and courageous, had joined her mother-in-law, and
declared for the Fronde, partly through her liking for _eclat_ and the
notoriety of parading at the head of the troops, with her two ladies of
honour, the Countesses of Fiesque and Frontenac, transformed into
aides-de-camp; partly by the secret hope that by Mazarin's defeat and
her father's triumph she might succeed in espousing the young King, and
so exchange the helmet of the Fronde for the crown of France.

[7] Her father, writing to her companions in arms the Countesses of
Fiesque and Frontenac shortly after their entrance into Orleans,
complimented them upon their courage, and addressed his letter to
_the Countesses Adjutant-Generals in the Army of my Daughter against
Mazarin_.

It would be a great mistake to attribute to this fair Frondeuse a
liberalism of ideas to which she was most assuredly a stranger. "It must
be," she somewhere remarks, "that the intentions of the great are like
the mysteries of the Faith: it does not belong to mankind to penetrate
within them; men ought to revere them, and to believe that they are
never otherwise than for the welfare and salvation of their country."
But, however that may be, it did not prevent the civil war from being a
very amusing thing for Mademoiselle. To hear the drums beating to arms
one fine morning, to see men running through the streets to defend the
barricades as well as their untrained hands could wield musket and
sabre, to lie upon the floor in a large chamber at Saint-Germain, and to
find on awaking that chamber filled with soldiers in great buff
jerkins,--those were pleasures not to be always found at will, and were
to be made the most of when met with. Such pleasures, moreover,
savouring of the unforeseen, the adventurous, and the grotesque, solely
determined Mademoiselle's conduct in the outset. But on the second
Fronde breaking out, when the struggle of the Parliament with royalty
had become a quarrel between princes and ministers, Mademoiselle felt
that the honour of her house was at stake. Gaston, after having pledged
himself to the Prince de Conde, so far as a man who does not know his
own mind can give a pledge, contented himself with whistling, as he was
wont to do, or to dissertating cleverly without acting. But his daughter
wrested from him an authority to go herself and defend Orleans against
the troops of Louis XIV.; his daughter, on seeing the unfortunate
adherents of Conde eng