Meanwhile, upon the terrace, three women, dressed in satin, and followed at a distance by mute and respectful equerries, were walking gravely to and fro with ceremonious, majestic gestures: in the middle, a lady of noble and stately figure, despite her fifty-seven years, was holding forth magisterially upon affairs of state; at her right, a young lady clad in garments of sombre hue, and holding herself stiffly erect, listened with contracted brows to her neighbor's learned views; at her left another older lady, the stiffest and primmest of the three, because she was of less illustrious rank, was talking, listening, and meditating all at once. The lady in the middle was the dowager princess, mother of the victor of Rocroy, Norlingen and Lens, who was just beginning, since he had become an object of persecution, and the persecution had landed him at Vincennes, to be called the Great Condé, a name which posterity has continued to bestow upon him. This lady, upon whose features could still be detected traces of that beauty which made her the object of the last and maddest of all the passions of Henri IV., had been wounded in her mother love, and in her pride as princess of the blood, by a _facchino Italiano_, who was called Mazarini when he was Cardinal Bentivoglio's servant, but who was now called His Eminence Cardinal Mazarin, since he had become Anne of Austria's lover, and First Minister of the Kingdom of France. He it was who dared to imprison Condé, and to send the noble prisoner's wife and mother into exile at Chantilly. The lady at her right was Claire-Clémence de Maillé, Princesse de Condé, who, in accordance with an aristocratic custom of the time, was called Madame la Princesse simply, to signify that the wife of the head of the Condé family was the first princess of the blood, _the_ princess _par excellence_: she was always proud, but her pride had gained in intensity since her persecution, and she had become haughty and supercilious. It was the fact that her husband's imprisonment raised her to the rank of a heroine, after being compelled to play only a secondary part so long as he was free; her state was more deplorable than widowhood, and her son, the Duc d'Enghien, just completing his seventh year, was more interesting than an orphan. The eyes of the nation were upon her, and without fear of being laughed at, she dressed in mourning. Since the forced exile of these two weeping women by direction of Anne of Austria their piercing shrieks had changed to muttered threats: from being the victims of oppression they had become rebels. Madame la Princesse, Themistocles in a mobcap, had her Miltiades in petticoats, and the laurels of Madame de Longueville, for an instant Queen of Paris, disturbed her slumbers.