ABSTRACT
Mazarin thought that Condé had been given too much. Insatiable, Condé still found grievances to nurse, notably that Conti had not been given the governorship of Provence to complete the southern bloc. He may have feared assassination: some frondeurs even believed that Anne might be sympathetic to such an event. He certainly never felt at ease in the capital. In July 1651 he left, to seek the reassurance of his strongholds and the adulation of his partisans. Parlement was left with the disagreeable after-effects of its heady political ventures. To endorse Condé’s actions now would be to create a new civil war: to support Anne would be to incur the risk of her recalling Mazarin; to do nothing would be to abdicate from hard-won authority. At the heart of the predicament was the fact that Parlement was neither an executive nor a representative assembly. Only Anne could appoint ministers: they were beholden only to her. By summer she appeared to be moving back on to her high ground, sufficiently confident to be able to accept temporary setbacks. Her inner council, all Mazarin’s men, Le Tellier, Servien and Lionne, needed no prompting from Cologne to expose and exploit the grievances and divisions of the coalition that pretended to power.
