It had been well enough for a while for the crafty Italian prime-minister to try and keep the minds of the courtier and the more educated class of the people otherwise employed; but he had remained blind, or had chosen to seem so, to the fact that these were also Frenchmen, and not all, by a great many, mere butterflies and triflers. Balls and festivities did not bound the range of vision of many a nobly-born gentleman, nor of the statesmen and chiefs in Parliament; and while some sided in the dispute with the queen and Mazarin, there were as many to oppose. “_À-bas Mazarin! À-bas la Fronde!_” and the cries were not to be silenced—though nothing, it was conceived at the outset, would be easier. The Fronde—the term was but a jesting one, arising from the Parliament prohibiting under all sorts of condign punishment the schoolboy game of stone-slinging in the ditches under the walls of Paris, and then it was the witty Barillon improvised his couplet— “A Frondy wind this morning arose, I hope it won’t bite poor Mazarin’s nose”; and from St Antoine to St Denis, from Montmartre to St Germain, before night that rhyme was on the tip of every tongue. The rough discords, the coarse ugly voice of faction soon rendered Paris no place for the Graces. It had become dangerous for women who were not amazons of politics to walk out alone; and Ninon was forced to accept the escort of her cavaliers, among whom were two specially favoured—the young Marquis de Sévigné, son of the incomparable queen of Letter-writing, and of his father, the Maréchal who had worshipped, ten years before, at Ninon’s shrine, and the Marquis de Gersay, captain of the Queen’s Guards. For refusing to obey the issued order of arrest of the two Parliament counsellors, Blancménil and Broussel, de Gersay had been deprived of his place, and disgraced. Paris was therefore neither any place for him, and Ninon and he found refuge together in his Brittany home, where they spent ten months together; at about the end of which time Ninon became the mother of a little son, and the sojourn in Brittany was one of happiness and tranquillity among the patient hard-working peasantry of the district surrounding the old manor-house. Only one cloud darkened Ninon’s content, and her dismay was not unnaturally considerable; for her lovely hair had begun rapidly to come off, so entirely, as to force a wig upon her beautiful head, which the Nantes perruquier bungled so abominably, that the curls and chignon asserted their falseness glaringly enough to extract the sarcastic comments of a lady Ninon believed to be jealous of her, as one disappointed of becoming the wife of de Gersay. “You have very charming hair, madame,” said the lady; “it must have cost you at least six livres.” “Just so,” said Ninon; “but you must have paid more for yours, madame; since even still it is rather thin.”