Paris
conferred daily with the chiefs of the old as of the new Fronde.

Gaston, who might have been the moderator of all these parties, formed
by himself a fifth among them. His irresolution prevented him giving
strength to any other of the factions, but he constituted a formidable
obstacle to all the rest. His inclination, as well as his interest,
should never have made him deviate from the Court party; yet he was
always opposed to it. Impelled by his jealousy of Conde and of the prime
minister, he acted in a manner contrary to his own wishes. He was,
however, neither wanting in intelligence nor finesse, nor even a certain
kind of eloquence; and the master-stroke of De Retz's address was to
have contrived, in furtherance of the object of his designs, to set
Gaston with the Fronde against the Princes, and afterwards for the
Princes against Mazarin.

The complication and the multiplicity of parties was as nothing in
comparison to that of private interests, which so crossed each other and
in so many different ways, which turned with such mobility, that, in the
ignorance which prevailed of the secret motives of the principal actors
in that drama so vivid, motley, and turbulent, nothing could be
predicated of what they would do, and a looker-on might have been
disposed at times to have pronounced them as insensates, who were rather
their own enemies than those of their antagonists.

If the libels of those times are to be credited, and especially the
satire in verse for which the poet Marlet was sentenced to be hanged,
the obstinacy with which the Queen exposed to danger her son's crown, by
retaining a minister detested by all, would be naturally explained by a
reason other than that of a reason of state. The advocate-general Talon,
Madame de Motteville, and the Duchess de Nemours exculpate Anne of
Austria on this head. They are three respectable and trustworthy
witnesses; and, without any doubt, that which they said they thought.
But the Duchess d'Orleans, Elizabeth-Charlotte, affirms in her
correspondence[4] that Anne of Austria had secretly married Cardinal
Mazarin, who was not a priest. She says that all the details of the
marriage were known, and that, in her time, the back staircase in the
Palais Royal was pointed out by which at night Mazarin reached the
Queen's apartments. She observes that such clandestine marriages were
common at that period, and cites that of the widow of our Charles the
First, who secretly esp