Stray Pearls: Memoirs of Margaret De Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise by Yonge (summer reads txt) 📕

There was indeed a good deal passing beyond those rooms where Margaret was so absorbed in her d’Aubepines that I sometimes thought she forgot her own kindred in them. Poor things! they were in sad case, though how Cecile could break her heart over a fellow who had used her so vilely, I could never understand. He repented, they said. So much the better for him; but a pretty life he would have led her if he had recovered. Why, what is there for a French noble to do but to fight, dance attendance on the King, and be dissipated? There is no House of Lords, no Quarter-Sessions, no way of being useful; and if he tried to improve his peasantry he is a dangerous man, and they send him a lettre de cachet. He has leave to do nothing but oppress the poor wretches, and that he is fairly obliged to do, so heavy are his expenses at Court. The King may pension him, but the pension is all wrung out of the poor in another shape! Heaven knows our English nobles are far from what they might be, but they have not the stumbling-blocks in their way that the French have under their old King, who was a little lad then, and might have been led to better things if his mother had had less pride and more good sense.

Gaspard de Nidemerle does the best he can. He is a really good man, I do believe, but he has been chiefly with the army, or on his own estate. And he can effect little good, hampered as he is on all sides.

In those days, Clement Darpent was sad enough at heart, but he did not quite despair of his country, though things were getting worse and worse. Mademoiselle had saved the Prince and his crew, besotted as she was upon them; and finely they requited Paris, which had sheltered them. All the more decent folk among them were lying wounded in different houses, and scarcely any of their chiefs were left afoot but the Duke of Beaufort, with his handsome face and his fine curls of flaxen hair, looking like a king, but good for nothing but to be a king of ruffians.

What does the Prince do but go to the Hotel de Ville with the Duke of Orleans and Beaufort, at six o’clock in the evening of the 4th of July, under pretence of thanking the magistrates and deputies of letting him in. Then he demanded of them to proclaim that the King was a prisoner in Mazarin’s hands, and to throw themselves into the war. They would do no such thing, nor let themselves be intimidated, whereupon the Prince went out on the steps, and shouted to his rabble rout, where there were plenty of soldiers in disguise, who had been drinking ever since noon: ‘These gentlemen will do nothing for us,’ he cried. ‘Do what you like with them.’

And then, like a coward, he got into a carriage with Monsieur and drove off, while M. de Beaufort, in a mercer’s shop, acted general to the mob, who filled the whole place. It was a regular storm. Flags with ‘Arret d’Union’ were displayed, shots fired, the soldiers got into the houses and aimed in at the windows, logs of wood smeared with fat were set fire to before the doors so as to burn them down.

Clement, who was a depute for his arrondissement, had, while this was going on, been getting together the younger and stronger men with the guard, to make a barricade of benches, tables, and chairs; and they defended this for a long time, but ammunition failed them, and the barricade began to give way amid the shouts of the mob. The poor old men crouching in the halls were confessing to the cures, expecting death every moment; but, happily, even that long July evening had an end; darkness came down on them, and there were no lights. The mob went tumbling about, at a greater loss than the deputies and magistrates, who did at least know the way. Clement, with a poor old gouty echevin on his arm, struggled out, he knew not how, into one of the passages, where a fellow rushed at them, crying, ‘Down with the Mazarins!’ but Clement knew by his voice that he was no soldier or bandit, but a foolish artisan, and at haphazard said: ‘Come, come, my good lad, none of this nonsense. This gentleman will give you a crown if you will help him out.’

The man obeyed directly, muttering that he only did as others did; and when they had got out into the street, Clement, finding himself not far