Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/166

152 indignation against the author of this plot and those who had shared in it. Now the apparent author of the plot was the Duke de Beaufort, aided by his principal officers together with some gentlemen in the service of the Vendômes. It was necessary, therefore, to arrest Beaufort and to bring him to trial. One may judge from this of the authority which Mazarin had gained, and how far Anne of Austria might one day be induced to go to defend a minister who was so dear to her. Before the death of Louis XIII., the Duke de Beaufort had been the man in whom the queen had most confided, and for some time he had been thought destined to fill the rôle of favorite. Since then, he had greatly injured his cause by his presumption and his evident want of ability, and, most of all, by his public intrigue with Madame de Montbazon; but the queen still retained a great weakness for him, and to sign an order for his arrest at the end of three months, was a great step, necessary, it is true, but still extreme, and giving a manifest proof of an entire change in her heart and her intimate relations. Even the dissimulation which she uses in this affair, marks the deliberate firmness of her resolution.

The second day of September is truly memorable in the history of Mazarin, and we may also say in that of France, for it witnessed the consolidation of royalty, shaken by the death of Richelieu and of Louis XIII., and the defeat of the party of the Importants. They did not rise again until the period of the Fronde, five years after, when they reappeared still the same, with the same designs and the same policy, and, after raising fierce and withering storms, were broken anew against the genius of Mazarin and the invincible fidelity of Anne of Austria.

On the morning of the 2d of September, Paris and the court were filled with commotion at the report of the ambuscade which had been lying in wait for Mazarin the night before between the Louvre and the hôtel de Clèves. The five conspirators who had shared in it with Beaufort, namely, the