hich never left the most worldly: the Prince of Conti
had died very devout, and Madame de Longueville had just expired at the
Carmelites', after twenty-five years' penance, when Cardinal de Retz died
on the 24th of August, 1679. At the time of his arrest, it was a common
saying of the people in the street that together with "Cardinal de Retz
it would have been a very good thing to imprison Cardinal Mazarin as
well, in order to teach them of the clergy not to meddle for the future
in the things of this world." Language which was unjust to the grand
government of Cardinal Richelieu, unjust even to Cardinal Mazarin. The
latter was returning with greater power than ever at the moment when
Cardinal de Retz, losing forever the hope of supplanting him in power,
was beginning that life of imprisonment and exile which was ultimately to
give him time to put retirement and repentance between himself and death.

Cardinal Mazarin had once more entered France, but he had not returned to
Paris. The Prince of Conde, soured by the ill-success of the Fronde and
demented by illimitable pride, had not been ashamed to accept the title
of generalissimo of the Spanish armies; Turenne had succeeded in hurling
him back into Luxembourg, and it was in front of Bar, besieged, that
Mazarin, with a body of four thousand men, joined the French army; Bar
was taken, and the campaign of 1652, disastrous at nearly every point,
had just finished with this success, when the cardinal re-entered Paris
at the end of January, 1653. Six months later, at the end of July, the
insurrection in Guienne was becoming extinguished by a series of private
conventions; the king's armies were entering Bordeaux; the revolted
princes received their pardon, waiting, meanwhile, for the Prince of
Conti to marry, as he did next year, Mdlle. Martinozzi, one of Mazarin's
nieces; Madame de Longueville retired to Moulin's into the convent where
her aunt, Madame de Montmorency, had for the last twenty years been
mourning for her husband; Conde was the only rebel left, more dangerous,
for France, than all the hostile armies he commanded. Cardinal Mazarin
was henceforth all-powerful; whatever may have been the nature of the
ties which united him to the queen, he had proved their fidelity and
strength too fully to always avoid the temptation of adopting the tone of
a master; the young king's confidence in his minister, who had brought
him up, equalled that of his mother; the merits a