Being now assured of the co-operation of the Frondeurs, Anne felt strong enough for an open struggle with Condé, and, having engaged Retz to maintain her cause in the Parlement, she, on 17 August, launched against the Prince a declaration, in which she charged him with ingratitude, contempt for the royal authority, criminal alliances with the enemies of the realm, and a desire to subvert the State. These charges led to violent scenes at the Palais de Justice, in one of which Retz narrowly escaped being assassinated by some of Condé’s friends. They were not, however, pressed; indeed, on 5 September, the Queen, on the mediation of Gaston d’Orléans, sent to the Parlement a letter formally exonerating the prince. But, under the pretext of giving more solemnity to the decree, she requested that it should not be promulgated until after the majority of Louis XIV., which he would attain on the following day, on completing his thirteenth year, the age fixed by the laws of France for the majority of her kings. Condé excused himself, by letter, from assisting at the proclamation of his Sovereign’s majority, on the ground that his enemies had rendered him so odious in his Majesty’s eyes that he could not be present without danger; and while the King, in the midst of a magnificent _cortège_, was wending his way through the cheering crowds to the Palais de Justice, the first Prince of the Blood, whose place should have been by his side, was hastening to his brother-in-law’s château of Trie in Normandy, with the object of persuading the Duc de Longueville to join him in resistance to the royal authority. He came, however, on a bootless errand, for Longueville, unlike his consort, had had enough of civil war, and declared that he was not in a position to render him any effective support. From Trie, Condé proceeded to Chantilly, whence he sent an envoy to Louis XIV., offering to return to the capital, if the changes in the Ministry which he understood that it was his Majesty’s intention to make were deferred for three days. But the young King haughtily refused even to consider this proposition. The prince thereupon summoned a meeting of his partisans at Chantilly; but, now that he had actually come to the very verge of the abyss, he found many reasons to deter him from taking the final step: his reluctance to plunge his country into the miseries of another civil strife; the many defections in his party, for to make war on the King of France was a very different matter from resisting the will of a Spanish regent and an Italian minister; the danger of placing any reliance on the promises of help he had received from Spain; and, finally, the knowledge that war would mean an indefinite separation from Madame de Châtillon, of whom he was more than ever enamoured, and who, having been gained by the Court, had been using all her influence to bring her lover to a more pacific frame of mind.