A brawl brought to the Bastile, in 1652, the count de Rieux, a son of the duke of Elbœuf. A dispute with the prince of Tarentum, as to precedence, gave rise to it. The prince of Condé, the great Condé, was the other actor. “The prince of Condé,” says the duchess of Montpensier, “took the part of the prince of Tarentum, who is nearly related to him, against the count de Rieux, and one day he got heated in the dispute; he imagined that the count de Rieux had pushed him, which obliged him to return it by a box on the ear; the count de Rieux then gave him a blow. The prince, who had no sword, made a dart at that of the baron de Migenne, who was present. M. de Rohan, who was also there, put himself between them, and got out the count de Rieux, whom his royal highness (the duke of Orleans) sent to the Bastile, for having dared to fail in respect. Many persons say, that the prince struck first; if he did so, he must have taken some gesture of the count for an insult, for though he is very passionate, he is not so much so as to do an action of this kind. I saw him after dinner, and he said, ‘You see a man who has been beaten for the first time in his life.’ The count de Rieux remained in the Bastile till the arrival of M. de Lorraine, who set him free, and blamed him very much.” It must have been a ludicrous sight, to see a prince of the blood, the victor of Rocroi, Fribourg, Nordlingen, and Lens, at fisticuffs amidst a ring of courtiers, in the palace of the duke of Orleans! “This was not the way,” remarks Voltaire, “to regain the hearts of the Parisians.” The leaders of the Frondeur faction were by no means tolerant of censure, even when it came from clerical lips. Bernard Guyard, a dominican, had reason to repent his having too honestly indulged in it. Guyard, who was born in 1601, at Craon, in Anjou, took the religious habit, and was admitted, in 1645, a doctor of the Sorbonne, and became popular for his pulpit eloquence, so much so that Anne of Austria appointed him her preacher, and the duchess of Orleans chose him as her confessor. While the war of the Fronde was being carried on—a war of which it has wittily and truly been said, that it ought to be recorded in burlesque verse—Guyard ventured to reprobate, in the pulpit, the conduct of those ambitious and unprincipled personages by whom its flames had been lighted up. The punishment of his offence followed close upon the commission of it. As he was leaving the church, he was arrested, and conveyed to the Bastile, where he continued for some months. He died in 1674, at which period he was theological professor in the convent of St. James. All his works have long since ceased to attract notice, with the exception, perhaps, of “The Fatality of St. Cloud,” which is a paradoxical attempt to prove that not Clement, nor a Dominican, but a leaguer, disguised as a monk, was the murderer of Henry III.