CHAPTER VIII.
THE QUEEN REGENT
LOUIS XIV. was four years and a half old when his father died at Saint-Germain, aged forty-two. Tardy in everything, Louis XIII. was six weeks in dying. The state christening of his son was celebrated during his illness. When asked his name, the little lad replied, "I am Louis XIV."
"Not yet, my son, not yet," murmured the dying King, "but shortly, if so it please God."
Anne of Austria, named Regent by her husband's will, rules in her son's name. A splendid Court assembles round her, at the Louvre, at Saint-Germain, and at Fontainebleau. Her exiled favourites are there to do her homage. The Duchesse de Chevreuse, after a long sojourn in Spain, England, and Flanders, – for she loves travel and the adventures of the road, either masked, or disguised as a page, a priest, or a cavalier, – is reinstated in her Majesty's favour. In Spain the Duchess's vanity was gratified by enslaving a royal lover – the King of Spain, brother of Anne of Austria; in England she diverted herself with fomenting personal quarrels between Charles I. and Henrietta Maria; in Flanders – a dull country – she found little to amuse her.
Mademoiselle de Hautefort (soon to become Duchesse and Maréchale de Schomberg) returns in obedience to the Queen's command, who wrote to her even when the King was alive, "Come, dearest friend, come quickly. I am all impatience to embrace you!"
The Duchesse de Sennécy arrives from the provinces, and the Chevalier de Jars from England. The latter had been imprisoned in the Bastille, and threatened with torture by Richelieu, to force him to betray the Queen's correspondence with Spain at the time of the Val de Grâce conspiracy. He had been liberated, however, but while the Cardinal lived had remained in England.
These, among many other faithful attendants, resume their places at the petit coucher, in the grand cercle, and at the morning lever.
Then there are the princes and princesses of the blood-royal: – Monsieur the Duc d'Orléans – no longer breathing vows of love in the moonlight, but a veteran intriguer – living on the road to Spain, which always meant rebellion, together with his daughter, La Grande Mademoiselle, a comely girl, the greatest heiress in Europe; Cæsar, Duc de Vendôme, son of Gabrielle and Henry IV., with his Duchess and his sons, the Ducs de Mercœur and De Beaufort; Condé, the uncrowned head of the great house of Bourbon – more ill-favoured and avaricious than ever – his jealous temper now excited against the bastards of the house of Vendôme, with his wife, Charlotte de Montmorenci, sobered down into a dignified matron, devoted to her eldest son, the Duc d'Enghien, and to her daughter, the Duchesse de Longueville, the brightest ornament of the Court; the Duc de Rochefoucauld and his son, the Prince de Marsillac, the author of Les Maximes, to become a shadow on the path of the last-named Duchess, who is to die in a convent; the great House of La Tour d'Auvergne, Viscomtes de Turenne and Ducs de Bouillon, from which springs Henri de Turenne, the rival of young Condé; Séguier, Duc de Villemer, generously forgiven for the part he took against the Queen as Chancellor, at the Val de Grâce; and, last of all, Henry, Duc de Guise – by-and-by to astonish all Europe by his daring escapade at Naples, where, but for Masaniello, he might have been crowned King, with the Queen's beautiful maid of honour, Mademoiselle de Pons, at his side.
There is also about the Court a young man named Giulio Mazarin, born in Rome of a Sicilian family, late secretary to Cardinal Richelieu. He has passed many years in Spain, and can converse fluently in that language with her Majesty whenever she deigns to address him. He has a pale, inexpressive face, with large black eyes, à fleur de tête, generally bent on the ground. His manners are modest, though insinuating; his address is gentle, his voice musical. Like all Italians, he is artistic; a conoscente in music, a collector of pictures, china, and antiquities. So unobtrusive and accomplished a gentleman cannot fail to please, especially as he is only a deacon, and, with a dispense, free to marry. The Queen, who often converses with him in her native tongue, appreciates his merits. Her minister, the Bishop of Beauvais, leaves the Court. He finds that his presence is useless, as the Queen acts entirely under the advice of this young Italian, whom she also selects as guardian to the young King, who, poor simple boy, looks on Mazarin as a father.
The Regency begins auspiciously. Fifteen days after the death of Louis XIII. the decisive victory of Rocroy was gained over the Spaniards by the Duc d'Enghien, a youthful general of twenty-two. Paris was exultant. The roads were strewed with wreaths and flowers; tapestry and banners hung from every window, fountains of choicest wines flowed at the corners of the streets, and amid the booming of cannon, the blare of trumpets, the crash of warlike instruments, and the frantic shouts of an entire population, the Queen, and her little four-year old son, ride in a gold coach to hear a Te Deum at Notre-Dame.
Her Majesty's authority is much increased by this victory. Mazarin, under favour of the Queen, gradually acquires more and more power. He presides at the council; he administers the finances – for which he came to be called "the plunderer"; he tramples on the parliament and bullies the young King. The princes of the blood and all the young nobles are excluded from offices of state or places in the household. Every one begins to tremble before the once modest young Italian, and to recall with dismay the eighteen years of Richelieu's autocracy.
But Mazarin has a rival in Henri de Gondi, afterwards Cardinal de Retz, now coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris. No greater contrast can be conceived than between the subtle, shuffling Italian, patient as he is false, and Gondi, bold, liberal, independent, generous even to his enemies, incapable of envy or deceit, grasping each turn of fortune with the ready adaptiveness of genius, and swaying the passions of men by his fiery eloquence; a daring statesmen, a resolute reformer, one of whom Cromwell had said – "that he, De Retz, was the only man in Europe who despised him."
Gondi considered himself sacrificed to the Church – for which he had no vocation – and did his utmost, by the libertinism of his early life, to render his ordination impossible; but in vain. Although he had abducted his own cousin, and been the hero of numberless scandals, the Archbishopric of Paris was considered a sinecure in the family of Gondi, and Archbishop and Cardinal he must be in spite of his inclination and of his excesses. In politics he was a republican, formed on the pattern of Cato and of Brutus, whose lives he had studied at the Sorbonne. He loved to be compared to Cicero and to Cataline, and to believe himself called on to revolutionize France after the fashion of a factious conspirator of old Rome. He longed to be anything belligerent, agitative – tribune, general, or demagogue. "Ancient Rome," he said, "honoured crime, therefore crime was to be honoured." "Rather let me be the leader of a great party than an emperor!" exclaimed he, in the climax of one of his thrilling perorations. The mild precepts of the gospel were clearly little to his taste. He had mistaken not only his vocation but his century. He should have lived in the Middle Ages; and as an ecclesiastical prince-militant led armies into battle, conquered territories, and made laws to subject peoples. Yet underlying the wild enthusiasm of his language, and the reckless energy of his actions, there was a kindly, almost gentle temper that imparted to his character a certain incompleteness which accounts for the falling off of his later years. Grand, noble as was De Retz, Mazarin ultimately beat him and remained master of the situation.
Under the guidance of Gondi (De Retz) the parliament, paralysed for a time, soon learns its power, and gives unmistakable tokens of insubordination by opposing every edict and tax proposed by the Government. Some of the most fractious of "these impertinent bourgeois," as Condé called them, were arrested and exhibited in chains like captives in a Roman triumph – at Notre-Dame on the occasion of a second Te Deum sung for a second great victory gained by young Condé. Mazarin, by this act, over-taxed the endurance of the citizens. In one night two hundred barricades rise in the streets of Paris. The Queen-Regent can see them from her windows. This ebullition of popular fury appears to Gondi as the realisation of his youthful dreams. The moment has come to make him a tribune of the people. He has loyally warned the Regent of the impending peril. The Queen considered his words mere bravado, and treated him personally with suspicion and contempt. Gondi was warned that Mazarin had decided on his exile. His generous nature was outraged: "To-morrow," he said, "before noon, I will be master of Paris." Noon did see him master of Paris; but, loose as was his estimate of the