STER AND HIS POLICY.

AND now what was the actual position of Mazarin on succeeding to power
in 1643?

Richelieu had died admired and abhorred. The people, glad to be
delivered from so heavy a yoke, obeyed with joy the incipient rule of
the Queen-Regent. The courtiers were at first enchanted with a
Government that refused nothing asked of it. It appeared, as one of the
number said, that there were no more than five little words in the
French language: "_La reine est si bonne!_"[1] The State prisons threw
open their gates; the rights of parliaments were respected; the princes
of the blood and the great nobles were restored to their governorships.
There was for a season one unanimous concert of praise and thanksgiving.
But when the princes and parliaments were desirous, as before
Richelieu's rule, of participating in the general direction of the
State, and especially in the distribution of place and patronage, great
was the surprise of both at finding a steady resistance on the part of
the Queen-Regent. To see her manifest a disposition to govern without
them was looked upon as something scandalous. Every attempt she made
thenceforward to retain a power which they evaded, or to repossess
herself of that which she had imprudently suffered to escape from her
grasp, seemed to them nothing less than a continuation of the odious
system of Richelieu. Their exasperation was increased to the highest
degree, therefore, when they beheld her give her entire confidence to a
foreigner, to a Cardinal, to a creature of Richelieu. By that triple
title Mazarin was equally hateful to the great nobles, the members of
parliament, and the middle class. The tyranny of Richelieu had in the
end attained to something noble by the high-handed heedlessness of all
his acts. If the people were to be trampled on, it was a species of
consolation that their oppressor was feared by others as well as
themselves. But that the oppression of the doomed French nation was to
be continued by a more ignoble hand was altogether intolerable.
Frenchmen had begun to ask one another, who _was_ this Mazarin who had
come to rule over them? He could not--like Richelieu--boast of his high
birth, of descent from a long line of noble ancestors--Frenchmen. Poets
and romancers, ye whose imaginations delight to dwell upon sudden
downfalls and rapid rises, mark well that little lad at play upon the
Sicilian shore near the town of Mazzara! Springing from the lowest of
the p