dside and carried to the Bastille.
The Duchess de Chevreuse, always gallant, in spite of waning beauty,
constituted herself the mediatrix between the Queen and the _Frondeurs_;
and although her daughter had openly become the mistress of the
Coadjutor, it was already contemplated to make her the wife of the
Prince de Conti, as a condition of the arrangement by which he should be
set free. Beaufort still continued to be the obsequious lover of Madame
de Montbazon, and, through her, Mazarin was kept well acquainted with
all his secrets.

No other power than that of female influence could have attached the
French nobility to the Prince de Conde, and determined it to take up
arms for his release. In fact, his hauteur, his brusquerie, his
brutality even, had, in repeated instances, offended that body, and the
Queen imagined that the bulk of the French gentry would witness his
arrest with as much pleasure as the citizens. But the women had been
fascinated by the _eclat_ of his four victories; they agreed to call
him the champion, the hero of France, and it seemed to them that they
shared his heroism in devoting themselves to his cause. As for the
higher nobility, they were not bound by any political principle; they
were very indifferent to the grandeur of France; very ignorant of its
pretensions in foreign affairs, or to what it had been pledged with
other nations. They loved war in the first place for its dangers, and in
the second for the honours and wealth they got by fighting; but even in
the army, far from making fidelity and obedience a rule of conduct, they
cherished a spirit of independence and resistance to the Crown, and
would only allow themselves to be influenced by their chivalric usages.
They gloried in showing themselves reckless of the future, caring more
about the glitter of the present than steady progressive advancement;
equally prodigal of fortune as of life, they were prone to follow
impulse rather than calculation; so that what we should perhaps call a
reckless frivolity was looked upon by them as a sentiment invested with
all the charm of brilliant gallantry. Those even whom neither their
affection nor their interest summoned to the standards of the captive
Princes, rushed gaily from the midst of their ease and festivity into
civil war at the first prompting of their mistresses.

Gaston d'Orleans, after having consented to the imprisonment of the
Princes, only decided upon entering into the project for