whole of the little town was one scene of dismay and
confusion.

The royal army and that of Conde now both marched towards Paris, nearly
upon two parallel lines. But the great distress which the Court suffered
from want of money caused almost as much insubordination to be apparent
amongst the troops of the King as amongst those of the rebels. Little
respect was shown to Mazarin himself; and the young King was often
treated with but scanty ceremony, and provided for but barely.

After quitting the neighbourhood of Gien, Conde, urged by the desire of
directing in person the negotiations and intrigues which were going on
in Paris, left his army under the command of the celebrated Tavannes,
and hastened to the capital. The Count de Tavannes, whom he had selected
to fill his own place, was without doubt an excellent officer, one of
the valiant _Petits-maitres_[3] who, upon the field of battle, served
as wings to the great soldier's thoughts, carried his orders everywhere,
executed the most dangerous manoeuvres, sometimes charging with an
irresistible impetuosity, at others sustaining the most terrible onsets
with a firmness and solidity beyond all proof. But though the intrepid
Tavannes was quite capable of leading the division of a great army, he
was not able enough to be its commander-in-chief, and he had not
authority over the foreign troops which the Duke de Nemours had brought
from Flanders, and which he made over, on accompanying Conde to Paris,
to the command of the Count de Clinchamp. The army, thus divided, was
capable of nothing great. Conde alone could finish what he had begun.
Once engaged in the formidable enterprise that he had undertaken against
the Queen and Mazarin, there was no safety for him but in carrying it
out even to the end. He ought, therefore, to have waged war to the
knife, if the expression be allowable, against Turenne, conquered or
perished, and to have constrained Mazarin to flee for good and all to
Germany or Italy, and the Queen to place in his hands the young King. To
do that, Conde should have had a definite ambition, an object clearly
determined; he ought to have plainly proposed to himself to assume the
Regency, or at least the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom in the
place of Gaston, by will or by force, in order to concentrate all power
in his own hands; that he might become, in short, a Cromwell or a
William III.: and Conde was neither the one or the other. His mind had
been pert