apable of serving in France, and of entering into
the ministry. They did not stop there, and certain councillors who were
not in the secrets of the party, and obeying only their passion,
proposed to exclude from the ministry even the French cardinals as being
still too dependent upon Rome. This sweeping motion was carried amid
loud cheers, which resounded through all parts of the hall. Whereupon
Conde laughingly remarked: "There's a fine echo." That same echo was the
ruin of De Retz's hopes, who only so passionately desired to become a
cardinal in order to succeed to Mazarin. Shortly afterwards the division
between Conde and the Old Fronde was declared, and Conde applied himself
to form an intermediate party, a new Fronde, which became sufficiently
powerful to disquiet Madame de Chevreuse and the Coadjutor.[3]
"Imagine," says the latter, "what the royal authority purged of
Mazarinism would have been, and the party of the Prince de Conde purged
of faction! More than all, what surety was there in M. the Duke
d'Orleans!"

[3] De Retz, tom, ii., p. 205.

[4] The same, p. 214.

But De Retz was not the only politician who terrified himself with the
idea of such a future looming thus darkly for France. Mazarin dreaded
it as much as he. His authority was almost universally thought to be for
ever annihilated; but a small number of courtiers who could read the
Queen's heart, judged otherwise, and owed to the skilful line of conduct
to which they adhered under these circumstances the high fortune to
which they attained in the sequel.

There is little doubt that, in the first instance, Conde might have
carried off the Regency from the Queen, deprived as she was of her prime
minister, and by her own acknowledgment incapable of governing by
herself; but then the direction of affairs belonged by right to the Duke
d'Orleans, of whom Conde was jealous. Conde, however, preferred to keep
the Regency in the Queen's hands, and by rendering himself formidable to
the Government, forcing it to reckon with him. If that union of the
Princes between themselves and the Fronde faction had subsisted, the
re-establishment of the royal authority would have been impossible: and
the commencement of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, who, although he
had only completed his thirteenth year, was about, by the force of an
exceptional law, to be declared of age, would have offered the
spectacle, so frequent in French annals,[5] of a state a prey