The imbroglio in Paris had now touched seething-point. The queen and Mazarin decided to blockade the city, and to obtain submission by reducing the inhabitants to starvation; but the firmness of President Molé and of the advocate Talon, strong in their principles of defence of the rights of all the community in the face of royal despotism, saved the situation. Mazarin sent to the Parliament a _lettre de cachet_ for the imprisonment of the princes and leaders of the Fronde: the Parliament retorted by denouncing Mazarin as an enemy of the king and the State, and a disturber of the public peace, and ordered him to quit the country within a week’s time. For the unfortunate thousands, weary of the conflict, asking only for peace and quietness, it was misery and confusion confounded, and they were thankful when a truce was patched up. But it was a mockery, for while the Parliament retained its right to assemble, the queen retained her prime-minister, detested by most, mistrusted even by more.[4] And meanwhile the dark clouds of anarchy and bitter contention brooding over France had blackened and burst over England into the storm of the tragedy of the 30th of January, which saw the death of King Charles I. by the headsman’s axe at Whitehall. Who that headsman was, and what of the real truth and trustworthy detail of the king’s execution, who shall say? Romance, in which reality may lie concealed, clings to that last scene, in which only it is certain that Charles Stuart bore himself for the king he was, and that while thousands of loyal subjects wept that day for the victim of Cromwell’s ambition, the regret in France was deep and far-reaching. Ninon was in London, a refugee, at the time, and it is possible as one authority avers, that she was present with de Gersay, and obtained from His Majesty a lock of his hair as he stood upon the scaffold, and that at a later time she took this to the queen, Henrietta Maria. One has to bear in mind that the “Musketeer” heroes immortalised by Dumas, also stood beneath the scaffold on that sad occasion. And why not? Royalist sympathy in France with our Cromwell-ridden country was strong. That Anne of Austria felt little of it for her unhappy sister-in-law, is self-evident, since Henrietta, lodged in the Louvre with her children, found shelter indeed, but cold comfort enough otherwise, being found, at last, fireless and almost foodless; and it was only when their destitute condition was represented to Mazarin, that he instantly sent her a good sum of money and other required assistance.