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The Parliament Of Paris
by
“If I should join hands with them,” he said to De Retz, “it might be best for my interests, but my name is Louis de Bourbon, and I do not wish to shake the throne. These devils of square-caps, are they mad about bringing me either to commence a civil war, or to put a rope round their own necks? I will let them see that they are not the potentates they think themselves, and that they may easily be brought to reason.”
“The cardinal may possibly be mistaken in his measures,” answered De Retz. “He will find Paris a hard nut to crack.”
“It will not be taken, like Dunkerque, by mining and assaults,” retorted the prince, angrily; “but if the bread of Gonesse were to fail them for a week–” He left the coadjutor to imagine the consequences.
The contest continued. In January, 1649, the queen, the boy king, and the whole court set out by night for the castle of St. Germain. It was unfurnished, with scarcely a bundle of straw to lie upon, but the queen could not have been more gay “had she won a battle, taken Paris, and had all who had displeased her hanged, and nevertheless she was very far from all that.”
Far enough, indeed. Paris was in the hands of her enemies, who were as gay as the queen. On the 8th of January the Parliament of Paris decreed Cardinal Mazarin an enemy to the king and the state, and bade all subjects of the king to hunt him down. War was declared against the queen regent and her favorite, the cardinal. Had it been the States-General in place of the Parliament, the French Revolution might have then and there begun.
Many of the greatest lords joined the side of the people. Troops were levied in the city, their command being offered to the Prince of Conti. The Parliaments of Aix and Rouen voted to support that of Paris. It was decreed that all the royal funds, in the exchequers of the kingdom, should be seized and used for the defence of the people. All was festivity in the city. The versatile people seemed to imagine that to declare war was to decree victory. There was dancing everywhere within the walls. There was the rumble of war without. The Prince of Conde, at the head of the king’s troops, had taken the post of Charentin from the Frondeurs, as the malcontents called themselves, and had carried out his threat of checking the flow of bread to the city. The gay Parisians were beginning to feel the inconvenience of hunger.
What followed is too long a story to be told here, except in bare epitome. A truce was patched up between the contending parties. Bread flowed again into Paris. The seared and hungry people grew courageous and violent again when their appetites were satisfied. When M. Mole and his fellows returned to Paris with a treaty of peace which they had signed, the populace gathered round them in fury.
“None of your peace! None of your Mazarin!” they angrily shouted. “We must go to St. Germain to seek our good king! We must fling into the river all the Mazarins.”
One of them laid his hand threateningly on President Mole’s arm. The latter looked him in the face calmly.
“When you have killed me,” he said, quietly, “I shall only need six feet of earth.”
“You can get back to your house secretly by way of the record offices,” whispered one of his companions.
“The court never hides itself,” he composedly replied. “If I were certain to perish, I would not commit this poltroonery, which, moreover, would but give courage to the rioters. They would seek me in my house if they thought I shrank from them here.”
M. Mole was a man of courage. To face a mob is at times more dangerous than to face an army.
Paris was in disorder. The agitation was spreading all over France. But the army was faithful to the king, and without it the Fronde was powerless. The outbreak had ended in a treaty of peace and amnesty in which the Parliament had in a measure won, as it had preserved all its rights and privileges.