From every field the first
crop was glory, the second a _bon-mot_. When the dagger of De Retz fell
from his breast-pocket, it was "our good archbishop's breviary"; and when
his famous Corinthian troop was defeated in battle, it was "the First
Epistle to the Corinthians." While, across the Channel, Charles Stuart was
listening to his doom, Paris was gay in the midst of dangers, Madame de
Longueville was receiving her gallants in mimic court at the Hotel de
Ville, De Retz was wearing his sword-belt over his archbishop's gown, the
little hunchback Conti was generalissimo, and the starving people were
pillaging Mazarin's library, in joke, "to find something to gnaw upon."
Outside the walls, the maids-of-honor were quarrelling over the straw beds
which annihilated all the romance of martyrdom, and Conde, with five
thousand men, was besieging five hundred thousand. No matter, they all
laughed through it, and through every succeeding turn of the kaleidoscope;
and the "Anything may happen in France," with which La Rochefoucauld
jumped amicably into the carriage of his mortal enemy, was not only the
first and best of his maxims, but the key-note of French history for all
coming time.
But behind all this sport, as in all the annals of the nation, were
mysteries and terrors and crimes. It was the age of cabalistic ciphers,
like that of De Retz, of which Guy Joli dreamed the solution; of
inexplicable secrets, like the Man in the Iron Mask, whereof no solution
was ever dreamed; of poisons, like that diamond-dust which in six hours
transformed the fresh beauty of the Princess Royal into foul decay; of
dungeons, like that cell at Vincennes which Madame de Rambouillet
pronounced to be "worth its weight in arsenic.
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