La Grande Mademoiselle

In the exercise of free wit, the women of the new political school found an influence which before their day had been monopolised by the polemists of the State's Councils. They – the women of the Opposition – swept forward and seized positions previously held by men, and since then, either from deep purpose or from pure conviction, they have held their ground and exercised their right to share, or to attempt to share, in the creation and in the destruction of governments. Mademoiselle followed the fashion of the day when she frequented the society of people who were in disgrace at Court. She ridiculed the King's Minister, and as she was influential and popular, outspoken and eager to declare her principles, she was called an agitator, though in the words of Mme. de Motteville, "she was not quite sure what she was trying to do." Mazarin, whom Mademoiselle considered "stupid," had entangled the wires of the cabals and confused the minds of the pretenders with such consummate art that the keenest intriguers gazed in bewilderment upon their own interests, and doubted their truest friends. For instance, Monsieur, who had mind and wit "to burn," could not explain, even to himself, why he repudiated Mademoiselle when she quarrelled with the second junior branch. He knew that he was jealous of his rights and of all that belonged to him; he knew that the power of the Condés was a menace, that his daughter was a powerful ally for any party, that her championship was, and always had been, his strongest arm against an unappreciative world, and after one of the senseless exhibitions of anger against Mademoiselle to which Anne of Austria, impelled by Mazarin, frequently incited him, he asked himself why he maltreated his daughter when she resisted the usurpations of his hated cousins, the Condés.

"Why," he queried piteously, "should I plunge the knife into my own breast?"

Why he did so, and why many another as astute as he moved heaven and earth to effect his own downfall was the secret of Mazarin.

Mademoiselle wept bitter tears for the loss of her father's friendship; then she arose in her pride, resolved to tread the path of life alone, according to her independent will. She was twenty years old and in the fulness of her beauty. She described her appearance with complaisancy126:

I am tall; I am neither fat nor lean; I have a graceful and freely moving figure, and my bearing is natural and easy. My bust is well formed. My hands and feet are not beautiful, but there is great beauty in their flesh, and the flesh of my throat is also very pretty. My leg is straight, and my foot is well formed. My hair is a beautiful ash-blonde. My face is long, and its contour is fine. The nose is large and aquiline. The mouth neither large nor little, but distinctly outlined and of a very agreeable form. The lips are the colour of vermilion. My teeth are not handsome, but neither are they horrible. My eyes are blue, neither large nor small, but brilliant, gentle, and proud, like my mien. I have a haughty, but not self-glorified air; I am polite and familiar, but of a manner to excite respect rather than to attract the lack of it. I am indeed very indifferent about my dress, but my negligence does not go as far as untidiness. I hate that! I am neat, and whether I am laced or loosely robed, everything that I wear looks well. This is not because I do not look incomparably better with tightly fitting garments, but it is because negligence and loose garments sit less ill upon me than upon another, for I may say, without boasting, that I become whatever I put on better than anything that I put on becomes me… God … has given me unparalleled health and strength. Nothing breaks me down; nothing fatigues me; and it is difficult to judge of the events and the changes in my fortunes by my face, for my face rarely shows any change. I had forgotten to say that I have a healthy complexion, which is in accord with what I have just said. My tint is not delicate, but it is fair, and very bright and clear.

Before the lessons of experience and evil fortune changed Mademoiselle's handsome face, she was thus vivaciously described by an anonymous contemporary:

This Princess of the blood of kings and of princes is haughty, daring, and of a courage much more like the courage of a man than is commonly found in woman. It may be said with truth that she is an amazon, and that she is better fitted to carry a lance than to hold a distaff. She is proud, enterprising, adventurous, quick, and free of speech. She cannot bear to hear anything contrary to her own opinion. As she has never loved either the King's ministers or her father's ministers, she has avoided them; because had she received them in her home, or frequented their society, civility would have constrained her to show them deference. Her humour is impatient, her mind is active, and her heart is ardently set upon whatever she undertakes. As to dissimulation, she does not know the meaning of the term. She tells what she thinks, careless of the opinion of the world.

She was described in divers ways, according to the impressions of her associates. One said that her manner gave evidence of serious reflection; another called her too vivacious. It was supposed that she had been the first to assert that the soul ought not to be susceptible to love, and therefore her admirers sang to her of the aversion felt by Pallas for the allurements of Venus. Mademoiselle had said:

"Je n'ai point l'âme tendre."

and she had meant what she said, and been glad to have it known that she was heart-free.

She was blamed for her rude manners and for her outbursts of anger. When she declared that she longed to go to war with the soldiers her critics laughed at her pretensions. It was generally believed that her faults were numerous, and that she had few of the qualities considered desirable in woman; but no one ever called her petty, cowardly, or false. La Grande Mademoiselle was never a liar; she never betrayed friend or foe. She was brave and generous; and it was not her fault if when nature placed her soul in the form of a woman it gave her the mien and the inclinations of a man.

CHAPTER V

I. The Beginning of Trouble – Paris and the Parisians in 1648 – II. The Parliamentary Fronde – Mademoiselle Would Be Queen of France – III. The Fronde of the Princes and the Union of the Frondes – Projects for an Alliance with Condé – IV. La Grande Mademoiselle's Heroic Period – The Capture of Orleans – The Combat in the Faubourg Saint Antoine – The End of the Fronde.

I

Few political crises have left, either upon participants or upon witnesses, impressions as diverse as the impressions left by the Fronde. As examples of this fact take Retz (whose Mémoires are the epopee of revolutionary Paris), Omer Talon, the Queen's friend, M. de Motteville, La Rochefoucauld, duke and peer, Gaston d'Orléans, de Beaufort, Anne de Gonzague, Mme. de Chevreuse, and all the messieurs and mesdames whose ways of thinking we know. They furnished the divers views of the Fronde from which we gain our knowledge of that event, and as they deduced their impressions from the effect which the Fronde had upon their personal interests or sympathies, and from their mental conditions, it is difficult to form an independent or a just idea. Versatile and brilliant imaginations have left kaleidoscopic visions of a limited number of very plain realities, and as the only means of giving uniformity and sequency to a narrative which, though it covers various periods, is circumscribed by certain limits, is to make a selection from the many means of study furnished by a voluminous mass of documents, I have detached from history nothing but the facts which were connected with the life of the person around whom I have woven this narrative.

By relating everything concerning La Grande Mademoiselle and by showing her actively engaged in her daily pursuits when the Fronde took shape and during the war, I have hoped to make visible to the reader at least one figure of the most confused of all the harassed epochs of our modern history.

Mademoiselle's point of view may not have been one of the best, but it had at least one merit: it was not the point of view of an ordinary observer. The Fronde was La Grande Mademoiselle's heroic period, and her reasons for embracing the cause were fit for the fabric of a romance. She intended to marry, and a marriage appropriate to her high station required the veiling smoke of the battle-field and the booming music of great guns. She entered the army and played her part with such spirit that, according to her own story, she wondered to the end of her days how she could have committed so many follies. These pages are written to explain the mental condition which evolved not only La Grande Mademoiselle's follies but the follies of many of her countrymen.

It is evident from the memoirs on record that Mademoiselle did not expect a revolution, but in that respect she was as clear-sighted as her contemporaries; no one looked for any change. Four years had passed since the people raised the barricades, and all that time Paris had growled its discontent. Neither the Regent nor the courtiers had cared to ask what the canaille were thinking. The curés had been driven from the devastated country parishes to beg bread and shelter in the monasteries, and the industrious French people who had always been neat and merry lay in rags on their sordid beds, dying of famine because the usurers of the State – the national note-holders – had seized their tools and confiscated all means of paying the labourer.

In 1644 the people invaded the Palais de Justice and noisily protested against the new tax. They ordered Parliament to take their threats to the Queen. The Queen refused to remit the tax, and the city immediately assumed the aspect which it habitually wore on the eve of revolution. Groups of men and women stood about the streets, the people were eager and excited, – they knew not why. Business was suspended. The shopkeepers stood on their doorsteps. The third night after the Queen refused to listen to the appeal of the people, the milk-soup boiled over! Bands of men armed with clubs descended from the faubourgs, crowded the streets of Paris, and, to quote an eye-witness, "they gave fright enough to the city where fear and like emotions were unknown." After a few hours the crowd dispersed and the city became calm. But the road was clear, the canaille had found the way; they knew that it was possible to arm with clubs, or with anything that they could handle, and surge into the streets against the Crown. From that hour forerunners of the approaching storm multiplied. Parliament openly sustained the demands of the people. In Parliament there were natural orators whose denunciations of the causes of the prevailing misery were brilliant and terrible. The people's envoys accused the Regency of permitting the abuses, the injustice, and the oppression which had wrecked the peace of France. They persisted in their protestations, and the Majesty of the Throne could not silence them. At the solemn sessions of the beds of justice and in the Queen's own chambers they presented their arguments, and with voices hoarse with indignation, and with hands raised threateningly toward heaven they cried their philippics in the Queen's ears. Seated beside his mother the child-king looked on and listened. He could not understand the meaning of all the vehement words, but he never pardoned the voices which uttered them. The Court listened, astonished.

Mademoiselle weighed the words of the people, she paid close attention, but her memoirs do not speak of the revolts of public opinion. She was as unconscious of their meaning as the Queen, – and to say that is to tell the whole story. Only sixty years before that time the barricades of the League had closed the streets of Paris, and only ten years before the theatre lovers had witnessed a comedy called Alizon, in which one of the ancient leaguers had fixed such eyes upon the King as our Communardes fixed upon the Versaillais. No one had forgotten anything! The Parisians had kept their old arms bright; they were looking forward to a time when arms would be needed; yet the Regent thought that when she had issued an order commanding the people not to talk politics she had provided against everything.

The nation's depths, as represented by the middle classes, had found a new apostle in the person of a member of the Parliament, "President Barillon." Barillon had been a pillar of the Government, but his feelings had changed. Mme. de Motteville, who was in warm sympathy with the Regent, wrote bitterly of his new opinions. She said:

That man has a little of the shade of feeling which colours the actions of some of the men of our century who always hate the happy and the powerful. Such men think that they prove their greatness of heart by loving only the unfortunate, and that idea incessantly involves them in parties, and makes them do things adverse to the Queen.

The Court was as blind as the Queen's friend; it could not see that the day was coming when the determination to abolish abuses would sweep away the ancient social forms before their eyes. In the opinion of the Queen the criticisms and the ideas of the King's subjects constituted felony, and it was Barillon's fate to go down. Barillon had been the Queen's devoted friend and champion. After the King died he had worked hard to seat the royal widow on the throne. He believed – no one knew what excuse he had for believing such a thing – that the Queen shared his ideas of the rights of the poor and the humble, and that she believed as he believed: that kings owed certain duties to their subjects. Barillon was not forced to wait long for his enlightenment. Anne of Austria was a woman of short patience, and advice irritated her. As soon as the President's eyes were opened to the truth he rushed headlong into the arms of the Opposition. Anne of Austria scorned "his treachery to the Crown." His impassioned thoughts of divine justice were enigmatical to the sovereign understanding. She was enraged by the obstinacy of her old friend, and by her orders he was cast into the prison of Saint Piguerol, where he died, as the just Motteville said, "regretted by every one." Barillon was the precursor of the "Idealogues" of the eighteenth century and of the Socialists of our own day.

The Queen was one of the people who seem to have received eyes because they could not be blind without eyes. The King's porringer was empty because the King had no money. The Queen, his mother, had pawned the jewels of the crown to appease her creditors, yet she was indignant when the bourgeois said that France was bankrupt. She did not attach any importance to "that canaille," – as she called the Parliament, – but she regarded criticism or disapproval as an attempt upon the authority of her son. As she expressed her exotic ideas freely, the bourgeois knew what she thought of them, and her abusive epithets were scored to the credit of the Opposition. As much from interest as from sympathy the Opposition invariably sustained the claims of the people. "The bourgeois were all infected with love for the public welfare," said the gentle Motteville bitterly. So the Court knew that in case of difficulty it could not count upon "that canaille."

Neither could Parliament count upon itself. There were too many counter-currents in its channels, too many individual interests, too many ambitions, too many selfish intrigues, to say nothing of the instinct of self-preservation which had turned the thoughts of the nobles toward a last desperate attempt to prevent the establishment of the absolute monarchy. They had resolved to make the attempt, and by it they hoped to save the remnant of their ancient privileges. They would have been justified in saving anything that they could lay their hands on, for no man is morally bound to commit suicide. In point of fact the only thing which they were morally bound to do was to remember that duty to country precedes all other duties, but in that day people had a very dim idea of duty to country. La Grande Mademoiselle believed that the King's right was divine, but she did not hesitate to act against the Court when her personal interests or the interests of her house demanded such action. After the "Affair Saujon,127" she practically retired from Court. Alluding to that fact, she said: "I did not think that the presence of a person whom the Queen had so maltreated could be agreeable to her Majesty."

She made long visits at her château of Bois-le-Vicomte, near Meaux. Her little court knew her prejudices and respected her feelings. She regarded the success of the French arms as a personal misfortune, because a French victory conferred more glory upon Monsieur le Prince. The death of the elder Condé had not lessened the insolent pretensions of the second junior branch, and the honours claimed by the hawk-eyed general afflicted the haughty Princess d'Orléans, who had no valiant soldier to add glory to her name.

Referring to the battle of Lens Mademoiselle said:

No one dared to tell me of it; the paper containing the account of it was sent to me from Paris, and they placed it on my table, where I saw it as soon as I arose. I read it with astonishment and grief. On that occasion I was less of a good Frenchman than an enemy.

This avowal is worthy of note because it furnishes a key to the approaching national crisis. Mademoiselle's treason was the crime of architects of the Fronde; of the Nobility first, afterward of all France. Mademoiselle wept over the battle of Lens, and when her father commanded her to return to Paris to appear with the Queen and to join in the public rejoicings her grief knew no bounds. The scene in the Palais Royal had destroyed her confidence and her sympathy, and she could not have "rejoiced with the Queen" on any occasion; but her father's commands were formal, and she was forced to assist with the Court (August 26th) at Notre Dame, when the Te Deum was chanted in thanksgiving for the victory of France.

On that occasion [said Mademoiselle] I placed myself beside Cardinal Mazarin, and as he was in a good humour I spoke to him of liberating Saujon. He promised me to do all in his power. He said that he should try to influence the Queen. I left them all at the Palais Royal and went away to get my dinner, and when I arrived I was informed of the clamour in the city; the bourgeois had taken arms.

The bourgeois had taken arms because of the unexpected arrest of two members of Parliament. "Old Broussel" was one of the two, and to the people he personified the democratic and humanitarian doctrines of President Barillon, who had died in his prison because he had angered the Queen by pleading the people's cause. The news of his arrest fell like a thunderbolt, and the people sprang to arms. The general excitement dispelled Mademoiselle's grief; she was not sorry for the uprising. She could not see anything to regret in the disturbance of the monarchy. Monsieur and the Queen had shown her that her interests were not theirs, they had tormented and humiliated her, and it pleased her wounded pride to think that her enemies were to be punished. The Tuileries were admirably situated for the occasion. Should there be a revolution it could not fail to take place under her windows, and even were she to be imprisoned – as she had been before – she could still amuse herself and witness the uprising at her ease. At that time there were no boulevards; the Seine was the centre of the capital. It was the great street and the great open hall in which the Parisians gave their fêtes. Entering Paris either from Rouen or from Dijon, travellers knew by the animation on the water when they were near the city. From the Cours la Reine to the little isle Saint Louis the river was edged with open-air shops and markets. On the river were barges laden with merchandise, with rafts, with water-coaches (which looked like floating houses), and with all the objects that man sets in the public view to tempt his fellows and to offer means of conveyance either to business or to pleasure. At various points the bargees and other river-men held jousts. All through the city there were exhibitions of fireworks and "water serenades," and along the shore, or moving swiftly among the delicate shallops and the heavy barges were gilded pleasure galleys with pennants flying in the wind.

The light, mirrored by the water, danced upon the damp walls of the streets which opened upon the quays.

The Seine was the light and the joy of Paris, the pride of the public life. Its arms enveloped Notre Dame, the mass of buildings called "the Palais," the Houses of the Parliament and the Bourse, an immense bazar whose galleried shops were the meeting-place of strollers and of gossips. A little below the Palais stretched the Pont-Neuf, with its swarms of street peddlers, jugglers, charlatans, and idlers who passed their days watching the parade of the people of Paris. "The disinherited," unfortunate speculators in the public bounty, sat apart from the stream of travellers, preparing for their business by slipping glass eyes into their heads, or by drawing out their teeth the better to amuse the public and to solicit alms.

All the emotions of the people were manifested first upon the river. The Seine was a queen; we have made it a sewer.

Even then Paris was a great cosmopolitan city, capable of receiving the people of the world; it was the only place in Europe where a palace could be made ready for guests in less than two hours. In less than one hour the hosts of the inns prepared dinner for one hundred guests at twenty écus a cover.

Yet in many respects the powerful city was in a barbarous condition; it was neither lighted nor swept, and as its citizens threw everything out of their windows, the streets were paved with black and infected mud. There was little or nothing like a police system, and the city was sown with "places of refuge" (a survival of the Middle Ages), which served as hiding-places for highwaymen and other malefactors, who enshrined themselves among the shadows and lay in wait for the weak or the unwary.

At that time the Duc d'Angoulême, the illegitimate son of Charles IX., used to send his servants into the streets to collect their wages from the passers-by. Having collected their money, the clever fellows returned to the ducal palace. The Duc d'Angoulême possessed the right of shelter, and his palace was vested with all the power of the horns of the altar: once within his gates, the criminal was in safety and "inviolable."

The Duc de Beaufort used to send his servants out into the streets to rob travellers for his personal benefit. When the robbers were arrested their proprietor demanded their release and made great talk of an indemnification.

The excessively mobile Parisian character has changed many times since the day of the Duc de Beaufort; but the people of the present are counterparts of the people of the times128 of Louis XIII. and the Regency. One of Mademoiselle's contemporaries said: "The true Parisians love to work; they love the novelty of things; they love changes in their habits; they even love changes in their business. They are very pious, and very – credulous. They are not in the least drunkards; they are polite to strangers."

Subtract the piety and add absinthe, the mother of Folly, and we have the Parisians of our own day. They too are industrious; they are always changing something; they are changeable in themselves; they are credulous; they call religion "superstition," but they believe in "systems," in "panaceas," in high-sounding words, and in "great men" – men truly great, or spuriously great; they still cherish a belief in revolutions. They are as ready now as they were centuries ago to die for an idea, for a Broussel, and for much less than a Broussel. Just such Parisians as we meet in our daily walks raised the barricades in 1648. Broussel's windows looked out upon the river; the boatmen and the people of the water were the first to hear of his arrest, and they rushed crying into the streets; the people of the Halles joined them; and the "good bourgeoisie" followed the people's lead. The tradesmen closed their shops, the chains were drawn across the streets; and in the twinkling of an eye Paris bristled with antiquated firearms like an historical procession.

Mademoiselle, who heard the noise, ordered her carriage, and went out to pass the barricades. She had never seen the mob as she saw it then. The people swayed forward to meet the insolent noble who dared to defy them; but when they recognised their Princess, their hoarse cries turned to shouts of welcome, and eager hands raised the chains. Then, haughtily ignoring their fond smiles, Mademoiselle passed and the chains fell behind her.