that degree
that they continually murmured because I neither settled affairs nor
pushed them to the last extremity. Upon which I observed that heads of
factions are no longer their masters when they are unable either to
prevent or allay the murmurs of the people.

The revenues of the Hotel de Ville, which are, as it were, the patrimony
of the bourgeois, and which, if well managed, might be of special service
to the King in securing to his interest an infinite number of those
people who are always the most formidable in revolutions--this sacred
fund, I say, suffered much by the licentiousness of the times, the
ignorance of Mazarin, and the prevarication of the officers of the Hotel
de Ville, who were his dependents, so that the poor annuitants met in
great numbers at the Hotel de Ville; but as such assemblies without the
Prince's authority are reckoned illegal, the Parliament passed a decree
to suppress them. They were privately countenanced by M. de Beaufort and
me, to whom they sent a solemn deputation, and they made choice of twelve
syndics to be a check upon the 'prevot des marchands'.

On the 11th of December a pistol, as had been concerted beforehand, was
fired into the coach of Joly, one of the syndics, which President
Charton, another of the syndics, thinking was aimed at himself, the
Marquis de la Boulaie ran as if possessed with a devil, while the
Parliament was sitting, into the middle of the Great Hall, with fifteen
or twenty worthless fellows crying out "To Arms!" He did the like in the
streets, but in vain, and came to Broussel and me; but the former
reprimanded him after his way, and I threatened to throw him out at the
window, for I had reason to believe that he acted in concert with the
Cardinal, though he pretended to be a Frondeur.

This artifice of Servien united the Prince to the Cardinal, because he
found himself obliged to defend himself against the Frondeurs, who, as he
believed, sought to assassinate him. All those that were his own
creatures thought they were not zealous enough for his service if they
did not exaggerate the imminent danger he had escaped, and the Court
parasites confounded the morning adventure with that at night; and upon
this coarse canvas they daubed all that the basest flattery, blackest
imposture, and the most ridiculous credulity was capable of imagining;
and we were informed the next morning that it was the common rumour over
all the city that we had formed a design