's niece. Everything announced that the
exile of that hated minister was but temporary, and Conde, perceiving
the object of all these moves, prepared for war, and silently took his
measures accordingly.

The nobility, who, from the beginning of February, had begun to assemble
in order to take part in the expulsion of Mazarin, now held their
meetings in the monastery hall of the Cordeliers, where might be seen
collected together as many as _eight hundred_ princes, dukes, and
noblemen, heads of the most considerable houses in France, all partisans
of Conde. As this numerical strength of the ennobled classes, together
with the multiplicity of titles among them, is somewhat startling to a
youthful English student, it may be well to remark that France had, in
fact, three aristocracies in the course of her annals from the Crusades
to the reign of Louis XIV. After the time of Louis XI., the
representatives of the _first_, or old feudal aristocracy, the
descendants of the men who were in reality the King's peers, and not his
actual subjects, were few and far between. These were the holders of
vast principalities, who maintained a kind of royal state in their own
possessions, and kept high courts of judicature over life and limb in
the whole extent of their hereditary fiefs. In the long English wars,
from Crecy to Agincourt, the great body of them disappeared, and only
here and there a great vassal was to be seen, distinguished in nothing
from the other nobles, except in the loftiness of his titles and the
reverence that still clung to the sound of his historic name. The
_second_ aristocracy arose among the descendants of the survivors of the
English and Italian wars. They claimed their rank, not as coming down to
them from the tenure of almost independent counties and dukedoms, but as
proprietors of ancestral lands, to which originally subordinate rights
and duties had been attached. Mixed with those, we saw the Noblesse of
the Robe, as the great law officers were called, who constituted a
parallel but not identical nobility with their lay competitors. The
_third_ aristocracy was now about to make its appearance, the creation
of Court favour, and badge of personal or official service--possessors
of a nominal rank without any corresponding duty--a body selected for
ornament, and not for use--and incorporating with itself, not only the
marquis and viscount, fresh from the mint of the minister or favourite,
but the highest names i