Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/767

Rh a marriage between them, and one or two even go so far as to name the priest who performed the ceremony. Michelet favours this supposition; nor does it appear at all improbable that Anne of Austria, who was much of a devotee, should have resorted to such a means of quieting her conscience, more especially as, according to all the memoirs of the period, she had more than once been taken to task by the religious sisterhoods whom she was constantly in the habit of visiting. It will be objected that Mazarin, being a churchman, could not marry, but it is extremely doubtful whether he was ever ordained a priest, at least he never officiated as one.

Whatever might have been the relations which subsisted between queen and minister, it is certain that his control over her, the young king, and the government of the nation, was, throughout his life, absolute. While he lived in the pomp and luxury of an eastern potentate, Louis was kept in a state of absolute penury; he was suffered to grow out of his clothes, even the sheets upon his bed were in rags, and his carriages were mouldering with age. The civil wars which desolated the capital and many of the provinces for years were wholly directed against Mazarin, and these, together with all the odium which throughout that time the nation cast upon her, might have been suppressed by dismissing him from her councils. Of his brutal rudeness towards her during the latter years of his life, and even upon his death-bed, where a scene was enacted which can bear but one explanation, all contemporaries bear witness, and, to conclude with a most significant fact, although previously notorious as a man of intrigue, from the commencement of his close relations with Anne of Austria, not even the most scandalous pamphlet ever accused him of an amour.

With the overthrow of the Importants commenced that period which is known in French history as "the fair days of the regency." Never, even during the reign of Richelieu, had France held so dominant a position in Europe. At Rocroi the young Condé had crushed the power of Spain, and, together with Turenne, marched from victory to victory, until the culmination at Lens and the peace of Münster. But while war raged without, all within was peace and tranquillity, taxes were repealed, largesses bestowed with a liberal hand, and the popularity of the regent attained such a height, that a courtier one day remarked that the whole French language was reduced to five words, "The queen is so good!"

In the days of his advancement, Mazarin had sought by clemency and a humility of demeanour to win popular approbation, and the change from the stern and pompous Richelieu was so striking that the very contrast secured his success. But from the fall of the Importants and the consolidation of his power all this was altered. He sent for his nephews and nieces from Rome and placed them in high positions about the court; he raised a guard for the protection of his person, and began to assume a style of regal splendour; he reduced the council of state to two persons beside himself, the Prince de Condé, father of the great general, and the Duc d'Orléans, and between these he craftily sowed the seeds of dissension by opposing their interests; by the aid of cajolery, large promises, and small fulfilments, and a fostering of selfish jealousies, he contrived, for a time, to preserve perfect tranquillity, and hold the balance between all parties. De Retz gives an admirable description of this state of things in the following paragraph: —


 * Monsieur (Orléans) thought himself above taking warning; the Prince de Condé, attached to the court by his avarice, was willing to believe so likewise; the Duc d'Enghien was just at the age to fall asleep under the shadow of his laurels; the Duc de Longueville opened his eyes, but it was only to shut them again; the Duc de Vendôme considered himself too happy only to have been exiled; the Duc de Nemours was but a child; the Duc de Guise, newly come back from Brussels, was ruled by Madame de Pons, and believed that he ruled all the court; the Duc de Bouillon fancied every day that they would give him back Sedan; Turenne was more than satisfied to command the army in Germany; the Duc d'Epernon was enchanted to have got into his post and his government; Schomberg had been all his life inseparable from everything that was well with the court; Grammont was its slave, and Messieurs de Retz, de Vitri, and de 