THE WARS OF THE FRONDE. (Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV.) A.D. 1649-1653. THE civil discords under which England groaned at the very same time, may serve to show the characters of the two nations. There was a gloomy desperation and a sort of rational rage in the civil wars of the English. Everything was decided by the sword; scaffolds were erected for the vanquished; and their king, who was taken prisoner in a battle, was brought as a culprit before a court of justice, examined concerning the abuse he was said to have made of his power, condemned to lose his head, and executed in the sight of all his subjects with as much regularity, and with the same forms of justice, as if it had been a private man condemned for a crime; while, during the course of these dreadful troubles, the city of London was not even for a moment affected with the calamities incident to a civil war. The French, on the contrary, ran headlong into seditions through caprice, and laughing all the time. Women were at the head of factions, and love made and broke cabals. The Duchess of Longueville prevailed on Turenne, lately made a Marshal of France, to persuade the army which he commanded for the king to revolt. Turenne failed of success, and quitted, like a fugitive, the army of which he was general, to please a woman who made a jest of his passion. From general to the King of France, he descended to be the lieutenant of Don Estevan de Gamara, with whom he was defeated at Retel by the king's troops. Every one knows this billet of the Marshal D'Hoquincourt to the Duchess of Montbazon : "Peronne belongs to the fairest of the fair;" and the following verses, which the Duke of Rochefoucault wrote on the Duchess of Longueville, when he received a wound by a musket at the battle of St. Anthony, by which he was for some time deprived of sight : Pour meriter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux, J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, et l'aurais faite aux Dieux. The war ended, and was re newed again at several different times; and there was not a person who had not frequently changed sides. the administration, was privately The Prince of Condé, hav-ficed the Prince of Condé to the ing brought the court back in tri- The Coadjutor, who had declared himself an implacable enemy to this prince, who had defended the state against its enemies, and the court against the rebels; Condé, at the summit of his glory, and who always acted more like the hero than the man of prudence, saw himself arrested, together with the Prince of Conti and the Duke of Longueville. He might have governed the state, if he would only have endeavoured to please; but he was contented with being admired. The people of Paris, who had made barricades for a counsellor clerk, hardly a degree removed from a fool, made public rejoicings when the hero and defender of France was hurried away to the dungeon of Vincennes. A year afterwards, the very men who had sold the great Condé and the other princes, to the dastardly revenge of Mazarin, obliged the queen to set open the gates of their prisons, and drive her prime minister out of the kingdom. Condé now returned amidst the acclamations of that very people who had shown such hatred to him, and by his presence occasioned new cabals and dissensions. The kingdom remained for some years longer in this tumultuous situation. The government, always the dupe of weak and uncertain councils, seemed now on the point of ruin; but dissension, which always prevailed among the rebels, saved the court. The Co adjutor, who was sometimes a friend, | that if he had received it sooner, and at others an enemy to the Prince of Condé, stirred up a part of the parliament and people against him, and boldly undertook at the same time to serve the queen by opposing this prince, and to insult her by obliging her to banish Cardinal Mazarin, who retired to Cologne. The queen, by a contradiction too common to weak administrations, was obliged at once to accept of his services, to put up with his insults, and to nominate to the purple this very man, who, when coadjutor, had been the author of the barricades, and had obliged the royal family to quit their capital and besiege it. At length Condé determined upon a war, which he ought to have begun in the time of the rebellion, if he was desirous of being master of the state, or never to have undertaken, if he meant to live as a subject. He quits Paris, arms the provinces of Guienne, Poitou, and Anjou, and applies for succours against his own country to those Spaniards of whom he had so lately been the most dreadful scourge. Nothing can better show the madness of these times, and the confused manner of proceeding, than what then happened to this prince. A courier was sent to him from Paris, with proposals for engaging him to return and lay down his arms. The courier by a mistake, instead of going to Angerville, where the prince then was, went to Augerville. The letter came too late: Condé declared, he would have accepted the proposals for peace; but since he was now at such a distance from Paris, it was not worth while to go back. Thus, by the mistake of a courier, and the mere capriciousness of this prince, France was once more plunged in a civil war. And now Cardinal Mazarin, who while an exile at the farther end of Cologne, had still continued to govern the court, returned back to France rather like a sovereign who returns to take possession of his dominions, than like a minister coming to resume his post; he was escorted by a small army of seven thousand men, raised wholly at his own expense; that is to say, with the government's money, which he had appropriated to his own use. The king, in a declaration at this time, is made to say, that the cardinal actually raised those troops with his own money; which at once overturns the opinion of those writers who say that when he first left the kingdom he was very poor. He gave the command of his small army to the Marshal D'Hoquincourt; all the officers wore green sashes, which was the colour of the cardinal's livery. Each party at that time had its particular sash. The king's was white, and the Prince of Condé's yellow it was surprising that Cardinal Mazarin, who had all along affected so much humility and modesty, should have had the arrogance to make a whole army wear his livery, as if he had been of a different party | livres divided into shares; so from the king his master; but he could not resist this emotion of vanity. The queen approved of it; and the king, who was then come of age, with his brother, went to meet him. On the first news of his return, Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother to Louis XIII. who had insisted upon his being banished, began to raise troops in Paris, without well knowing how he was to employ them. The parliament renewed its decrees, proscribed Mazarin, and set a price upon his head. They were obliged to consult the registers for the price paid for the head of an enemy to the state, and they found that in the reign of Charles IX. the sum of fifty thousand crowns had been promised by decree to any person who should produce Admiral Coligny alive or dead. It was, therefore, very seriously determined to act according to form, by setting the same price on the assassination of a cardinal and prime minister. No one, however, was tempted to gain the fifty thousand crowns offered by the proscription, which, after all, would never have been paid. In any other nation, or at any other time, such a decree would have met with persons to put it in execution; but now it served only to afford new subject of raillery. Blot and Marigni, two witty writers, who mingled gaiety with these tumults and disorders, caused a paper to be fixed up in the public places of Paris, offering a reward of one hundred and fifty thousand much to the person who should cut off the cardinal's nose, so much for an ear, so much for an eye, and so much for the person who would make him a eunuch. This raillery was the only effect produced by this proscription. The cardinal, on his side, made no use either of poison or assassination against his enemies; and notwithstanding the rancour and madness of so many factions, and their hatred, no very great crimes were committed on any side. The heads of parties were not inclined to cruelty, nor were the people very furious, for it was not a religious war. The whimsical spirit which prevailed at that time had taken such thorough possession of the body of the parliament of Paris, that having solemnly ordered an assassination which was laughed at, they issued a decree, by which a certain number of counsellors were ordered to repair to the frontiers, and take depositions against the army of Cardinal Mazarin, that is to say, the king's army. Two of these counsellors had the imprudence to take some peasants with them, and break down the bridges over which the cardinal was to pass: they were taken prisoners in the attempt by a body of the king's troops, but were released again, without any further punishment than that of being laughed at by all parties. At the very time that this body was running into these extremes against the king's minister, it de clared the Prince of Condé guilty | were already too much drained to allow either of the two parties to keep great armies on foot; but small ones were sufficient to decide the fate of the kingdom. There are times when an army of one hundred thousand barely sufficient to take two towns; and there are others in which eight thousand men may subvert or establish a throne. of high treason, who had taken up arms solely to oppose this minister; and by a strange reverse of judgment, which nothing but their former actions could render credible, they ordered the fresh troops which had been raised by Gaston, Duke of Orleans, to march against Mazarin, and at the same time prohibited any sums to be taken out of the public funds to pay them. Nothing else could be expected from a body of magistrates who, thrown quite out of its proper sphere, ignorant of its own rights and real power, and as little acquainted with state affairs and war, meeting in a tumultuous manner, and passing decrees in hurry and confusion, took measures which it had not thought of the day before, and which it was afterwards astonished at itself. The parliament of Bordeaux, which was at that time in the Prince of Condé's interest, observed a more uniform conduct, because, being at a greater distance from the court, it was not so much agitated by opposite factions. men is Louis XIV., who was brought up in adversity, wandered with his mother, his brother, and Cardinal Mazarin, from province to province, with not near so many troops to attend his person as he afterwards had in time of peace for his ordinary guard; while an army of five or six thousand men, part sent from Spain, and part raised by the Prince of Condé, pursued him to the very heart of his kingdom. The Prince of Condé, in the meantime, made quick marches from Bordeaux to Montaubon, taking towns, and increasing his numbers in every place. All the hopes of the Court were centred in Marshal Turenne. The king's army was at Guienne, on the Loire, and the Prince of Condé's a few leagues distant, under the command of the Dukes of Nemours and Beaufort. The misunder But objects of greater importance now engrossed the attention of all France. Condé, in league with the Span-standing between these two geneiards, appeared in the field against the king; and Turenne, having deserted those Spaniards with whom he had been defeated at Retel, had just made his peace with the court, and was commanding the king's army. The finances rals was near proving fatal to the prince's party. The Duke of Beaufort was unfit for the least command. The Duke of Nemours passed for a brave and amiable, rather than a skilful general. The army was ruined by them both |