e,"--and into that brilliant arena, like some
fair circus equestrian, gay, spangled, and daring, rides Mademoiselle.

Almost all French historians, from Voltaire to Cousin, (St. Aulaire being
the chief exception,) speak lightly of the Wars of the Fronde. "La Fronde
n'est pas serieuse." Of course it was not. If it had been serious, it
would not have been French. Of course, French insurrections, like French
despotisms, have always been tempered by epigrams; of course, the people
went out to the conflicts in ribbons and feathers; of course, over every
battle there pelted down a shower of satire, like the rain at the Eglinton
tournament. More than two hundred pamphlets rattled on the head of Conde
alone, and the collection of _Mazarinades_, preserved by the Cardinal
himself, fills sixty-nine volumes in quarto. From every field the first
crop was glory, the second a _bon-mot_. When the dagger of De Retz fell
from his breast-pocket, it was "our good archbishop's breviary"; and when
his famous Corinthian troop was defeated in battle, it was "the First
Epistle to the Corinthians." While, across the Channel, Charles Stuart was
listening to his doom, Paris was gay in the midst of dangers, Madame de
Longueville was receiving her gallants in mimic court at the Hotel de
Ville, De Retz was wearing his sword-belt over his archbishop's gown, the
little hunchback Conti was generalissimo, and the starving people were
pillaging Mazarin's library, in joke, "to find something to gnaw upon."
Outside the walls, the maids-of-honor were quarrelling over the straw beds
which annihilated all the romance of martyrdom, and Conde, with five
thousand men, was besieging five hundred thousand. No matter, they all
laughed through it, and through every succeeding turn of the kaleidoscope;
and the "Anything may happen in France," with which La Rochefoucauld
jumped amicably into the carriage of his mortal enemy, was not only the
first and best of his maxims, but the key-note of French history for all
coming time.

But behind all this sport, as in all the annals of the nation, were
mysteries and terrors and crimes. It was the age of cabalistic ciphers,
like that of De Retz, of which Guy Joli dreamed the solution; of
inexplicable secrets, like the Man in the Iron Mask, whereof no solution
was ever dreamed; of poisons, like that diamond-dust which in six hours
transformed the fresh beauty of the Princess Royal into foul decay; of
dungeons, like that cell at V