rests the fact whether Mazarin owed in reality all his career and the
great future which then opened before him to a falsehood cunningly
invented and audaciously sustained; or whether Madame de Chevreuse and
the _Importants_, after having tried their utmost against him, now
resolving to destroy him with the armed hand, were themselves destroyed
and became the instruments of his triumph. The evidence available
irresistibly leads to the latter conclusion, and we think that we shall
be able to show that the plot attributed to the _Importants_, far from
being a chimaera, was the almost inevitable solution of the violent
crisis just described.

La Rochefoucauld, without having indulged in the insane hopes of his
friends and lent his hand to their rash enterprise, made it a point of
honour to defend them after their discomfiture, and set himself to cover
the retreat. He affects to doubt whether the plot which then made so
much noise was real or supposititious. In his eyes, the greater
probability was that the Duke de Beaufort, by a false _finesse_,
endeavoured to excite alarm in the Cardinal, believing that it was
sufficient to strike terror into his mind to force him to quit France,
and that it was with this view that he held secret meetings and gave
them the appearance of conspiracy. La Rochefoucauld constitutes himself
especially the champion of Madame de Chevreuse's innocence, and
declares himself thoroughly persuaded that she was ignorant of
Beaufort's designs.

After the historian of the _Importants_, that of the _Frondeurs_ holds
very nearly the same arguments. Like La Rochefoucauld, De Retz has only
one object in his Memoirs--that of investing himself with a semblance of
capacity and making a great figure in every way, in evil as well as
good. He is often more truthful, because he cares less about other
people, and that he is disposed to sacrifice all the world except
himself. In this matter it is hard to conceive the motive for his
reserve and incredulity. He knew right well that the majority of the
persons accused of having taken part in the plot had already been
implicated in more than one such business. He himself tells us that he
had conspired with the Count de Soissons, that he had blamed him for not
having struck down Richelieu at Amiens, and that with La Rochepot, he,
the Abbe de Retz, had formed the design of assassinating him at the
Tuileries during the ceremony of the baptism of Mademoiselle (de
Montpen