lances, shovels, torches, stakes, crooks, levers, sabres, and spits.
They sang and howled alternately, counterfeiting with atrocious yells the
cries of a cat, and carrying as a flag one of these animals suspended
from a pole and wrapped in a red rag, thus representing the Cardinal,
whose taste for cats was generally known. Public criers rushed about,
red and breathless, throwing on the pavement and sticking up on the
parapets, the posts, the walls of the houses, and even on the palace,
long satires in short stanzas upon the personages of the time. Butcher-
boys and scullions, carrying large cutlasses, beat the charge upon
saucepans, and dragged in the mud a newly slaughtered pig, with the red
cap of a chorister on its head. Young and vigorous men, dressed as
women, and painted with a coarse vermilion, were yelling, "We are mothers
of families ruined by Richelieu! Death to the Cardinal!" They carried
in their arms figures of straw that looked like children, which they
threw into the river.

When this disgusting mob overran the quays with its thousands of imps, it
produced a strange effect upon the combatants, and entirely contrary to
that expected by their patron. The enemies on both sides lowered their
arms and separated. Those of Monsieur and Cinq-Mars were revolted at
seeing themselves succored by such auxiliaries, and, themselves aiding
the Cardinal's gentlemen to remount their horses and to gain their
carriages, and their valets to convey the wounded to them, gave their
adversaries personal rendezvous to terminate their quarrel upon a ground
more secret and more worthy of them. Ashamed of the superiority of
numbers and the ignoble troops which they seemed to command, foreseeing,
perhaps, for the first time the fearful consequences of their political
machinations, and what was the scum they were stirring up, they withdrew,
drawing their large hats over their eyes, throwing their cloaks over
their shoulders, and avoiding the daylight.