gainst Mazarin, minister and cardinal, but not a priest, the Parlement
was more successful in its long contest. Entrenched in their office,
rendered hereditary by the establishment of the _paulette_ (so named
from the contractor Paulet, who suggested it to Sully in 1604), the
magistrates had acquired a spirit of independence and pride which led
them to style themselves "the born protectors of the people," and to
assert their right to assume the _role_ of the _Etats Generaux_, and to
play the part of the Parliament of England, which at that hour was
accomplishing a revolution, and to which, indeed, Mazarin compared them.
In January, 1646, they proclaimed the cardinal a disturber of the public
peace, an enemy of the king and the State, and directed him to leave the
court immediately, and the kingdom within a week. In February, 1651, he
was again banished, he, his family, his adherents, and his foreign
servants, and this decree, promulgated to the sound of the trumpet in
all the quarters of Paris, was greeted by the populace with noisy
exclamations of joy. In March and in June these orders were repeated,
the wily favorite of Anne d'Autriche seeking every opportunity of
regaining his power. It was these triumphs of the Fronde that inspired
the despotic Louis XIV with that dislike for the city of Paris which he
cherished all his life,--these, and the too-frequent public monuments
which spoke of other crowned heads than his own!

The nation had already entered that period of incredible distress and
degradation which was to lead to the Revolution, and on the surface of
which the so-called splendor of the court glittered with a species of
decaying phosphorescence which blinds the eyes of grave historians to
this day. In 1646 there were in the jails of the kingdom twenty-three
thousand eight hundred persons, confined for non-payment of taxes, five
thousand of whom died there. "_Tout le royaume_," said Omer Talon, two
years later, "is sick with exhaustion. The peasant no longer possesses
anything but his soul, because he has not yet been able to put that up
for sale." No prince, in the judgment of Saint-Simon, possessed the art
of reigning in a higher degree than did Louis XIV. "Louis Quatorze is
certainly not a great man," says Duruy, "but he is very certainly a
great king, and the greatest that Europe has seen." And yet the latter
quotes from the _Memoires_ which the king demanded from his intendants
on the condition of their pr