It was anarchy for the sheer fun of anarchy's sake, a struggle which
pervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot of
forces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. The
delirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the
aristocratic bolshevists of Conde's army routed the victorious king
and cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation of
tragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason had
turned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him a
France which was morally, religiously, intellectually, a sucked
orange.
Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising
rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which
has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous
revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La
Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually
escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the
stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory
that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is
the first of the moral virtues.
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