Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

---

[178] no longer. An ignominious peace is at hand; and though peace, too, has her victories, yours is not a nature grand enough to grasp them. Last to yield, last to be forgiven, there will yet be little in your future career to justify the distrust of despots, or to recall the young heroine of Orldans and St. Antoine.

---

IV. the conclusion.

Like a river which loses itself, by infinite subdivision, in the sands, so the wars of the Fronde disappeared in petty intrigues at last. As the fighting ended and manoeuvring became the game, of course Mazarin came uppermost,--Mazarin, that super-Italian, finessing and fascinating, so deadly sweet, l'omme plus agreable du monde, as Madame de Motteville and Bussy-Rabutin call him,flattering that he might win, avaricious that he might be magnificent, winning kings by jewelry and princesses by lapdogs,--too cowardly for any avoidable collision,too cool and economical in his hatred to waste an antagonist by killing him, but always luring and cajoling him into an unwilling tool,--too serenely careless of popular emotion even to hate the mob of Paris, any more than a surgeon hates his own lancet when it cuts him; he only changes his grasp and holds it more cautiously. Mazarin ruled. And the King was soon joking over the fight at the Porte St. Antoine, with Conde and Mademoiselle; the Queen at the same time affectionately assuring our heroine, that, if she could have got at her on that day, she would certainly have strangled her, but that, since it