" The character of the agitation was no more
to be judged by its jokes and epigrams, than the gloomy glory of the
English Puritans by the grotesque names of their saints, or the stern
resolution of the Dutch burghers by their guilds of rhetoric and
symbolical melodrama.
But popular power was not yet developed in France, as it was in England;
all social order was unsettled and changing, and well Mazarin knew it. He
knew the pieces with which he played his game of chess: the king
powerless, the queen mighty, the bishops unable to take a single
straightforward move, and the knights going naturally zigzag; but a host
of plebeian pawns, every one fit for a possible royalty, and therefore to
be used shrewdly, or else annihilated as soon as practicable. True, the
game would not last forever; but after him the deluge.
Our age has forgotten even the meaning of the word Fronde; but here also
the French and Flemish histories run parallel, and the Frondeurs, like the
Gueux, were children of a sarcasm. The Counsellor Bachaumont one day
ridiculed insurrectionists, as resembling the boys who played with slings
(_frondes_) about the streets of Paris, but scattered at the first glimpse
of a policeman. The phrase organized the party. Next morning all fashions
were _a la fronde_,--hats, gloves, fans, bread, and ballads; and it cost
six years of civil war to pay for the Counsellor's facetiousness.
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