e Retz's power to neutralise wholly these hostile dispositions;
but he could hinder them from being brought into dangerous activity. The
Coadjutor at first with that view acted in good faith, and remained
faithful in the first moments of the agreement which he had entered into
with the Queen. Probably it might then have been possible to attach him
finally to the Court party; but Mazarin could not believe that the
Coadjutor, so fertile in tricks, so full of finesse, was capable of
anything like frankness and generosity. In the practical experience of
life, mistrust has its perils as well as blind confidence, and failure
as often happens to us through our unwillingness to believe in virtue,
as through our inability to suspect vice. Mazarin judged after himself a
man who resembled him in many respects, but not in all. Moreover, he
feared lest he might seek to win the Queen's affection from him; and
that fear was not groundless. De Retz saw himself the object of the
suspicions and afterwards of the machinations of a power which laboured
at his destruction, whilst for that power he was compromising his
influence and his popularity. To reacquire it, he hastened, therefore,
to throw himself with all his adherents on the side of the Princes, and
saw no safety but in their deliverance. This alliance of the two camps,
so long enemies, was concluded between the Coadjutor and the Princess
Palatine, and rendered so firm and secret by the confidence with which
these two party chiefs inspired each other, that Mazarin, who
unceasingly dreaded such a union, and who always suspected it, did not
know it for certain until it revealed itself by its effects.[3]

[3] Motteville--Joly--Lenet.

The parliament formed a fourth party. Not that that body was unanimous;
but it had within itself an honourable majority which was alike inimical
to the Frondeurs, the seditious, and the minister. The parliament
therefore would have been disposed to unite itself to the Princes'
party, and to lend it support; but to do so it would have been necessary
that the chiefs of that party should renounce all alliance with the
foreigner. Turenne and Madame de Longueville had joined with the
Spaniards to fight against France. The young Princess de Conde, with the
Dukes de Bouillon and de la Rochefoucauld, who had shut themselves up in
Bordeaux, had entered into an alliance with them, and had received from
them succour in the shape of money. The Spanish envoys in