Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
Successful generals are bad masters, and the jackboot was now supreme at
court. Soon Condé's insolent bearing and extravagant demands, and the
vanity of his _entourage_ of young nobles, dubbed _petits maîtres_,
became intolerable: he was arrested at the Louvre and sent to the keep
at Vincennes. But Mazarin, thinking himself secure, delayed the promised
reward to De Retz, who joined the disaffected friends of Condé: and the
court, again foiled, was forced to release Condé, surrender the two
princes, and exile the hated Mazarin, who, none the less, ruled the
storm by his subtle policy from Cologne. Condé, disgusted alike with
queen and Parlement, now fled to the south, and raised the standard of
rebellion.
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME.]
The second phase of the wars of the Fronde became a more serious matter.
Turenne, won over by the court, was given command of the royal forces
and moved against Condé. The two armies, after indecisive battles, raced
to Paris and fought for its possession outside the Porte St. Antoine.
The Frondeurs occupied what is now the Faubourg St. Antoine: the
royalists the heights of Charonne to the east. It was a stubborn and
bloody contest. The armies were led by the two greatest captains of the
age, and fought under the eyes of their king, who with the queen-mother
watched the struggle from the eminence now crowned by the cemetery of
Père la Chaise. "I have seen not one Condé to-day, but a dozen," cried
Turenne, as victory inclined to the Royalists. The last word was,
however, with the Duke of Orleans: while he sat hesitating in the
Luxembourg, the Grande Mademoiselle ordered the guns of the Bastille to
be turned against Turenne, and the citizens opened the gates to Condé.
Again his incorrigible insolence and brutality made Paris too hot for
him, and with the disaffected princes he returned to Flanders to seek
help from his country's enemies. It was a fatal mistake, and Mazarin was
not slow to turn it to advantage. He prudently retired while public
feeling was won over to the young king, who was soon entreated by the
Parlement and citizens to return to Paris. When the time was ripe,
Mazarin had the Duke of Orleans interned at Blois, Condé was condemned
to death _in contumacio_: De Retz was sent to Vincennes. Ten councillors
of the Parlement were imprisoned or degraded, and in three months
Mazarin returned to Paris with the pomp and equipage of a sovereign. It
was the end of the Fronde, and of the attempt of the Parlement, a venal
body[133] devoid of representative basis, to imitate the functions of
the English House of Commons. The crown emerged from the contest more
absolute than before, and Louis never forgot the days when he was a
fugitive with his mother, and driven to lie on a hard mattress at the
palace of St. Germain. In 1655 the Parlement of Paris met to prepare
remonstrances against a royal edict: the young king heard of it while
hunting at Vincennes, made his way to the hall of St. Louis
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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