f the contracted engagement? Who struck at and wounded by
the self-same blow the Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse? Who restored
them both and for ever to the Queen and Mazarin? Who destroyed the
Fronde by dividing it? We shall find out by-and-by, but let us merely
say just now that it was the rupture of that marriage which again
shuffled the cards and changed the face of the situation. In pitting
against himself those who had so powerfully succoured him in his
misfortune, Conde ought at least to have drawn closer to the Court and
had a serious understanding with the Queen; but he tergiversated, and at
the end of some months of that wavering policy, he found himself
standing unmasked between the Court and the Fronde, both equally
discontented with him, repeating and exaggerating the blunder committed
by Mazarin. The greatest error during the course of a revolution is to
believe that the support of either of the parties who are in actual
collision may be dispensed with. At the close of a revolution the
attempt to dominate may be tried; during the crisis a choice must be
made. Mazarin had fallen through having tried to dominate the Fronde and
Conde at one and the same time; Conde lost himself in thinking to
dominate the Fronde and the Court.

[1] Retz himself has taken care to inform us of his sad _liaison_
with Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, throughout the whole of the second
volume and beginning of the third of his Memoirs. Amsterdam edition,
1731. That unfortunate lady died suddenly of a fever, unmarried, in
1652. She was born in 1627.

It is an historical problem very difficult to solve, as to who was the
author of the rupture of the marriage projected between the Prince de
Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. We are well inclined to believe
that that individual at any rate was the chief author of the rupture to
whom it was the most profitable. The Queen and Mazarin, who from his
place of retirement governed her with as absolute a sway as ever, saw
from the first the danger which threatened them from such an alliance,
entirely unexpected as it was by both. The negotiations between Madame
de Chevreuse, while Conde was prisoner, and Madame de Longueville at
Stenay, had been conducted by the Palatine with such consummate skill
and perfect secrecy that neither the Queen nor Mazarin had the slightest
suspicion of them. When the rumour reached the ears of the Cardinal in
his retreat at Bruhl, near Cologne, h