incennes which Madame de Rambouillet
pronounced to be "worth its weight in arsenic." War or peace hung on the
color of a ball-dress, and Madame de Chevreuse knew which party was coming
uppermost, by observing whether the binding of Madame de Hautefort's
prayer-book was red or green. Perhaps it was all a little theatrical, but
the performers were all Rachels.

And behind the crimes and the frivolities stood the Parliaments, calm and
undaunted, with leaders, like Mole and Talon, who needed nothing but
success to make their names as grand in history as those of Pym and
Hampden. Among the Brienne Papers in the British Museum there is a
collection of the manifestoes and proclamations of that time, and they are
earnest, eloquent, and powerful, from beginning to end. Lord Mahon alone
among historians, so far as our knowledge goes, has done fit and full
justice to the French parliaments, those assemblies which refused
admission to the foreign armies which the nobles would gladly have
summoned in,--but fed and protected the banished princesses of England,
when the court party had left those descendants of the Bourbons to die of
cold and hunger in the palace of their ancestors. And we have the
testimony of Henrietta Maria herself, the only person who had seen both
revolutions near at hand, that "the troubles in England never appeared so
formidable in their early days, nor were the leaders of the revolutionary
party so ardent or so united." The character of the agitation was no more
to be judged by its jokes and epigrams, than the gloomy glory of the
English Puritans by the grotesque names of their saints, or the stern
resolution of the Dutch burghers by their guilds of rhetoric and
symbolical melodrama.

But popular power was not yet developed in France, as it was in England;
all social order was unsettled and changing, and well Mazarin knew it. He
knew the pieces with which he played his game of chess: the king
powerless, the queen mighty, the bishops unable to take a single
straightforward move, and the knights going naturally zigzag; but a host
of plebeian pawns, every one fit for a possible royalty, and therefore to
be used shrewdly, or else annihilated as soon as practicable. True, the
game would not last forever; but after him the deluge.

Our age has forgotten even the meaning of the word Fronde; but here also
the French and Flemish histories run parallel, and the Frondeurs, like the
Gueux, were children of a sarcasm. Th