Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/769

Rh livres for his capture alive or dead. And yet, notwithstanding, upon his return from his third and last exile, on the 29th of March 1653, he was received with every mark of enthusiastic affection; the great nobles, many of whom had been his most virulent enemies, cast themselves at his feet, and jostled each other for the distinction of being first to crouch there; a grand festival was given in his honour at the Hôtel de Ville, and the multitude gathered about the building in crowds, and rent the air with acclamations whenever he appeared at the windows.

Such is the value of popular hate — and popular favour.

De Retz was in prison, Condé and Beaufort were in exile, the party of the Fronde was shattered, the populace were weary of civil strife, and Mazarin still remained master of queen and king. There is something marvellous in the tenacity with which through years of discord, hatred, rebellion, and exile, this man clung to power; France could no more shake him off than could Sinbad the old man of the sea. "I and time," was a favourite expression of his, and the two certainly wrought wonders for him. He lived down all hate and all enemies, and that with little or no assistance from the headman's axe, and passed the latter years of life in tranquillity, absolute authority, and a general toleration almost amounting to popularity. This it is which has given to posterity an exaggerated estimate of his talents. His rule from first to last was a vicious and unhappy one for France, the success which attended her arms was due to her great commanders, Condé and Turenne, and these were her only offsets against the oppression, exaction, and the wretched condition of her people which marked the whole period of his administration. Nothing could be more deplorable than the management of the finances. What it was under Emery has been already referred to; Fouquet appropriated and squandered the national money with a magnificent generosity that half blinds us to his faults; it was reserved for the great Colbert to redeem the crimes and errors of his predecessors. While commerce was almost extinct, the people famishing, and justice dead, Mazarin had but one thought, the aggrandisement of his power, and the increase of his enormous wealth. "Sire," said Fouquet to the king, "the exchequer is empty; but his Eminence the cardinal will lend you what you want." The magnificence of his state far surpassed that of royalty itself. When he left Paris for Spain to arrange the Treaty of the Pyrenees and the king's marriage, he took in his train sixty churchmen and nobles of the first rank, accompanied by their retinues; his household attendants were three hundred in number, besides a guard of three hundred foot and one hundred horse; his baggage was conveyed in eight waggons, each drawn by six horses; in addition to these were twenty-four mules, and a great number of led horses. His re-entrance into the capital with Louis and his bride is thus described in one of Madame Scarron's letters


 * The household of Cardinal Mazarin was not the ugliest. It began with seventy-two baggage-mules, of which the first twenty-four had housings, simple enough; the others had more beautiful, finer, and more brilliant housings than the finest tapestries you have ever seen. The last were of red velvet with gold and silver embroidery, and silver bits and bells, all of such magnificence as caused great exclamations. Then passed twenty-four pages, and all the gentlemen and officers of his household; after that, twelve carriages with six horses each, and his guards. In short, his household was more than an hour in passing.

Although usually grasping and avaricious, Mazarin could be magnificent at times. It is related that at one of his great fêtes he led his guests through a suite of apartments, in which they were shown furniture, mirrors, cabinets, candelabras, plate, jewels, and other costly articles worth five hundred thousand francs, and that when they had done admiring these riches, he informed them that he intended to put them all into a lottery for which each person should be presented with a ticket.

The means by which he had accumulated his riches were various, and mostly base: sales of offices, fines, peculations, gambling, plunder of all kinds. Gambling was the all-pervading vice of the age, and the especial favourite of the minister, who, probably, to draw men's minds from State affairs, carefully fostered and encouraged it at court. The king was early initiated into the custom, and staked and lost the little money he was allowed most royally in the cardinal's or Madame de Soisson's salons. Every mansion was a gaming-house, where scores of thousands of francs were lost and won every few minutes. From the court the passion descended to the city, and spread universal corruption.

Nevertheless, Mazarin did much to soften and polish the manners of the nobility, rendered rude and savage by generations of civil war. He introduced a