Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

CHAPTER VIII

The Cardinal and his palaces—The château and town of Richelieu—The Palais-Cardinal—Richelieu’s household, daily life, and friends—The Hôtel de Rambouillet—Mademoiselle de Gournay—Boisrobert and the first Academicians—Entertainments at the Palais-Cardinal—Mirame.

The restless, ambitious energy and the passion for detail which made Cardinal de Richelieu the hardest worker of his time in politics, were thrown equally into his characteristic amusements. His love of building and furnishing splendidly carried him far beyond such pleasant country-houses as Rueil, Limours, or Bois-le-Vicomte, luxurious as they were. The Palais-Cardinal itself, in the heart of Paris and almost royal, had certain limitations, the architect being blamed for a lack of height and dignity. Le Mercier excused himself, we are told, by the Cardinal’s own orders: he desired to give no cause for jealousy to the great ones of the kingdom who did not love him “because of the extreme hauteur with which he treated them, and to show moderation, even in the disposing of his palace, in the sight of those powerful persons who were envious of such prodigious credit and grandeur.”

No scruples interfered in the lonely valley of the Mable, where for miles around the name of Richelieu now had no rival. Even Champigny, the once dreaded house of the Montpensiers, had come into the Cardinal’s possession by a more or less forced exchange with Gaston d’Orléans, his little daughter’s untrustworthy guardian. The fine old château was pulled down; its former outbuildings make the château of to-day; and the chapel, with its precious windows, its tombs and picturesque cloister, was only saved by the Pope’s refusal to consent to its destruction. The Cardinal-Duc, though First Minister of France and head of her army and navy, could not flatly disobey the Church in a private matter.

CHÂTEAU DE RICHELIEU

FROM AN OLD PRINT

There is more actually left of the old Montpensier buildings than of the magnificent palace, foreshadowing the splendour of Versailles, into which Cardinal de Richelieu transformed the river-fortress of his ancestors. Wide lawns, stiff alleys and avenues, still moats with water-lilies, one small pavilion looking sadly over the trees towards a high gateway where no one seems to enter; this is all that remains of the far-famed Château de Richelieu.

It was in the year 1625, soon after he came to power, that the Cardinal visited Richelieu with Madame de Combalet, and resolved on the transformation. After this the work went on for years, and was hardly finished when he died, though long before that the palace was the admiration of Europe, only surpassed in France by Fontainebleau. It was approached by an avenue a mile and a quarter long, ending in an immense demi-lune on which the first court opened by a stately gateway with flanking pavilions. This court led to a second; a bridge over the moat which, as in old days, surrounded the actual château, gave admittance to another gateway under a dome, guarded by a figure of Renown and other mythological statues. Within this was the cour d’honneur, a square of great buildings, with high pavilions at the four corners and in the centre opposite the gateway. Here was the grand staircase of variegated marble; and here, after the ruin of the House of Montmorency, stood the famous Slaves of Michel Angelo, brought from the Duke’s Château of Écouen. Statues and busts were everywhere.

The further front, beyond another bridge, looked upon square gardens “embroidered with flowers,” where peacocks strutted, and through which flowed the imprisoned Mable in a broad canal full of fish. Beyond this again was another vast half-moon space of garden and parterre, with statues, fountains, grottoes, an orangery, and a chapel; and all was surrounded by the great deer-park and the woods in ordered beauty, long alleys striking into them, lost in the shade.

The decoration, in and out, of this wonderful place shared the Cardinal’s thoughts with the keenest interests of his political life; and the collection of works of art, for Richelieu and the Palais-Cardinal, meant in itself a large correspondence. Besides all this, he had undertaken to create a town outside the gates of his new palace, its main street to be of hôtels on one dignified plan, after the model of the Place Royale, built for themselves by his chief officers and the nobles whom he meant to attend his Court at Richelieu. That Court was never held, but the town rose out of the earth, “as if by enchantment,” with all kinds of privileges and immunities granted by the King, and its symmetrical buildings have long survived their raison d’être, the château. There is indeed more life now in that seventeenth-century street than when La Fontaine wrote of its admired but monotonous rows of houses:

“La plupart sont inhabités;

Je ne vis personne en la rue;

Il m’en déplaît; j’aime aux cités

Un peu de bruit et de cohue.”

The Cardinal’s devoted friend, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, acted as surveyor of the works at Richelieu, and in a letter to him in June 1632, between the execution of Marillac and Monsieur’s invasion of Languedoc, we have evidence of the way in which every exterior and interior detail was thought out by an unresting brain. The painting of the rooms was now in full swing, being mostly designed by Simon Vouet, the King’s favourite painter, and carried out by him and other artists.

After giving orders as to the decoration of a large room above the entrance, the Cardinal proceeds:

“The vaulted cabinet at the side should be painted in grisaille on the stone vaulting, partly by the painter from Lyons, and partly by other painters, who will enrich the grisaille with gold. M. de Bordeaux, being on the spot, will make them agree together as to what each shall do. In this cabinet there must be a wainscot six feet high with a recess to hold rarities, and the said wainscot shall be painted in grisaille of one tint and gilded to match the vaulting. M. Vouet can very well design the paintings.”

Architectural details regarding the level of different rooms, their respective heights, their flat or vaulted ceilings, fill a good part of the letter. Everywhere there are six-foot wainscotings with shelves or recesses for “rarities”; for His Eminence’s collection of objets d’art was already famous in Europe.

Then he goes on to the gardens.

“My uncle tells me that the canal at Richelieu is full of weeds. At the end of the summer, when the lawns are levelled and the masons are no longer working on the banks of the said canal, it must be entirely drained and all the weeds must be rooted up and burnt in its bed; and when it is clean and dry let it be filled again, and put a boat on it, and make a bargain with a strong and vigorous man who has nothing else to do, that he will not suffer a weed in it but will tear them up as they grow, which may be done with tools of iron made for the purpose. In that country it suffices a man if he have enough to live on, so that I think a hundred francs or forty crowns will acquit me.”

With quite as eager an interest, both now and again later, even when Monsieur is “drawing towards Languedoc” and political storms are darkening all the horizon, he writes of pictures from Mantua that he is sending to Richelieu, of the preservation, with new floors and beams, of his father’s old rooms—a fancy which, in Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s opinion, spoiled the grandeur of the house—of building a park wall; and last, not least, of the new town and the houses that his friends are building there. A little hurry, he thinks, would not be out of place, for he is bent on making Richelieu, his own town, a centre of trade, of justice, of enlightenment, to all the western country.

Though almost incredible, it appears to be a fact that the Cardinal died in 1642 without ever having visited his new palace and little city of Richelieu. Various royal and distinguished guests, however, were entertained there in his lifetime by his niece or other representatives.

But Paris knew the Cardinal intimately well. His last eight years of life and work were chiefly spent at the Palais-Cardinal. From its completion, in the winter of 1633-4, he lived there in almost royal splendour. Though the exterior may have suffered from jealousy in high places, the apartments were far more gorgeous, more heavily luxurious, than those at Richelieu—which must have possessed, from descriptions, a kind of cool beauty and delicate grace suited to the tender lines and colouring of Poitou. At the Palais-Cardinal, the windows were glazed with “large squares of crystal mounted in silver.” Rooms, halls, staircases, galleries, cabinets, were a blaze of colour; there were ceilings all gold, with allegorical pictures in mosaic, to the Cardinal’s glory. The walls were hung with pictures by the greatest artists, French and Italian; there was a gallery of famous men, some of the portraits painted by Philippe de Champagne, others by Simon Vouet. The furniture throughout was magnificent, and the art treasures of every kind represented the work of collectors all over Europe. The gardens, in those early days, were charming in their formal beauty; lawns and clipped box hedges, a mosaic of flowers, long alleys of trees, and a high terrace with a famous iron-work balustrade which was destroyed in 1786 by the bad taste of the Duc de Chartres, then possessor of the palace.

The Cardinal’s household was large, and devoted to him; whatever his character at Court and abroad, at home he was neither an ogre nor a sphinx, but a hard-working, autocratic, fiery, not ungenerous gentleman. His chaplains and almoners could bear witness to his widespread charity, ranging from the sick and poor in the streets of Paris to peasants ruined by war, and from colleges and hospitals to small forgotten convents which found themselves supplied, by his orders, with bread and meat they had no money to buy.

VILLE DE RICHELIEU

FROM AN OLD PRINT

The Cardinal’s household included at least five-and-twenty pages of noble birth, who received the same training in arms, horsemanship, mathematics, and dancing as if they had belonged to Royalty. A number of “gentlemen of condition” waited on him constantly and dined at his second table; the first was reserved for himself—when well enough to be there—and for his intimate friends, relations, and special guests. He had five hard-worked private secretaries, clerical and lay: the Prieur des Roches, Charpentier, Chéré, Mulot, Rossignol; his private physician, M. Citoys, often served him in the same way. Among his State secretaries and special agents, who directed, as we know, an army of spies at home and abroad, Père Joseph and his Capuchin clerks held the first place. “Ezéchiéli,” as the Cardinal called him, had his offices in the palace, and visited His Eminence by day and by night.

The Bouthilliers, father and son, with M. de Noyers, were among his most confidential counsellors and fellow-workers; and in more private fashion Laffemas, head of the Paris police and known as “le bourreau du Cardinal,” brought him the evil report of his enemies. In later years Mazarin became his trusted diplomatic agent and chosen successor. The Cardinal de la Valette, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the Marquis de Brézé, the Marquis de la Meilleraye—these two being created by him Marshals of France—may be described as his aides-de-camp; and beyond all these buzzed a crowd of political pamphleteers and other writers in the Cardinal’s pay; conspicuous among them Renaudot—founder under him of the Gazette de France, the first approach to a modern newspaper—Corneille the poet, and various members of the young Academy.

The Cardinal was fond of music, and his band of twelve instruments attended him everywhere. But what really made his train “august and majestic,” says Aubery, was the strong force of guards always present for his defence. The King had added two hundred musketeers and a company of gendarmes to the hundred horse originally granted him, and these troops were quartered in and around his palace, being on duty by turns, as if attending on Royalty.

The officers of the guard were not always lucky enough to please His Eminence. This is a characteristic story:

“He had said one day to Saint-Georges, his captain of the guard, that he wished to walk after dinner in his gallery at the Palais-Cardinal and would see no one there; nevertheless, entering with M. de Noyers, he found two Capuchins. After giving them a favourable audience, and finishing his business with M. de Noyers, he scolded his captain of the guard for disobeying his orders, and treated him to hard words, telling him plainly that he would be obeyed, and that if he ever committed such a fault again, he would not come off so cheaply.

“The gentleman, furious at such disgrace, and believing that he could not remain in the service with honour, took leave to retire, without farewell, to some inn in the Rue St. Honoré. So that M. le Cardinal, seeing him no more, asked for news of him; and learning what had happened, begged the Commander de la Porte to go and find him and bring him back. But the Commander failing to do so, His Eminence charged M. de la Meilleraye to go in his turn, and to bring him back by any means in his power. Which at last he did, after trouble enough in persuading him. So that His Eminence, seeing him enter the room, went five or six steps to meet him, and embracing him with much kindness, said: ‘Saint-Georges, we were both very hasty; but if you are like me, you will never think of it again. God forbid that my hastiness should ruin the fortunes of a gentleman such as you: on the contrary, I will do you all the good I can.’”

After which one does not wonder that the Cardinal’s own people liked him.

His constant ill-health, with the weight of State affairs, made a regular life necessary to him. He went to bed at eleven, but after three or four hours of restless sleep he was generally to be found sitting up in his room, his worn face bent over portfolio or writing-table, his thin hand and active brain guiding the politics of Europe. Thus he would work from candlelight to dawn, writing and dictating, till fatigue obliged him to lie down and sleep again. But he was up before eight and working with his secretaries; then, when dressed, he received the King’s other Ministers; then heard mass, which he celebrated himself on great festivals; and then, before the mid-day dinner, gave audience in the garden to any one who wished to see him. After dinner he talked with his friends and guests till it was necessary to visit the King, to receive ambassadors and great men, to attend in public to important affairs of State. It was not till evening that he allowed himself any real quiet and recreation. Then we may see him strolling again in the garden, playing with his favourite cats, listening to music, laughing with the few familiars, such as the lively Abbé de Boisrobert, whose privilege it was to amuse him; and so, with private prayers that lasted half an hour, ended his days at the Palais-Cardinal.

He was always, of course, unpopular at Court and in society; not only because he was feared and mistrusted, but owing to an air of pedantry and affectation which was unpleasing to everybody and especially so to women; yet he particularly liked to make himself agreeable to them. When all the fables of his love-affairs are cleared away, this characteristic trait remains. He despised women, but he was ready to bid pretty high, sometimes, for their confidence and admiration. Several times, for instance, Madame de Chevreuse escaped with the punishment of temporary exile for plots and treasons which would have cost a man his head. The Cardinal would have been glad to stand high in her favour, as well as in that of her royal mistress. As their hatred grew with years, so did his hardness and severity, till the Duchess, leaving Queen Anne in danger and disgrace, fled finally to Spain.

His niece, with whom he was on the most intimate, affectionate terms, seems to have been the only woman who really cared for Cardinal de Richelieu. For her he planned various great marriages in France and Lorraine, all of which came to nothing. He gave her the Petit-Luxembourg when he moved to his new palace, but she still overlooked his housekeeping and was the leading figure in his entertainments. Society realized her power, and treated her with considerable reverence, though it laughed behind her back and told many malicious stories. As a fact, Madame de Combalet—created Duchesse d’Aiguillon in 1638—filled a difficult position well; strengthening it by friendships with distinguished women such as the Princesse de Condé and Mademoiselle d’Angennes, the famous Julie of the poets, the star of her mother’s salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The Marquis de Rambouillet has been already mentioned as a steady friend of Cardinal de Richelieu, and though His Eminence was not to be seen at Madame de Rambouillet’s assemblies—the centre of civilising influence long before his noonday of power—he took a keen and partly sympathetic interest in all that went on there. His brilliant intelligence could not fail to recognise the great work done for society by “the divine Arthénice” in her blue drawing-room, where savage manners were softened and refined, military roughness was smoothed, coarse gossip discouraged; some touch of culture and literary taste being made a passport to the hostess’s favour. It seems certain that political intrigue found no place at the Hôtel de Rambouillet; but it is characteristic of Richelieu’s nervous, suspicious mind that he was not convinced of this. The long flirtation carried on by his friend the Cardinal de la Valette with the Princesse de Condé, both of them constant guests there, caused him some anxiety, and the story goes that he sent Père Joseph to Madame de Rambouillet with promises of advancement for her husband if she would keep him informed of the “intrigues” of these two. The Marquise replied: “I do not believe, Father, that Madame la Princesse and M. le Cardinal de la Valette have any intrigues; but if they have, I should not be the person to act as a spy!” It seems that Cardinal de la Valette, who was clever and witty, did indulge in the dangerous pleasure of laughing at Richelieu’s pedantries, and with Madame de Rambouillet herself, “in whom he had entire confidence,” and who enjoyed the joke.

Richelieu’s keenness of intellect and political intuition were not matched by the delicate wit and lightness of touch that are usually a Frenchman’s birthright. He was rather fond of making jokes, but they were often heavy, if not grim, and better calculated to amuse himself than his hearers. Mademoiselle de Gournay had experience of this. She was a clever literary woman in a time when such women were rare. Montaigne adopted her as a daughter, and by his wish she published an edition of his works after his death, with a preface of her own. This was in 1595. At the height of Richelieu’s fame she was an old and eccentric woman, living in Paris, known as the author of L’Ombre, a poetical work full of ancient and far-fetched words and high-flown sentiments. The fashionable young poets and literary men of Paris found pleasure in teasing and ridiculing Mademoiselle de Gournay.

In 1635 she edited a new edition of Montaigne, which she dedicated to Cardinal de Richelieu. She was invited to an audience at the Palais-Cardinal. Richelieu paid her the necessary compliments, but in obsolete words which he had carefully chosen out of L’Ombre. He was highly pleased with himself, and his attendants were choking with laughter. But Mademoiselle de Gournay was an aristocrat. Not for nothing was she bien demoiselle, as Tallemant says. “Elle avoit vu le beau monde.”

“‘You are laughing at the poor old woman,’ she said. ‘Laugh, great genius, laugh: it is right that every one should contribute to your diversion.’”

The Eminentissime was ashamed of himself, and asked her pardon. Afterwards he pensioned her handsomely, and not only her, but her old servant Mademoiselle Jamyn and her favourite cat Piaillon, not forgetting Piaillon’s kittens. The Abbé de Boisrobert, Mademoiselle de Gournay’s good friend, brought these claims irresistibly before a lover of cats.

At the height of favour as jester, verse-maker and confidential gossip, Boisrobert was a fount of honours and pensions at the Palais-Cardinal. Poor poets and other literary men were the special objects of his care. He was a clever busybody who went everywhere and knew every one of the scribblers in verse and prose, social, political, theological, classical, dramatic, or of more trifling kind, who had drifted up mostly from the provinces into Parisian garrets and hung about the hôtels of the great, depending on patronage for their daily bread. It was among these scattered units of varied birth and talent, all belonging to “the republic of letters,” that the French Academy began to exist, and Boisrobert has the right to be called one of its founders.

His character of favourite and of universal patron, as well as his literary skill, admitted him to weekly meetings of a few chosen spirits in the Marais, at the house of Valentin Conrart, bourgeois, Protestant, and man of letters. Boisrobert’s position at the Palais-Cardinal made it natural that he should carry the report of these meetings direct to Richelieu. The Minister was not altogether pleased. He disliked private assemblies; too often, in his experience, they meant conspiracy, and he would gladly have made them illegal.

The arguments of Boisrobert, if they did not quite reassure the Cardinal, suggested to him a means of utilising these literary meetings to the advantage of the State and of the French language. He proposed to Conrart and his friends, through Boisrobert, that they should become a public body with letters-patent, bound by its own statutes and holding its assemblies under royal authority, with the object of purifying and regularising the language and literature of France. The men of letters struggled a little, for liberty was sweet. But they soon submitted, and the Forty Immortals took their place among those French institutions which have survived the old world in which they were born.

As long as Richelieu lived the Academy worked under his presiding authority. He encouraged no frivolity, no discussion of trifles, but insisted on hard, steady work. The great Dictionary, first planned by the poet Chapelain, was seriously begun in 1634 and carried on by the most methodical among the new academicians, some of whom were considerably laughed at by the free literary world outside. They were, in fact, slaves to a Minister who, besides having an unfounded faith in his own taste, was a critic swayed by reasons extra-literary: one need hardly mention that the Academy, under Richelieu, snubbed Corneille and condemned Le Cid, too Spanish and too independent to please His Eminence.

The slavery was profitable: places and pensions made life liveable for the wiser academicians of Richelieu’s day—whose survivors were described by La Bruyère as “vieux corbeaux,” croaking as their master had taught them. And they grew to love their chains, while pouring flattery at the great man’s feet. Guillaume Colletet, more drunkard than poet, composed a rondeau which was presented by Boisrobert to the Cardinal:

“Au grand Armand je vous invite à boire!

Trinquer pour lui, c’est œuvre méritoire.

C’est le support du Parnasse françois;

C’est l’Appollon qui verse quelquefois

Ses rayons d’or jusque dans nostre armoire.

Si sa vertu veut qu’on chante sa gloire,

Sa santé veut qu’on en fasse mémoire

Et que l’on crie, à table, à haute voix:

Au grand Armand!

N’y boire pas, c’est avoir l’âme noire.

Donc, pour blanchir la nostre comme yvoire,

Roys des esprits, beuvez comme des Roys!

Bacchus viendra couronner vos exploits

Et Boisrobert en contera l’histoire

Au grand Armand!”

It is to the honour of Pierre Corneille that he did not, till many years later, find a place among these “roys des esprits.” The Cardinal had been disappointed in him. Before the Academy existed he was one of five poetical secretaries who were employed by His Eminence to arrange his own original ideas in poetry and drama. The other four were Boisrobert, l’Estoile, Colletet, and Rotrou. It seems that Corneille was too honest for his place; his criticism too frank and his opinion too positive. He was soon dismissed, the Cardinal finding that he lacked “esprit de suite”; which may be translated as the gift of following blindly wherever his patron chose to lead.

Richelieu had a passion for plays and ballets, and employed a troup of actors of his own. They were the third company in Paris, the others belonging to the Théâtre des Marais and the Hôtel de Bourgogne. There were two theatres at the Palais-Cardinal, and the smaller was generally used for the comedies, dances, and other entertainments constantly attended by their Majesties and the Court. Here were performed pieces arranged by the Cardinal’s own authors: Les Tuileries and L’Aveugle de Smyrne, dull comedies magnificently staged; livelier pieces such as Clorise, by Baro, a very popular play-writer; other fashionable plays; ballets in which young Royalties danced—Mademoiselle, Gaston’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Longueville, Mademoiselle de Vendôme, the Duc d’Enghien; his future wife Mademoiselle de Maillé-Brézé, and other nieces and cousins of the Cardinal. These gay fantastic ballets, even more than regular plays, were the delight of society, young and old. All the courtiers and great ladies joined in them; Louis XIII. himself often composed both the words and the music of lutes, spinets, violins, and forgot his gloomy stiffness in dancing.

In the intervals of the performances the Cardinal’s guests enjoyed rare fruits and dainty sweetmeats, handed round by his pages in baskets tied with English ribbons of gold and silver tissue. When comedy and dance were over the company was offered a gorgeous supper on the great service of plate which the Cardinal left to the King.

The entertainments at the Palais-Cardinal reached their zenith in January 1641, with the representation of Mirame. Richelieu, to quote a contemporary, “témoigna des tendresses de père pour cette pièce”; and it seems actually to have been in great part his work, in collaboration with the academician Desmarets. The larger of his two theatres, holding three thousand persons, was used for the first time and decorated with special magnificence. It was rather a vast saloon than a theatre, with gilded galleries for the most distinguished guests; the ordinary admiring crowd finding place on the floor. His Eminence, happy and triumphant, was near the Queen: the Abbé de Marolles, once a timid student, now a critical spectator, describes him as dressed in a long mantle of flame-coloured taffeta over a black soutane, with collar and facings of ermine.

The scenery of the play, with the new machinery which astonished all eyes, had been ordered from Italy by Cardinal Mazarin, now a familiar figure in Paris and Richelieu’s right hand. There was a long perspective of palaces and gardens, with terraces, grottos, fountains, statues, all looking out over the sea, “with agitations,” says the Gazette, “which seemed natural to the waves of that vast element, and two large fleets, one appearing two leagues distant, both of which passed in sight of the spectators.”

Over this lovely scene night gradually fell, and all was lit up by the moon. Then, just as naturally, day dawned and the sun rose, taking his turn in this “agréable tromperie.”

The majority of the guests were amazed and transported beyond measure. A few critics, among whom was the Abbé de Marolles, did not particularly care for all this “fine machinery and grand perspective.” He found it fatiguing to the eyes and the mind: in his opinion a comedy should depend for success on story, poetry, and fine acting. “Le reste n’est qu’un embarras inutile.”

There were other more malicious critics who saw in the story of the play—the love of Princess Mirame, daughter of the King of Bithynia, for the daring sailor Arimant, commanding the fleet of Colchos, with all the tragical events which at last brought about a happy ending—a veiled allusion to the old romance of Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham. It is very improbable, to say the least, that Richelieu, who had at this time ceased to persecute the Queen, should choose to offend her afresh by stirring up grievances fifteen years old. His object, never indeed attained, was to live at peace among princes and nobles who had learnt their lesson. What really annoyed him in connection with this performance of Mirame was the discovery by his watchful enemies of various disreputable persons among the invited guests. The King was displeased; Monsieur enjoyed the incident; and the Cardinal could only revenge himself on an unlucky official who had been too free with his cards of admittance.

In spite of fault-finders Mirame was a triumph. Standing up in his place, the Cardinal joyfully acknowledged the constant thunders of applause, then waving his hand for silence, that none of his fine lines might be missed. When the play was over, and the Queen had passed on a golden bridge drawn by peacocks to a silver throne prepared for her beyond the lifted curtain of the stage, to preside over a grand ball that ended the evening, there was no prouder man in Europe than her host—the weary, sickly statesman who had already given provinces to France and made her paramount in Italy and Spain.

CHAPTER IX
1633-1637

Conquests in Lorraine—The return of Monsieur—The fate of Puylaurens—France involved in the Thirty Years’ War—Last adventures of the Duc de Rohan—Defeat, invasion, and panic—The turn of the tide—Narrow escape of the Cardinal—The flight of the Princes.

From the year 1630, Richelieu had employed historians and antiquaries in hunting up documents to justify his plans for the greater glory of France. Amazing were the pretensions that these learned persons encouraged him to make for his King. According to them, Louis XIII. might claim sovereign rights over England, Spain, Milan, Naples, and Sicily, not to mention Flanders, Artois, Franche-Comté, Lorraine, and other frontier provinces. How far Richelieu’s dreams of conquest really extended, it is difficult to say. But the year 1633 found him resolved at least, in his own words, to “re-establish the monarchy in its original greatness” by asserting “the ancient rights of the Crown”; and Duke Charles of Lorraine soon gave him his desired opportunity of annexing a large part of the old Austrasian province.

Relying on imperial support and on his sister’s marriage with the heir-presumptive of France, the Duke had broken treaties and had neglected to pay homage for his French fief, the duchy of Bar. In the summer of 1633 the Parliament of Paris was directed by Richelieu to declare that duchy confiscated to France. In August a French army, led by the King and the Cardinal, marched once more upon the frontier of Lorraine.

The Duke tried to gain time, hoping for the help of a Spanish army under the Duke of Feria, which was advancing from Italy. He sent his brother, Cardinal Nicolas-François, to negotiate with the French, offering not only to consent to the dissolution of his sister’s marriage, but that the Cardinal, who had taken only minor orders, should ally himself with Richelieu by marrying Madame de Combalet. This proposal was coolly put aside by Richelieu, who observed that he had not advised the King to enter Lorraine with a powerful army for his private family ends. He insisted that Nancy, the capital, with Princess Marguerite in person, should be placed in the King’s hands as a pledge of submission.

As to his sister, Duke Charles was willing enough, being painfully aware that the alliance with Gaston was a mistake which might ruin him; but he would not consent to surrender his capital, protesting, with oaths, that he would rather burn it down. Nevertheless, the city did not stand a long siege; but when Louis XIII. and Richelieu made their entry, their promised captive had escaped. By the help of her brother the Cardinal, and with great spirit and courage on her own part, Madame Marguerite had slipped out of Nancy at the beginning of the blockade, and in a page’s disguise had joined her husband at Brussels. There she was formally received as Duchess of Orléans by the Queen-mother and the Infanta, and the marriage was confirmed by the Archbishop of Malines.

Richelieu was not altogether displeased. Well convinced of his power to separate Monsieur from his new wife as soon as the Prince himself should return to France and his duty, he was not sorry to have an honourable excuse for going to extremes with the Duke of Lorraine. No hostage, no capital. Duke Charles was helpless; his sister was no longer in his hands; his Spanish allies, checked on their way by a Protestant army, failed to come to his aid. He had to see a parliament established in Metz and almost the whole of his province garrisoned by French troops. When the King returned to Paris the lilies of France were flying over Lorraine. Town after town submitted, fortress after fortress. In January 1634 Charles abdicated for the time in favour of his brother the Cardinal, and with the small remains of his army took service under the Emperor.

Then Cardinal de Richelieu bent all his energies to forcing on Gaston’s return to France and reconciliation with his brother. He regarded this as a necessity of State, and he was equally resolved that the Queen-mother, who had made some overtures on her own account, should never again set foot in France. Both Marie and Gaston, while quarrelling between themselves, played the Minister’s game by their own foolishness. A murderer, caught at Metz, was suspected with reason of being sent from Brussels by Chanteloube, Marie’s unwise counsellor, to attempt the life of Richelieu: he lost his own. The same fate befell others, in Lorraine and elsewhere, charged with the same designs; and while this secret campaign went on, Gaston and his favourite Puylaurens made an independent treaty with Spain, promising to invade France with a foreign army to be supplied by the Imperial generals in the Low Countries.

Well served by spies, Richelieu knew all this. He replied to Monsieur’s treason by representing to the King that such a prince, who could promise French fortresses to the enemy, was not fit to wear the crown; and with a bold decision before which, at such a crisis, not even the hereditary monarchy was sacred, he proposed a league of nobles and princes of the blood who should pledge themselves, in case of Louis’ death, against the unconditional succession of his brother. France after all, in the eyes of Richelieu, was greater than her kings.

By the autumn of 1634 Puylaurens and his master knew that they had made a huge mistake in allying themselves with Spain. No troops were forthcoming, and it began to be evident that the prospect was not one of triumph and revenge, but of ruin and perpetual exile. All through September M. de Puylaurens was negotiating secretly with Cardinal de Richelieu, promising for Monsieur, among other things, the renunciation of his marriage, and also making a good bargain for himself.

Gaston left Brussels one day in October, and galloped hard to the frontier. He had been an exile for two years, and was enchanted to see France again. His little daughter, Mademoiselle, now seven years old, met him at Limours, and flew joyfully into the arms of a gay and fascinating father.

As to Madame, left behind in Flanders, her marriage was solemnly declared null and void by an assembly of French clergy, as having been contracted against the civil law. In this decision, however, the clergy acted on Gallican lines, independently of the Pope, who was of a different opinion; and although, after long resistance, Monsieur formally submitted, he had protected himself in advance by a letter to Urban VIII. refusing to be bound by any extorted promise. The consequence was, that Richelieu’s apparent triumph in this affair of the Lorraine marriage only lasted his life. Gaston and Marguerite remained faithful to each other; and the stiff Madame who reigned in after years at Blois and at the Luxembourg was the same Princess, the heroine, in her adventurous girlhood, of a secret marriage and a romantic escape.

It was that private letter of Gaston’s to the Pope which brought about the ruin of the unlucky Puylaurens. He had gained high favour with Richelieu, who had purchased his faithful service, as he thought, by making him a duke and a peer of France and by marrying him to his own first cousin, Mademoiselle Philippe de Pontchâteau, younger daughter of his aunt, Louise du Plessis, his father’s sister. The marriage took place in Paris at the end of November 1634, and on the same day the Duc de la Valette, son of the Duc d’Épernon and widower of Henry IV.’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Verneuil, was married to the elder sister, Marie de Pontchâteau, and the Comte, afterwards Maréchal, de Guiche to another cousin, Mademoiselle du Plessis de Chivray. The Cardinal celebrated the triple wedding by a magnificent fête. At this time the first nobles in France found it politic to quarrel for the honour of his alliance, and it was matter of general talk in society that he meant to marry Monsieur to Madame de Combalet, the Lorraine marriage being set aside. This report even reached the ears of Monsieur’s little daughter, and filled her with just indignation.

A few weeks after the wedding the Cardinal’s spies brought him not only the secret, well kept by Puylaurens, of Monsieur’s letter to Rome, but proofs of a fresh treasonable correspondence carried on by the new Duke with Spain. Swiftly fell Richelieu’s vengeance. Puylaurens, with several of his friends, was arrested at the Louvre on February 14, and carried off by royal order to Vincennes. The entreaties of Monsieur, newly reconciled at Court, delayed his trial, but he died after four months of prison. “His good fortune,” says Richelieu, “withdrew him from this world, and saved him from the infamy of a shameful death, which he could not have escaped.”

Whether the fatal atmosphere of the dungeons of Vincennes was assisted by poison of a more active kind, will never be known. That suspicion hung about the deaths of many of the Cardinal’s prisoners. Richelieu consoled the young widow of Puylaurens by marrying her to the Comte d’Harcourt, of the House of Lorraine, younger brother of the Duc d’Elbeuf, a queer personage, but a fine soldier. He had fought a successful duel with Bouteville, in itself a distinction. He proved himself worthy of the Cardinal’s favour by serving His Eminence faithfully for the rest of his life.

But for Richelieu, the Thirty Years’ War might have ended with the death of Wallenstein and the imperial victories which followed it. Even the Protestant princes of Germany were ready for a compromise with the Emperor. But Richelieu had no intention of accepting a general peace which would leave his Swedish friends weak and dissatisfied, his own conquests incomplete, Spain and Austria easily predominant in Italy and the Low Countries. He resolved that France, as an ally of Sweden, Holland, and the German Protestants, should now take an active part in the war, and he prepared for the actual declaration by a treaty with the Dutch for the partition of the Spanish Netherlands, to be followed by one with the Dukes of Savoy, Parma, and Mantua, for the conquest and division of the Milanese.

In May 1635, after some military provocation on the part of Spain, Louis XIII. sent his herald-at-arms to Brussels—a noble Gascon, Jean Gratiollet, Captain of Abbeville—and solemnly declared war against his brother-in-law, Philip IV., while publicly inviting the Low Countries to rebel against Spain. “Europe was amazed,” says a modern French writer, “to see Richelieu suddenly take up arms for those same Huguenots whom he had crushed with such good will at La Rochelle.”

Europe was amazed: and what of the French nation, flung unconsulted into the struggle with Catholic Europe which might easily have become a fight for its own existence? The three Estates of the realm had each its own separate point of view. The princes and nobles loved war; but the majority, Catholic and hating Richelieu, were rebels at heart. However, each man had his orders: content or malcontent, each governor found himself dispatched to his own province, each commander to his post, while generals dashed hither and thither in pursuit of armies which had to be hired, recruited, disciplined, poured in half-a-dozen directions over the frontier—Germany, Flanders, Lorraine, Switzerland, Italy. Richelieu, the directing brain, at this moment of high energy, moved the members even against their will.

To most of the clergy, again, the war was of the nature of sacrilege; and still more so, later on, the demand of an enormous payment of arrears for lands held under the Crown, which had been suffered to go free for nearly a hundred years. But at a time when the taxes of France had rolled up to more than a hundred million francs a year, a gigantic and as yet unheard-of sum, Richelieu could no longer grant the clergy the privilege of paying no tax but their prayers, which he had himself claimed for them at the States-General of 1613.

“The people give their goods, the nobles their blood, the clergy their prayers.” As ever, the patience of the most heavily taxed seemed almost inexhaustible; and it was not till France was deeply engaged in the war, her middle class and her peasantry crushed by Richelieu’s intendants and financiers under burdens every week more enormous, that in the south and the north populations made some effort to save themselves; made it by rioting, their only resource, and found themselves—Croquants in Guienne, Va-nu-pieds in Normandy—in a last state worse than the first.

In spite of all these discontents there were ways in which Frenchmen now realized the national unity which was Richelieu’s dream. The famous leader, Duke Henry de Rohan, was again in arms, not now as a Huguenot chief, but commanding an army against the Duke of Lorraine, fighting for his duchy with imperial troops behind him. In the spring of 1635, it was to Rohan that Richelieu committed the task of preparing for his designs on Milan by a new occupation of the Valtelline, thus once more playing the old game of blocking the chief military road between Austria and Spain. All went well at first, the Duke proving himself a loyal subject and a good general. The cause that finally discomfited him and drove him at last to throw up his command and to retire to Geneva was the failure of Richelieu’s government to pay a promised indemnity to the Grisons, rightful possessors of the valley, who after two years’ French occupation, secretly encouraged by Spain, rebelled suddenly against Rohan and insisted on the evacuation of their territory. Blamed by Richelieu for a failure which was no fault of his, and broken by severe illness, the Huguenot hero was still ready to bear arms for France. In the spring of 1638 he volunteered to serve under Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar—the great soldier who, if actually fighting for his own hand, nevertheless gave Alsace to France—and died of his wounds after the siege of Rheinfeld, having lived long enough to know with what swift brilliance Bernard had turned defeat into victory.

For many months, as readers of history know, the fortune of war went against Richelieu. The ravages of the French and the Dutch armies in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange and the Marshals de Châtillon and de Brézé, did not incline the population to change masters. In Germany, one town after another fell into imperialist hands, and it was only with difficulty that the French held their own in Lorraine. The invasion of the Milanese failed; and later on the deaths of the Dukes of Savoy and of Mantua deprived France of two important allies.

The French fleet, though making a fine show for those days—forty-seven men-of-war—wasted its strength in vainly flourishing about the coast; and owing to the quarrels of its commanders, the Comte d’Harcourt and the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with M. de Vitry, governor of Provence—the slayer of Concini—did not for a long time succeed in even recovering the Isles of Lérins, seized by Spain at the opening of the war.

And then, in July 1636, a terrible disaster threatened France. Imperial troops crossed the frontier, and had taken two strong places in Picardy, La Capelle and Le Catelet, before the French commanders were ready to oppose them. Imperial cavalry crossed the Somme and advanced to the Oise, the Comte de Soissons retreating before them, and spread a very natural terror throughout the country. They were mostly Croats and Hungarians, fierce and savage men, whose road was marked by robbery, fire, and slaughter. Their leader was the Bavarian, John of Werth, a name of fear in the campaigns of his day.

Paris was in a state of terror and fury. The black shadows of the streets, in the sweltering heat of late July and early August, were loud with raging men and women, whose voices taught the Cardinal-Duc his unpopularity. Paris was ill fortified, ill defended, and part of her strong old walls had been destroyed by him for the sake of his Palais-Cardinal. They cried against him because of that; because of his ingratitude to the Queen-mother, his failure, so far, in the war he had undertaken, his alliance with heretics. And Richelieu knew that their fear, if not their hatred, was too well justified. The Comte de Soissons, whose army, camping in the forests and holding the fords of the Oise, protected Paris, was not above suspicion as to his loyalty; the Duc de Chaulnes, governor of Picardy, was lazy and negligent; money and men were lacking for the defence of a divided, discontented, panic-stricken country.

The first news of the invasion found the King and the Cardinal absent from Paris as usual in the heat of summer. They returned at once to the stifling, frantic city.

Then “the great Armand” showed the stuff he was made of. “Remember, I pray you,” he wrote to the Comte de Soissons, “on such occasions as these, moments are worth years.” Paris being always and before all things a Catholic city, he appealed to her religion. All the bishops in the kingdom were commanded to hold processions within and without their cathedrals, with the special devotions of the Forty Hours. From every church in Paris and in the whole of France, with every chapel of convent or monastery, the bells clanged out, calling the faithful to pray for their country. In his own person, the Cardinal vowed to the Paris convent of the Filles du Calvaire, in the Marais, Père Joseph’s favourite foundation, a large sum of money and a silver lamp to burn perpetually before Our Lady’s altar.

Whatever his own personal faith may have been, he knew the spiritual needs of the people. That he did not fear their angry voices he proved by driving alone, “at a foot’s pace, without suite and without guards,” through the wild crowds in the streets, from the Palais-Cardinal to the Hôtel de Ville, bearing the royal order that the city trades and companies should assemble for the purpose of giving their help to the King. His courage triumphed. The people, says Montglat, “dared not say a word to him.”

Royal decrees followed thick and fast; their succession was like the sending round of the Fiery Cross, summoning men to serve their country. Those Parisians who had planned to escape John of Werth and his pillaging horde by flying with all their movable goods to Orléans or some other city of the west, found the gates of Paris shut against them. All privileges and exemptions were abolished in the city. All men capable of bearing arms were ordered to present themselves for enrolment, either at the Hôtel de Ville, where the old Maréchal de la Force sat on the steps to receive them, or mounted and armed at Saint-Denis. All the workshops of Paris were closed; all building stopped; no master of a trade, excepting bakers, butchers, armourers, gun-makers, saddlers, and the like, might keep more than one apprentice; the rest, with masons, stone-cutters, carpenters, artisans of every sort, must serve the King. From each owner of a coach, a horse was demanded; and every house in Paris was expected to furnish a man with belt and sword. The peasants of the surrounding villages were set to work on new fortifications at Saint-Denis.

A day sufficed to change terror into enthusiasm. On August 5 representatives of all the trade guilds and syndicates were received by Louis XIII. in the great gallery of the Louvre, “and offered him their persons and their goods with so great gaiety and affection, that most of them embraced and kissed his knees.” Louis rose to the occasion and kissed them all, not excepting the chief of the cobblers, whose guild made the noble gift of 5,000 francs. The Parliament—not without grudging conditions—the municipality, the colleges, monasteries, and other bodies, poured money at the King’s feet: there was enough to pay and keep, for three months at least, twelve thousand foot and three thousand horse.

In the meanwhile, the news that the enemy had taken Corbie on the Somme, thus drawing alarmingly near to Amiens, on the direct road to Paris, fanned the flame so fiercely that “tout le jeune bourgeois,” says Montglat, “à toute force, vouloit aller à la guerre.” Not many days later, the King and the Cardinal advanced to Amiens, and a strong army, commanded by Monsieur and the Comte de Soissons, held the enemy in effectual check along the banks of the Somme. By the middle of September, all the actual danger of invasion was past, though the Imperialists still held Corbie. John of Werth and his merry men, loaded with booty, had galloped back across the frontier of Artois.

Corbie was not retaken till November, but the Cardinal Infant, his aunt’s successor as ruler of the Netherlands, with the other Spanish and Imperialist generals, discouraged by the advance of the French army, had already withdrawn from French territory; and it seemed, as the autumn advanced, as if the fortune of war was changing in Richelieu’s favour. The enemy was repulsed everywhere: in Burgundy, by Weimar, Condé, and the Cardinal de la Valette; on the Spanish frontier, where St. Jean de Luz was taken, but further advance was resisted by the old Duc d’Épernon and the Comte de Grammont, governors of Guyenne and of Béarn; on the Morbihan coast, where a Spanish force, disembarking near Vannes, attacked the Abbey of Prières. The sturdy monks defended themselves so gallantly that the country-side had time to rise against the invaders, who fled back in disorder to their ships.

At this moment of danger, the two young men whom Richelieu had called to the command of the King’s armies were busily plotting his destruction. To them and their like the death of the Minister and the anarchy that must follow were not only desirable for their own ends, but the best medicines for the ills of France.

Monsieur and the Comte de Soissons were seldom friends, except when they joined hands against Richelieu, and it happened that at this time each was nursing special grievances: Monsieur, as to his forbidden marriage and the death of Puylaurens; Soissons, because the Cardinal had dared to offer him his niece in marriage, had refused him the command of the army in Alsace, and more recently had shown distrust by setting Monsieur over him as Commander-in-Chief of the army on the Oise. There were not wanting faithful friends who pointed out to both princes that now was the moment to revenge themselves. The army was theirs; the Cardinal was at Amiens; the King, staying at the Château de Demuin, a few miles away, rode constantly into the city to hold council with his Ministers. It was natural that the princes in command of the army should attend the council. The rest was easily thought out, with the help of M. de Montrésor, a follower of Monsieur, M. de Saint-Ibal, in M. le Comte’s confidence, and two “solid men,” Varicarville and Bardouville. These six conspirators fixed a day on which the Cardinal should be stabbed to death after the King had left the council.

All went well for their purpose. On the appointed day, “the council being ended, the King went away with all his guards, and the Cardinal remained alone in the courtyard with Monsieur and the Comte de Soissons. Immediately,” writes the Marquis de Montglat, “Varicarville, who knew the secret, stationed himself behind the Cardinal, expecting the signal which Monsieur was to give, while Saint-Ibal and Bardouville took their stand, one on the right, the other on the left. But instead of commanding that the projected deed should be done, Monsieur, seized with fear, remounted the staircase without a word; while Montrésor, surprised at the change, followed him, telling him that his enemy was in his power, and that he had only to speak.”

It was not the first time that Richelieu had owed his life to Gaston’s temperament. So éperdu was the Prince, so utterly had his nerve failed him, that he could only mutter something about “another time,” and escaped as quickly as possible, leaving the Comte de Soissons, “dans la dernière confusion,” face to face with Richelieu. Unaware of his danger, and the King’s brother having disappeared, the Cardinal bade his other enemy farewell and retired to his lodging. The fingers of Saint-Ibal, Varicarville, Bardouville, relaxed on their dagger-hilts, and one may imagine that these three gentlemen stared rather blankly on each other as their doomed victim walked away.

When the story became known, which was not immediately, many persons blamed the Comte de Soissons that he had not made up for Monsieur’s weakness by finishing the affair. “He excused himself,” says Montglat, “by the respect he owed Monsieur, so that he dared undertake nothing in his presence without his command.” He was too wise to act alone in such a matter: the position of Gaston’s cat’s-paw, to be disclaimed and forsaken and left to the King’s justice, was not attractive. The army might rally round the heir to the throne in sudden rebellion; the Comte de Soissons was not equally secure.

Three days later there was another chance, for Richelieu visited the camp; but he was attended by his own guards, and the assassination was “judged impossible.” On this occasion a whisper of the plot reached his ears, and with his usual fearlessness he spoke of it to the Comte de Soissons, haughtily reprimanding him.

The princes were frightened, for their plots had gone beyond the death of Richelieu. They had disloyally done their best to delay the relief of Corbie; they had attempted to draw the Duc d’Épernon into the project of a rising, already favoured by the Duc de Bouillon and others, the object of which was to lay hold on the government, to reinstate the Queen-mother, and to make peace with Spain. They failed; the various successes of the autumn were against them; the Duc d’Épernon, though two of his sons were on their side, refused to listen to them. After the re-taking of Corbie, having returned from the army to Paris, they were seized with a great fear of the Cardinal. He was certain to know all; he was of a temper that never forgave; the Court, they felt assured, was not a safe place for them. They took counsel with each other and resolved to fly, at once, on a dark November night, while Paris was singing and rejoicing over the good news of victory.

Both princes, before leaving Paris, paid a separate visit to the Tuileries. There, under the care of M. de Montglat’s mother, Madame de Saint-Georges, lived Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Gaston’s daughter, now nine years old, a person of decided character, and one of Richelieu’s most hearty haters. The Comte de Soissons paid great court to this little lady, the richest heiress in France if not in Europe. Though four years older than her father and twenty-three years older than herself, and having failed ten years earlier to run away with her mother, he proposed to marry her, and Gaston was ready to consent. This plan was one of the links that now united them. Mademoiselle herself liked Monsieur le Comte, and accepted his compliments and sugar-plums with satisfaction: but at this time she did not understand his object.

It is doubtful if the royal consent would ever have been given to this marriage. But a curious little passage in the Cardinal’s own Memoirs shows how keenly he noticed every detail in the lives of the princes, and on what slight if sure grounds he accused them of conspiracy.

“The next day at evening, which was the night of the 19th to the 20th, Monsieur and he (M. le Comte) left Paris; and that it was plotted between them is shown by this: Monsieur having arrived in Paris, and visiting Mademoiselle his daughter, Madame de Saint-Georges told him that M. le Comte had but just gone out. He leaned his head against a chimney-piece, remained long thoughtful, then said, and repeated several times, ‘What! Monsieur le Comte is here? What! He has not gone to Champagne!’ Which showed plainly that there was a plot between them.”

Disguised and almost alone, the princes retired in different directions: Monsieur to his castle of Blois, the Comte de Soissons to neutral ground at Sedan, held by its sovereigns of the House of Bouillon for more than a hundred years. From these retreats they sent their demands and remonstrances to Louis XIII., while on the other hand they corresponded with the Queen-mother and with Spain.

Richelieu seems to have treated the discontents of the Comte de Soissons with some scorn. He allowed negotiations with him to drag on for some months, and then advised the King not only to forgive him, but to allow him to remain four years at Sedan unless he chose to return to the Court: a leniency for which the Cardinal has been blamed; dangerous to the State and fatal to Soissons himself.

As to Monsieur, a mixture of threats and entreaties, the advance of royal troops to Orléans, the clever management of M. de Chavigny, the Cardinal’s most trusted agent, soon brought about a change in his weathercock mind. He met the King at Orléans in February 1637, “with many demonstrations of friendship.” Indeed, “dissimulation went so far, that there appeared to be a sincere reconciliation between Monsieur and the Cardinal.”

CHAPTER X
1637-1639

Palace intrigues—Mademoiselle de Hautefort—Mademoiselle de la Fayette—The affair of the Val-de-Grâce—The birth of the Dauphin—The death of Père Joseph—Difficulties in the Church.

In Richelieu’s own mind his worst enemies were to be found among his nearest neighbours. “Les intrigues de cabinet,” says M. de Montglat, “donnèrent plus de peine au Cardinal de Richelieu que toute la guerre étrangère.” Not only mischievous great ladies like the Duchesse de Chevreuse, but every man or woman who had anything to do with the Court, were objects of his watchful suspicion, and to most of them, while they begged his favour and flocked to his entertainments, he seemed the cruel ogre, the mysterious sphinx, so long represented in history.

He never really trusted the King. Louis was fond of gossip, easily amused by small things, and often attracted by persons undesirable from Richelieu’s point of view. And even at his height of power he found it impossible to carry out the ideal arrangement which would have hindered any one not bound to his own service from approaching the King at times such as the petit coucher, when intimate talk was allowed, and men might even dare to tell a story against the Eminentissime himself. They would probably repent; for though Louis might laugh and enjoy such jokes, he had a way of repeating them to the Cardinal, if only with a half-childish notion of teasing him. The consequences to a chattering courtier might be serious.

The influence of these gentlemen with the King was seldom really dangerous, and yet the Cardinal was justified in his distrust, for the majority hated him, and he went about always with his life in his hand, not because of ambitious princes alone. Men’s consciences were no protection to him. For instance, the Abbé de Retz, afterwards Cardinal and Coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris, felt little doubt that he would have done a right action, socially and politically, had he carried out a plan for killing Richelieu in the chapel of the Tuileries, at the long-deferred christening of Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

Over and over again Richelieu tried to confine the King’s special favour to persons chosen by himself, and over and over again he failed. It was not so much that people played him false, as that he found them—men and women—too proud, too independent, and too faithful to their order for the place he meant them to fill—that of the King’s favourites and his own spies. There was Mademoiselle de Hautefort, with whom Louis fell in love when she was a beautiful girl of fifteen, brought to Court from her native province by her grandmother, Madame de la Flotte, and appointed one of the Queen-mother’s maids-of-honour. After the “Day of Dupes,” when Marie de Médicis left France and her household was broken up, Madame de la Flotte became lady-in-waiting to the young Queen in the place of Madame du Fargis, whom Richelieu sent into exile; and Mademoiselle de Hautefort, transferred at the same time, was specially recommended by Louis to his wife’s favour.

At first, very naturally, Queen Anne was not pleased. Marie de Hautefort was in every way a dazzling person. Madame de Motteville declares that she made a greater effect at Court than any other beauty. “Her eyes were blue, large, and full of fire; her teeth white and even; her complexion had the white and red suitable to a fair beauty.” Added to this, she had a sharp tongue; she was high-spirited, “railleuse,” and by no means soft-hearted.

Louis XIII.’s love-affairs contrast curiously with those of his father. Nothing could be more innocent, more purely platonic, than his devotion to Mademoiselle de Hautefort. He hardly dared approach her; his talk was of dogs and of birds; and yet he showed the stormy jealousy and the sulks and humours of a passionate lover, and spent hours in writing songs and music for his lady. She disputed with him freely and laughed at him unmercifully.

At the beginning Richelieu encouraged this singular affection. But after about three years he saw reason to change his mind. Mademoiselle de Hautefort was not inclined to act as his political agent, and she had soon given the loyalty of a warm and generous nature to her mistress, the Queen, whom she saw neglected by Louis and subject to the tyranny of the Cardinal. This is to say that the woman most admired by the King had joined the Spanish party at Court and was rightly counted by Richelieu among his enemies.

It cost him little trouble to drive Mademoiselle de Hautefort out of favour—at least for a time. When Louis had become slightly tired of his quarrels with the fair beauty and slightly chilled by her friendship with the Queen, it was made easy for him to find consolation in the dark eyes of Louise de la Fayette, a cousin of Père Joseph, whose family was supposed to be devoted to the Cardinal.

Mademoiselle de la Fayette was as good and gentle as she was lovely; in the varied records of the French Court there exists no sweeter figure. During two years she and the eccentric King adored each other with a tender affection and mutual confidence quite absent from the Hautefort affair; yet this, like the other, never passed the bounds of friendship. It went so far, however, that the girl’s conscience was alarmed, and she began to think of taking refuge in a convent.

The idea was not unwelcome to Cardinal de Richelieu. The Court was full of his spies, who warned him that Mademoiselle de la Fayette’s intimate talk with the King was not to his advantage; that she was inspired by Père Caussin, the royal confessor, to speak to Louis in favour of his mother, his wife, his brother, and all the other victims of a warlike, heretical policy; that she was encouraged by her uncle the Bishop of Limoges and her brother the Chevalier de la Fayette, to set him against the Cardinal; that the Bishop had even been heard to say, “When the Cardinal is ruined, we will do this and that. As for me, I shall inhabit the Hôtel de Richelieu.”

The Court was buzzing with intrigues all through 1636, the “year of Corbie,” while the King still enjoyed, as far as possible, the society of the only woman who had ever loved him for his own sake. Mademoiselle de la Fayette, torn between conscience and affection, was dragged one way and the other by two sets of advisers, each headed by a dignified ecclesiastic moved by reasons beyond mere anxiety for her welfare and that of the King. The Père Carré, Superior of the Dominicans in Paris and a favourite director of Court ladies, was one of Richelieu’s chief spies and most devoted servants. Mademoiselle de la Fayette came to him for counsel. He encouraged her scruples and blessed her vocation: “Il faisait parler Dieu,” says M. Cousin, “selon l’intérêt et au commandement de Richelieu.”

On the other hand Père Caussin, a Jesuit, and apparently an honest man, took advantage of his place as the King’s confessor to advise Mademoiselle de la Fayette to remain at Court. He saw no reason why Louis should be deprived of a perfectly innocent friendship for the sake of foolish scruples and a half-imaginary vocation. Such an opinion, if disinterested, would have been worthy of all respect; but at the French Court, divided between Richelieu’s spies and Richelieu’s enemies, this was almost impossible. The reasons that had moved Cardinal de Bérulle and the brothers Marillac, the grievances of the Queen-mother, of the Pope and of the princes, all found voice in Père Caussin. He was closely allied, too, with another distinguished Jesuit, Père Monot, the confessor of Christine, Duchess of Savoy, who was at this very time in Paris working against Richelieu in the interests of Spain. Considering all this, it is no great wonder that Père Caussin presently found himself disgraced and banished to Brittany, a harmless Jesuit of eighty years old being appointed royal confessor in his place. It seems that Richelieu did not wish to break the tradition which gave the care of the King’s conscience to that Order.

Tired of intrigue, pushed on by Père Carré and her own doubts, Louise de la Fayette entered the Convent of the Visitation in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in May 1637. For some months the King continued to visit her there, until Richelieu, whose influence had been a good deal shaken by her arguments, had regained his personal power, and Mademoiselle de Hautefort, still at Court, her old dominion.

The tragi-comedy known as “the Affair of the Val-de-Grâce,” which played itself out in the summer of 1637, proved that Richelieu’s star was still in the ascendant. The war with Spain had added fresh distress to Queen Anne’s position, so long a false and lonely one. The secret sympathy of half the Court and of all the malcontents in the kingdom did not compensate the Queen for the loss of her friends, exiled one by one as Richelieu came to suspect them, or for the entire separation from her own family and its allies in Austria, the Netherlands, and Lorraine. The Queen did not easily resign herself. In spite of espionnage, she wrote and sent letters to her brothers, the King of Spain and the Cardinal-Infant, as well as to Madame de Chevreuse, living in banishment at Tours. These letters were written in a refuge to which spies did not penetrate: the Benedictine Abbey of the Val-de-Grâce in the Faubourg St. Jacques. The Abbess, of Spanish origin, was a devoted servant of the Queen.

It is no insult to Richelieu’s patriotism to believe that he had never pounced on smaller game with equal satisfaction. The famous letters themselves, if we may believe Madame de Motteville, contained no actual treason against the King or the State; but they did contain “railleries” against the Cardinal, and in any case they were written to the enemies of France, and belonged to the political opposition so long irreconcilable, which he crushed more sternly every year he lived. We may think what we please about his more personal motives of spite and revenge: that he had made love to the Queen and that she had laughed at him seemed to the gossips of the time a sufficient explanation of everything. The Cardinal, they said, wished to send her back to Spain, to divorce her from the King, to marry him to Madame de Combalet! In the following year that much-talked-of lady was consoled for the loss of so many great matches by being created Duchesse d’Aiguillon in her own right. Her uncle paid an enormous sum of money for the title and the estates belonging to it.

The Queen’s troubles in the summer of 1637 began with the intercepting, by Richelieu’s people, of a letter in cypher which she had written to Madame de Chevreuse. The bearer, La Porte, her valet-de-chambre, was the person to whom she trusted all her secret correspondence. Suddenly thrown into the Bastille, examined first by Richelieu’s terrible agents and then by the Cardinal himself, threatened with torture and death, the faithful man refused to say one word that could incriminate his royal mistress. Even the Cardinal admired his fidelity.

It was in August, and the Court was at Chantilly. The Queen in her alarm first denied everything, solemnly and on oath; then thought it prudent to make some kind of confession. She sent for the Cardinal, who came accompanied by his two chief secretaries, M. de Chavigny and M. de Noyers. Madame de Sénecé, the mistress of her household, was in attendance on the Queen.

The Cardinal, according to himself, was respectful, fatherly, but severe. When the Queen began to assure him of the harmlessness of her letters, he said at once that he did not believe her, but promised her his own faithful service and the King’s forgiveness if she would confess everything. On this, Anne sent the witnesses out of the room and remained alone with Richelieu. We have only his word for what passed: that the Queen, speaking “with much displeasure and confusion,” confessed to a correspondence with Spain and with Flanders, carried on by secret means and in terms which might justly displease the King; that she exclaimed several times, “Quelle bonté faut-il que vous ayez, Monsieur le Cardinal!”; that she protested her eternal gratitude, saying, “Give me your hand,” while holding out her own, famous for its beauty; which the Cardinal respectfully refused to touch.

ANNE OF AUSTRIA, CONSORT OF LOUIS XIII

FROM A MINIATURE AT SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM

He made her write and sign her confession, and then caused the King to bestow a formal forgiveness, not sweetened by a list of requirements as to her future conduct. She was to visit no convents and to write no letters without the King’s permission, her maids and her ladies-in-waiting, especially “Fillandre, première femme de chambre,” who had charge of her writing-desk, being set as spies and gaolers over her. Not much wonder that the lively little niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, visiting Chantilly in that disturbed month of August, found the Queen in bed, ill with fear and worry.

For this was not the end of it. The Cardinal was dissatisfied, still suspecting concealment. La Porte in his prison was once more threatened with torture. A spy was sent to him—one of the Queen’s officers, gained over by Richelieu and Laffemas. He brought a supposed message from the Queen to La Porte, commanding him to tell all he knew. But if Anne’s enemies were clever and resourceful, so also were her friends. The romantic courage of Mademoiselle de Hautefort and of the Chevalier de Jars, himself confined in the Bastille, had found a way of conveying a letter to La Porte, warning him of the extent of the Queen’s confessions. He was thus prepared to tell the same story—all of which seems to justify Richelieu’s suspicion.

Madame de Motteville says that the remembrance of those summer weeks at Chantilly “faisoit horreur à la Reine.” She was within an ace of following her mother-in-law’s example in a flight from France. Mademoiselle de Hautefort and the Prince de Marcillac—afterwards Duc de la Rochefoucauld—were ready to ride off with her to Brussels. Her life at the Court had become unendurable. Richelieu brought forward the terrors of the law in the person of Chancellor Séguier, who not only examined the Queen “like a criminal,” but made a thorough search at the Abbey of the Val-de-Grâce, where her letters and papers were supposed to be hidden. Either because the Abbess was fearless and loyal, or because there was nothing to find, the Chancellor found no papers of a later date than 1630.

So the storm passed over. Richelieu could prove nothing; the King and Queen were reconciled; and the only consequence was a fresh exile for Madame de Chevreuse, who rode for her life from Tours and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.

Mademoiselle de Hautefort remained in favour for two more years; the Queen valued her friendship, and the King, after his final parting with Mademoiselle de la Fayette, had returned to his old love; she became a lady-in-waiting, with the title of Madame and other privileges. But Richelieu was still afraid of her. Rather cautiously and slowly, from 1637 till the end of 1639, he was working for her ruin. In the Queen’s very household he had a spy, long unsuspected and exceedingly clever at her odious trade, Mademoiselle de Chémerault, a young maid-of-honour, an intimate friend of Madame de Hautefort. From the most private interior of the Court, this girl reported every word and deed to a Madame Maline, who conveyed the information direct to Richelieu in letters which still exist, a mine of ancient gossip written in the curious jargon used by him in his secret notes. Everybody has a nickname: the Cardinal himself, in these notes, is sometimes Amadeo, sometimes l’Oracle; the King and Queen are Céphale and Procris; Madame de Hautefort is l’Aurore, Madame d’Aiguillon Vénus, Mademoiselle de la Fayette, la Délaissée, Mademoiselle de Chémerault herself, le bon Ange. These letters warned the Cardinal of all the loves and hatreds, the private and public discontents and desires, which moved the Queen and her friends, and kept him in touch with every detail of the stormy yet affectionate intercourse between Madame de Hautefort and the King. Her empire, if only intermittent, was dangerous; the more so, because she was known to be on friendly terms with the Comte de Soissons and with Monsieur.

Richelieu believed in “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Young Henry d’Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, was brought to Court by him with the definite object of distracting the King from the society of Madame de Hautefort. This plan being on the way to succeed, the Cardinal took advantage of one of the King’s journeys, when the lady was not there to plead her own cause, to accuse her of being as dangerous an intrigante as Madame de Chevreuse, adding that he could no longer endure this fighting in the dark, and that Louis must choose between Madame de Hautefort and himself. With some show of regret, the King yielded. Madame de Hautefort was banished from Court, and retired to her grandmother’s country estates. Four years later, when Richelieu and Louis XIII. were dead, she was recalled and honoured among the old friends who had been faithful to the Regent in adversity.

The Queen’s own troubles and humiliations came to an end in September 1638. On the 5th—Richelieu’s birthday and also the date on which he became Cardinal, Duke, and Peer—the long-wished-for Dauphin was born at Saint-Germain. All France rejoiced; the towns, especially Paris, held high festival, with singing of Te Deum, firing of cannon, ringing of bells, keeping open house for all comers. The Cardinal, who was in Picardy, wrote rapturous letters to the King and Queen.

“I hope and believe that God has given Monseigneur le Dauphin to Christendom to appease its troubles, and to bring to it the blessing of peace. I vow to him, from his birth, the same passionate devotion I have always had for the King and for your Majesty, whose faithful servant I am and shall be eternally....”

The Cardinal’s rejoicing was sincere. In the birth of the future Louis XIV. he rightly saw the triumph of his own policy as well as the saving of France from the danger, which the King’s weak health made imminent, of falling into the hands of Gaston d’Orléans and his crew. Two years later, in 1640, the birth of Philippe was an additional security.

But the joy of September 1638 was soon followed by one of the most real sorrows of Richelieu’s life. In December he lost Père Joseph, his adviser and shadow, the intimate friend of thirty years. Through all difficulties and changes the two men had worked together. Both were hard and pitiless politicians, driving at the same ends in Church and State. François du Tremblay, the monk, was the more imaginative, the more enthusiastic, and the less human of the two. He was not, like Richelieu, personally ambitious, and he lived the simple life of a friar, while his keen cleverness and ready, fearless resource made him the first of diplomatists. If he was eager for the Cardinal’s Hat steadily refused by Pope Urban VIII., it was because of the advantages this honour would have brought to his beloved Capuchin Order.

Père Joseph had been ill for some time at his convent in Paris when the Cardinal wrote to beg him to come to Rueil, offering to send his own litter that he might travel comfortably. This offer he accepted. Richelieu received him with much affection, and at first he seemed to rally: he dictated a circular letter to his congregation of the Filles du Calvaire, answered letters from missionaries in the East, and listened with pleasure to a book describing the exploits of Godefroy de Bouillon in the Holy Land; the spirit of a crusader was in him to the last. Another seizure brought him very near death, but he lingered till December 18, while Richelieu tried to cheer his “Ezéchiéli’s” failing ears with news of the victories by which France was now reaping the fruit of so much effort and suffering.

With great funeral pomp the Capuchin was borne back to Paris and buried in his convent church in the Rue St. Honoré, where for nearly a hundred and seventy years his stately Latin epitaph, composed by Cardinal de Richelieu, told the world how he had lived in the midst of splendour and riches, austere and poor. His bones lay beside those of the famous Père Ange, Duc de Joyeuse and Marshal of France. In 1804, when the already profaned church was pulled down and the Rue Mont-Thabor built over its site, their remains were removed to the cemetery of Montmartre.

Paris of the streets made her own epitaph for Père Joseph:

“Cy gît au chœur de cette Eglise

Sa petite Eminence grise,

Et quand au Seigneur il plaira

Son Eminence rouge y gira.”

The Cardinal’s Hat desired by Richelieu for his old friend was eventually given to Jules Mazarin, the clever Italian statesman who, originally an agent of the Vatican but now naturalised in France, had risen so high in Richelieu’s opinion that he appointed him in Père Joseph’s place one of his principal Secretaries of State.

Mazarin was in fact a peacemaker between Richelieu and the Pope, and his promotion to be Cardinal was really a sign of their reconciliation. The Church of France had been supported by Rome in resistance to the new laws and revived taxes and the many complicated exactions made upon her great possessions in aid of the war. The cry of sacrilege rose high; the archbishops and bishops were divided, the majority eager to resist a Minister whom they called “tyrant,” “apostate,” and other hard names, the minority ready to hail Cardinal de Richelieu as “the Head of the Gallican Church.” There was actually a talk of appointing him Patriarch. Why not? said the Jesuits, wisely respectful of the civil power. Books and violent pamphlets were written on both sides of the question.

The Pope refused to issue bulls for the appointment of French bishops so long as the French Government held on its present course. Richelieu was prepared to do without them. The King refused to receive the Nuncio, or to recognize his authority. The Pope absolutely refused to confirm Richelieu’s own election as Abbot-General of the Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré, or to countenance his project of advanced reform in his own Order of Cluny. A private quarrel in Rome made matters worse; one of the French Ambassador’s gentlemen was killed, and the ambassador’s wrath irritated the Pope into forbidding any funeral honours to be paid in Rome to Richelieu’s lieutenant, the soldier-Cardinal de la Valette, who died at Rivoli in the midst of his Savoyard campaign of 1639.

The quarrel was at last made up: for the French Church, as for the government, it was really a question of money, and both agreed to a compromise. Richelieu’s Finance Secretaries withdrew some part of their immense demands; the clergy, very unwillingly, granted the rest; Urban VIII. was appeased, and Mazarin became a Cardinal.

If Richelieu opposed the Pope, the friend of the Hapsburgs, and asserted the liberty of the Gallican Church in such matters, for instance, as the annulling of Monsieur’s marriage, he was neither unorthodox, nor unfriendly to different forms of religious effort. The great charities of the seventeenth century grew and flourished under his shadow. The spirit of St. François de Sales lived on in the Order of the Visitation, devoted to the sick and the poor. Vincent de Paul, with his Mission of Lazarist Fathers and his Sisters of Charity, bringing light into dark places and helping the miserable, both in Paris and in the deserts of the country, was a familiar and beautiful figure through most of Richelieu’s reign. Monsieur Vincent’s great Mission work, the training of the younger clergy, also nobly carried on by the congregations of the Oratory, of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet and of Saint-Sulpice, had lain very near Richelieu’s own heart in his young days.

The Cardinal extended his powerful protection to the teaching Orders, Jesuits, Ursulines, and others; and the reformed Benedictines of Saint-Maur, so famous for ecclesiastical and historical learning, owed their distinction largely to him. He did very much, indeed, towards the reform and discipline of the regular clergy, and with a longer life he might have removed many of the abuses which spoiled their religious ideal. But his chief and immediate object was to nationalize the Orders, and to bring them under the same authority with France as a whole.

“A central and supreme authority”; absolutism; obedience: these were the root-principles of Richelieu’s rule. He hated original, independent thought or action, in Church or State; it was of the nature of rebellion. Personal quite as much as political, this imperious, dominating temper was the chief secret of his triumph in matters where reason and equity have in the long run decided against him; for instance, the many cases in which he appointed his own judges and tribunals to try his prisoners, the slower and often fairer proceedings of the parliamentary law-courts being found unbearable by his impatient and positive mind.

The same dominating spirit explains Richelieu’s treatment of his old friend the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. He could be tolerant of Protestants: their private heresies mattered little, as long as their public conduct was loyal. But the advance of Jansenist opinions within the French Church was another thing. In the case of M. de Saint-Cyran, as strong-willed a personage as the Cardinal himself, it meant a very powerful spiritual influence not quite strictly orthodox, with a stiff morality and an independence of mind which judged and condemned much of the Cardinal’s own theory and practice. He did his best to win Saint-Cyran, whose learning and high character were of European fame. But bishoprics would not tempt the man who did not choose to range himself among the Cardinal’s slaves, who, though none too loyal to the Pope, declared openly that the Church could not annul Monsieur’s marriage, and who agreed with Jansenius in denouncing the alliance of France with heretics.

The great director and glory of Port-Royal was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1638, and remained there till after the death of Richelieu. The Eminentissime could not afford to tolerate a man the watchwords of whose spirit were independence, boldness, and truth. “He is more dangerous,” he said, “than half a dozen armies.”

CHAPTER XI
1639-1642

Victories abroad—The death of the Comte de Soissons—Social triumphs—Marriage of the Duc d’Enghien—The revolt against the taxes—The conspiracy of Cinq-Mars—The Cardinal’s dangerous illness—He makes his will—The ruin of his enemies—His return to Paris.

For the last three or four years of Cardinal de Richelieu’s life his figure stands out against a horizon glowing with the fires of victory.

After the death of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in 1639, Richelieu’s diplomacy transferred his army and his lieutenants to Louis XIII.’s service, and the conquest of Alsace for France was the consequence. The Comte de Guébriant, the brilliant soldier who succeeded Weimar in the command, carried the war into Germany, and by a series of victories, in conjunction with the Swedes, “made the Emperor tremble in Ratisbon.”

In the Spanish Netherlands, the Maréchal de la Meilleraye took Arras after a two months’ siege, and gave back to France the ancient province of Artois. In northern Italy the campaign was more troublesome. The princes of Savoy, the new Duke being a child, disputed the regency with their sister-in-law Christine of France, and allied themselves with Spain. Christine herself, influenced by Père Monot, had leanings towards the imperial side, and it was not till the Spaniards had swept over Piedmont and taken Turin and besieged Casale that she brought herself to turn for help to Richelieu. Even then, jealous for her son’s independence and her own, she would not consent to send him to France for education, much less to hand over his whole dominions to be occupied by her brother’s armies. Her obstinacy triumphed, for Richelieu withdrew his conditions and sent the Comte d’Harcourt to relieve Casale and retake Turin; operations which were brilliantly carried out. The Spaniards were driven out of the country; the Savoyard princes, finding the fortunes of war against them, submitted to the Duchess-regent, who returned victorious to her capital. France gained, besides a firm alliance with Savoy, a paramount position in North Italy.

Spain was in trouble by land and by sea. Her fleets were defeated and half destroyed by the French in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay, and by the Dutch, Richelieu’s allies, in the English Channel. The old province of Catalonia, with the frontier counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne, revolted against the burdens heaped on them by Olivarez and offered their allegiance to the King of France. French armies overran Roussillon, besieged Perpignan, and driving on over the mountains, fought side by side with the rebels in Catalonia. Before the death of Richelieu almost all the province was in French hands, and his brother-in-law, the Marquis de Brézé, had reigned for some months as Viceroy at Barcelona. It looked as though the south-eastern frontier of France would be extended, as in the days of Charlemagne, to the Ebro. The power of Spain was furthered handicapped by the revolt of Portugal. Encouraged by France, she claimed and seized her independence, recalled her old royal family of Braganza to the throne, and added one more to the active allies of Richelieu.

The tragic end of the Comte de Soissons was a more personal triumph for the Cardinal. Monsieur le Comte had spent his time at Sedan in weaving plots with the Duc de Bouillon and the wild Archbishop of Rheims, now Duc de Guise, while waiting for some turn of events that might restore his fortunes. In the summer of 1641 Richelieu decided to break up this nest of conspirators. He required the Duc de Bouillon to withdraw his hospitality, and ordered the Comte de Soissons to banish himself to Venice. Both refused. It was now open war between them and Richelieu. They tried, but failed, to draw Gaston d’Orléans into their quarrel; for once he was prudent in time. They published a manifesto, as usual declaring themselves loyal subjects of Louis XIII., moved solely by a patriotic desire to get rid of the tyrant Minister. “Pour le Roy, contre le Cardinal,” was the device on their banners.

They prepared to invade France with a small army of imperial troops, supported by Duke Charles of Lorraine, who was now prepared to break his last treaty with Richelieu. They were met by a royal army commanded by the brave but lethargic Coligny, Maréchal de Châtillon. He was rather seriously beaten by the rebels in the first and only engagement of the little campaign. But this news, which cost Richelieu a few hours of great wrath and anxiety, was followed immediately by other news which made it of no importance: “the bitter and the sweet,” His Eminence wrote to M. Bouthillier—“the sweet” being the death of Soissons, who was shot by an unknown hand in the confusion of that victorious skirmish through the woods of La Marfée, on the left bank of the Meuse.

Richelieu had a right to rejoice, for one of his trusted spies wrote to him: “If M. le Comte had not been killed, he would have been welcomed by the half of Paris ... so says every one ... and that all France would have joined him, because of the sol au livre and the other vexations laid upon the people, who are very malcontent.”

The revolt died with Soissons, for neither Bouillon nor Guise bore a name to be followed far. Bouillon submitted and was pardoned; Guise fled to Brussels, and did not return till the days of the “bonne Régence.” The Cardinal persuaded Louis—with difficulty, they say—not to wreak his vengeance on the Prince’s dead body, but to restore him to his mother. Some time afterwards His Eminence paid a visit of condolence to Madame la Comtesse. “Elle étoit sur son lict, et ne respondit aux complimens que par ses larmes.”

The death of Louis de Bourbon freed Richelieu not only from a political and personal enemy, but from one of the proudest of the princes who scorned the lofty social claims of himself and his family. These reached their highest point in 1641. His uncle, Amador de la Porte, was Grand Prior of France, and enjoyed several rich governments. His pious and eccentric brother, Alphonse, was Archbishop of Lyons, Primate of Gaul, and Cardinal. Richelieu could not make a statesman of this worthy ecclesiastic, but those who failed to treat him with the honour due to a great prince of the Church found themselves in disgrace. The Cardinal’s first cousin, Charles de la Porte, Marquis de la Meilleraye, was a Marshal of France, Grand Master of the Artillery with his residence at the Arsenal, and a Knight of the Order. One of the Cardinal’s favourite commanders, he distinguished himself in many campaigns, and, though a good man in the main, was said to have enriched himself from the public finances. He afterwards succeeded Richelieu as Governor of Brittany.

The Cardinal did his best to pour honours on the families of his two sisters, Françoise and Nicole. Madame de Combalet, now Duchesse d’Aiguillon and all-powerful with her uncle, had one brother, François de Vignerot, Marquis du Pont-de-Courlay, who ruined himself in spite of splendid appointments and earned terrible scoldings from the Cardinal, who paid his debts and as far as possible disinherited him. It was his eldest son, Armand Jean, born in 1629, whom the Cardinal adopted as heir to his name, arms, and titles, and the greater part of his possessions. This boy took the name of Du Plessis, and succeeded to the duchy, peerage, and estates of Richelieu. The title of Marquis de Richelieu passed to the younger brother, Jean Baptiste Amador de Vignerot, and his descendants succeeded in time to the duchy of Aiguillon, left by Madame d’Aiguillon to her niece, her brother’s only daughter, Mademoiselle d’Agénois.

The Marquis de Maillé-Brézé, whose unhappy wife died in 1635, accepted enormous benefits from his brother-in-law without much show of thanks. In Richelieu’s last years he held some of the highest military commands in the kingdom, and was too clever and capable not to acquit himself well, though with airs of ennui and fits of temper. His children did not inherit his intelligence. His son, Armand Jean, Duc de Fronsac, failed to distinguish himself in the navy; his daughter, Claire Clémence, a dull little girl with a touch of the heroic, hardly seemed equal to her fate—that of linking the family of Richelieu with the blood royal of France.

The brilliant matches made by the Cardinal’s cousins, Mesdemoiselles de Pontchâteau and others, had already proved that, as Montglat says, “the greatest were happy and honoured to be allied with him.” Among these “greatest” was the first prince of the blood, the Prince de Condé. He had been Richelieu’s faithful and rather servile follower ever since their reconciliation in 1626, being shrewd enough to see that this was the path to wealth and power. So early as 1633, when Mademoiselle de Brézé was only five years old, he had proposed a marriage between her and his son Louis, Duc d’Enghien, and the Cardinal had accepted the offer. In 1641 the marriage was celebrated in Paris with great magnificence. The bridegroom was sulky and unwilling: already, at twenty, he was a fighting hero, a man of the world, and desperately in love with Mademoiselle du Vigean. To him his childish little wife was profoundly uninteresting. But the match gave keen pleasure to Cardinal de Richelieu; and the Prince de Condé proved his satisfaction by offering to marry his daughter, Mademoiselle de Bourbon (the famous Duchesse de Longueville), to young Armand de Maillé-Brézé. The Cardinal replied, according to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, with dignity and good sense: “Qu’il vouloit bien donner des demoiselles à des princes, et non pas des gentilhommes à des princesses.”

PORTE DE CHÂTELLERAULT: RICHELIEU

But there was the other side of the shield. There were dark shadows behind the victories and social triumphs which lifted France and her great Minister so high in Europe. During Richelieu’s last years his armies were sometimes forced to other work than that of fighting Imperialists. The provincial government of France had become, in many quarters, little but a hard and extortionate system of tax-collecting, and the richest districts naturally fared the worst. When Bullion, Bouthillier’s colleague in the management of the finances, wrote despairingly in the autumn of 1639 to Chavigny, “Nous sommes maintenant au fond du pot,” and added his fear that foreign war might bring about civil war, the great fertile province of Normandy, ruined by injustice, tyranny, and enormous taxation, was actually in open rebellion; the “Va-nu-pieds” were marching in bands over the country, murdering tax-gatherers, destroying Government property, while even the tradespeople of Rouen and Caen rose and burned the houses and bureaux of the royal officers and killed them and their servants in the streets.

Richelieu wrote very sharply to his financiers on their mismanagement and ill-judged severity. As to the Normandy affair, they must remedy that “by prudence and skill,” as best they could: no troops could be spared to help them. However, His Eminence had to yield to necessity, and Colonel de Gassion, with 6,000 men, marched into Normandy, occupied Caen and Rouen, put hundreds of peasants to the sword, hanged or sent to the galleys hundreds more, while those who escaped fled the country. The whole population was disarmed; the Norman Parliament ceased for the time to exist, and the province had to pay a heavy indemnity besides all the arrears of the taxes it had refused, which were reimposed in the fullest rigour. The towns were deprived of all their liberties and privileges, their municipal courts being suspended; for two years Normandy was governed by a Royal Commission, and lay in deep disgrace under a kind of martial law. All this was an example—extreme, certainly—of Richelieu’s domestic government, the wrong side of his glory.

The Norman revolt worried him terribly; the more so as he knew that it was instigated by his enemies; not Spain alone, but England, hindered by internal troubles from taking an open part in the war. Richelieu had indeed earned little gratitude from Charles I. His creation of a navy, his colonising and trading policy, had for years made France a dangerous rival to England in home and foreign seas, and of late his far-seeing statesmanship, by encouraging the rebel party in Scotland, had helped to bias the King in favour of his mother-in-law’s quarrel. Marie de Médicis was an honoured guest at the English Court for nearly three years, from 1638 to 1641.

This old friend and enemy of the Cardinal did not survive him. She died, poor and miserable, at Cologne, in the summer of 1642: her children reigning in all Christendom, she had not an inch of earth to call her own. The Cardinal, lying ill at Tarascon, caused a solemn service to be held in her memory.

Another deepening shadow on his last years was the state of his health. In addition to the old ills of frequent fever and headache, he now suffered from painful and distressing complaints which kept him constantly in the hands of physician or surgeon; and the consequences were much depression, irritability, and suspiciousness, with increased hardness and severity to those who offended him, so that great and small feared him more than ever and loved him less. In this condition of mind and body he entered on the year 1642, during which he was to encounter his last conspiracy, to suffer his last doubts of the King’s trust and favour, and triumphantly to end his career.

Already, in the autumn and winter of 1641, there was mortal enmity between Richelieu and the young favourite he had given to Louis XIII. The success of Cinq-Mars was complete: the King could not pass a day without him; he was Grand Equerry, cut a splendid figure at Court, was popular and gay, made love to great ladies, dreamed of marrying Princess Marie de Gonzague and climbing to the highest rank in the kingdom. If the friendship of the King had stormy episodes which might have warned a less vain and confident courtier against putting his trust in princes, there were also times when Louis was ready to listen with grim enjoyment and even with sympathy to the young man’s rash talk against the Cardinal. Richelieu had not found in Cinq-Mars the tool he expected, and revenged himself sharply by word and deed. He treated “M. le Grand” with scornful anger as an impertinent boy, laughed at his social ambitions and barred his access to the royal Council.

Cinq-Mars swore vengeance; his talk was of “poniards and pistols.” He had been a secret ally of the Sedan conspirators; now, with a few confederates, among whom were his intimate friends M. de Fontrailles and M. de Thou, he began seriously to plot the destruction of the Cardinal. The first idea was simply assassination; but the dangers were obvious, and François de Thou had a troublesome conscience. They widened their plan into a political conspiracy, including Monsieur, the lately pardoned Duc de Bouillon, and the Spanish government. De Thou shrank also from high treason, but he was not the man to betray his friends; he had been injured in his career by Richelieu, and also, private reasons apart, regarded him as “the oppressor of France and the perturbator of Europe.” His hope seems to have been that Louis himself might be induced by his favourite’s strong influence to dismiss his Minister.

If this ever seemed probable, it was in the early days of 1642. The King and the Cardinal were both ill when they left Paris for Roussillon, the Spanish campaign being in full swing. They travelled separately, the royal party a day in advance; the Cardinal’s suite was so large that the same night’s lodging was seldom enough for both, and the progress was slow. Leaving Paris in January, they reached Narbonne in the second week of March.

Cinq-Mars had not wasted his time. He had gone so far, they say, with the bored, discontented King, as to suggest not only the Cardinal’s disgrace, but his murder. Louis listened, says Aubery, with horror; yet he neither warned the Cardinal nor took any steps to defend him. He wrote to him indeed in the first days of March, when the weary journey was nearly over, “songés seulement à vostre persone”; but this might naturally refer to Richelieu’s health, which was growing worse every day. The King saw no real danger, probably, in the irresponsible chatter of M. le Grand. He was half amused; he was often very impatient of his Minister’s domineering temper, and not unwilling to use his favourite as a safety-valve. In that there was nothing new; but all the history shows that the King leaned on the Cardinal’s genius, trusted him, if he did not love him, and had too much good sense ever seriously to think of depriving the kingdom of his services.

Cinq-Mars was discouraged, at least as to the violent death he proposed for the Cardinal. Not only was the King a little cold, for his favour was beginning to wane, but Monsieur and the Duc de Bouillon, on whose presence and help he had counted, were prudently careful to keep at a distance. He placed all his hopes, therefore, on the secret treaty with Spain, which was actually brought to him at Narbonne. Fontrailles, disguised as a Capuchin friar, had carried it to Madrid for the signature of Olivarez. In it the King of Spain promised an army of 17,000 men and a large sum of money to Monsieur, the Duc de Bouillon, and Cinq-Mars, who were to command this force under the Emperor and to hold Sedan in his name while Spain invaded France. All the French conquests of the last four years were to be restored, and the work of Richelieu entirely undone. The precious document was sent to Monsieur for his signature, which he, with newly developed caution, was in no hurry to give. Richelieu had offered the command in North Italy to the third chief conspirator, Bouillon. His brother, the Vicomte de Turenne, always of stainless loyalty, was fighting in Roussillon with the Maréchal de la Meilleraye and the young Duc d’Enghien.

The King passed on to the siege of Perpignan, leaving the Cardinal seriously ill at Narbonne. His sufferings at this time, both of mind and body, were very great, and may be traced through the letters which, day by day, he dictated and sent to M. de Noyers, his Secretary for War, in attendance on the King. Louis was himself far from well, but the Cardinal’s constant, eager inquiries, during this enforced separation, betray anxieties beyond the matter of health; for Cinq-Mars was always at his post, and if Richelieu knew nothing yet of the Spanish treaty, he suspected everything as to his enemy’s personal designs. The thought of these, and the agony of clinging to that power which, in the last resort, depended on the favour of the King, were worse to the strong spirit than days and nights of pain caused by cruel sores and barbarous remedies.

Early in May he writes from Narbonne: “Unluckily, though the surgeons say I am better, they cannot lift me from one bed to another without extraordinary pain”; and three days later: “As I thought to be entering the haven, a new tempest has driven me far away.” A fresh abscess had appeared on his already crippled right arm. “To console me, they talk of playing with knives again, on which I shall find it hard to resolve, having neither strength nor courage enough. I pray God to grant me these, that I may conform to His will.” Two days later: “I suffered extraordinary pain last night.... They have decided to make an opening in the bend of the arm. But they fear they may cut the vein. I am in the hand of God. I would I had finished my testament, but I cannot do it without you, and you cannot move till Perpignan is taken.”

The slight ease given by the operation lasted only a few days, more abscesses forming; and it seems that the Cardinal thought himself a dying man. M. de Noyers having arrived at his pressing summons, Pierre Falconis, notary-royal of the town of Narbonne, was employed to write out that remarkable will of seventeen sheets which shows his mind at its clearest and strongest. Madame d’Aiguillon and M. de Noyers were his executors, and among the witnesses were Cardinal Mazarin and Hardouin de Péréfixe, his chamberlain, afterwards Archbishop of Paris. Falconis attested that “mondit seigneur le Cardinal-Duc” was unable, owing to the state of his right arm, himself to sign his testament.

The end was not yet. The doctors advised a move from the marshes and stagnant lakes of Narbonne to the healthier air of Provence and the Rhône. Any ordinary conveyance was impossible for the Cardinal’s pain-racked body. He travelled in his bed, carried by eighteen men in an immense litter hung with crimson and gold. So large, we are told, was the “machine,” that gateways had to be widened, doors and windows taken out, walls pulled down, at the many stopping-places on His Eminence’s journey. He was overtaken by bad news: the Maréchal de Guiche had been defeated by the Spaniards near Cambray, and for a few days there was great alarm in the north of France, with new outcries against the Cardinal; his enemies were even mad enough to accuse him of having arranged the defeat in order to prove himself still necessary to France. If this absurd report reached him, his already troubled mind was soothed by a letter from the King, brought to him at Arles by M. de Chavigny: “Je finiroy en vous asseurant que quelque faux bruit qu’on fasse courre je vous ayme plus que jamais et qu’il y a trop longtemps que nous sommes ensemble pour nous jamais séparer ce que je veux bien que tout le monde sache.”

Richelieu’s reply to that letter was to send the King, by the hand of Chavigny, a copy or rough sketch of his brother’s secret treaty with Spain.

By what means that copy reached him has been one of the secrets of history. Among many guesses, Michelet favours the story that Queen Anne, aware of the treaty, took this means of making her peace with the Cardinal. But it seems more likely, on the whole, that Richelieu’s own spies at the Court of Madrid had made the discovery. In any case it meant for him a final triumph.

At first the King was irresolute. Ill from the heat, he had returned to Narbonne from the camp at Perpignan, leaving the siege to his officers. Though he knew Cinq-Mars to be a traitor, he did not at once arrest him, half hoping, perhaps, that the “pauvre diable” might save his life by escaping over the frontier. Fontrailles had already done so, but Cinq-Mars, proud, foolhardy, confident in his master’s affection, followed him to Narbonne. Urgent letters to the King from the Cardinal decided his fate. When too late he hid himself in a house at Narbonne; the mistress had pity on his curly head, but her hard-hearted husband denounced him; the royal guards seized him and conveyed him to the castle of Montpellier. De Thou, the least guilty of all and the first to be taken, was sent to Tarascon, where Richelieu had already arrived. The Duc de Bouillon, arrested at Casale, was brought back to France and imprisoned at Lyons in the old castle of Pierre-Encise, which in those days still dominated the city.

The King’s illness disinclined him to linger in the south, either for the conquest of Roussillon or for the trial of traitors. On the very day of his favourite’s arrest he left Narbonne for Fontainebleau, and stopped at Tarascon for an interview with the Cardinal. Both were so ill that Louis was carried on a bed into his Minister’s room, and there, side by side, the rulers of France, neither of whom had a year to live, discussed the Spanish treaty and its authors. Louis gave them up, without conditions, to the vengeance of Richelieu. He, assured of the King’s eternal faith and affection, forgot bodily pain in mental triumph, and was ready to take up, with all his old energy, the full regal power and authority with which he found himself suddenly invested. This extended not only to the punishment of State criminals, but to the Spanish campaign and the whole government of the south.

It seems that Bouillon and Cinq-Mars had a legal loophole of escape. They appeared in the actual treaty only as “deux seigneurs de qualité,” their names, with that of Sedan, being added in a secret memorandum; Monsieur and His Catholic Majesty of Spain were the only two persons openly mentioned. The fate of his fellow-conspirators therefore depended largely on Monsieur; and they, knowing this, may well have despaired.

He was at Blois, “faisant le malade,” when the news of the arrest of Cinq-Mars reached him. As a first precaution, he burned the original treaty. Then, finding that all was known, he sent the Abbé de la Rivière to Richelieu with letters of confession and grovelling entreaties for pardon. Richelieu told the messenger that his master deserved death, and might think himself fortunate if he escaped with confiscation and banishment. He had no longer the saving quality of being heir to the throne of France. He was terribly frightened. The Cardinal, with great show of severity, insisted that he should renounce for ever all “charges and administrations” in the kingdom, and should retire for the present, on a pension, to Annecy in Savoy, after being confronted at Lyons with his captive confederates. This trial the King spared him; but he had to save himself by signing a declaration that Messieurs de Bouillon and de Cinq-Mars were in fact the two “seigneurs de qualité” to whom the Spanish treaty referred.

Cinq-Mars and de Thou were brought to their trial at Lyons. Rumour and gossip seem to have coloured too highly the dramatic situation so often painted and described. According to the story believed by Madame de Motteville, M. de Montglat, and society generally, both prisoners were conveyed by river, the boat in which they travelled being towed by the great barge on which the Cardinal had embarked in his gorgeous litter. As a fact, it was de Thou alone who made part of this spectacle of vindictive triumph, Cinq-Mars being fetched by a troop of horse from Montpellier. The voyage against the swift waters of the Rhone was long and slow. On each bank a squadron of the Cardinal’s guards kept pace with the boats. They left Tarascon on August 17, and did not reach Lyons till September 3, when de Thou, with Cinq-Mars, joined the Duc de Bouillon in the castle of Pierre-Encise.

Their trial began immediately; and for Cinq-Mars the verdict was certain, even had not the jury been partly composed of Richelieu’s own commissioners, notably that Laubardemont who had for years been a name of terror to his enemies. Chancellor Séguier, with a touch of humanity, tried to save François de Thou: this gallant gentleman was plainly guiltless of any active conspiracy. But there were old private grudges in his case, and Richelieu’s state of mind and body made any hope of mercy vain. Laubardemont, acting for him, brought up an old law of Louis XI. which punished with death those who knew of a plot without revealing it. This law had seldom been carried out in full severity, but its existence was enough to condemn the man who had been a too faithful friend, and de Thou shared Cinq-Mars’ sentence. The Duc de Bouillon saved his head by resigning his strong fortress of Sedan to the King—“who much desired it,” says Montglat, “because it was situated on the river Meuse, and served as a retreat for all the malcontent.”

The sentence, pronounced on September 12, was carried out that same day in the square of the Hôtel de Ville at Lyons. Many writers have described the heroic calmness with which the two young men met their death and the universal pity and mourning throughout society. M. de Montglat expresses the feeling of his order. “Thus died M. le Grand, aged twenty-two years, handsome, well-made, generous, liberal, and having all the parts of an honnête homme, had he not been ungrateful to his benefactor, and had he shown more judgment in his conduct. As to M. de Thou, he was beloved of every one: he was indeed a man of great merit, regretted by the whole Court, where many believed that he was condemned without reason.”

Three days before the execution Perpignan opened its gates to the French, and Cardinal de Richelieu, who left Lyons for Paris as soon as the trial was over, wrote from his first stage to M. de Chavigny: “These three words are to tell you that Perpignan is in the King’s hands and that M. le Grand and M. de Thou are in the other world, where I pray God they may be happy.”

Louis XIII., we are told, received the news of his old favourite’s death with equal heartlessness—“remembering no more the friendship he had borne him and without any feeling of compassion.”

Travelling in his great “machine,” the Cardinal made his slow journey chiefly by canals and rivers. October was advanced when he slept the last night at Fontainebleau, embarked on the Seine, landed in Paris, and was borne on to his retreat at Rueil, the Court being at Saint-Germain.

It was a triumphal return; his enemies were fallen; and from every side news of fresh victories came to greet the dying Minister who had given France her new place among the nations.

CHAPTER XII
1642

The Cardinal’s last days—Renewed illness—His death and funeral—His legacies—The feeling in France—The Church of the Sorbonne.

In the first days after Cardinal de Richelieu’s return from the south, few persons, certainly not himself, realized that his career was so near its end. The doctors, however, knew what they were doing when they healed the wounds in his arm; his chief surgeon remonstrated, but to no purpose, for the Cardinal would have it done. “He has dealt himself a mortal blow,” the surgeon said to a friend.

For the moment, infirm as he was, he took a new hold on life. During those autumn weeks at Rueil he was eager, imperious, restless, suspicious, ever planning for the future, in case he should survive the King; strangely haughty, irritable, and nervous, insisting that his armed guards should attend him everywhere, even in the royal presence. Louis XIII., himself too ill and depressed to enjoy his hunting as usual, was pestered by Chavigny and de Noyers with messages from the Eminentissime, insisting on the disgrace of four of his best-liked officers—among whom was M. de Troisville, or Tréville, the famous captain of musketeers—whose only crime was that they had formerly been friends of Cinq-Mars, and that Richelieu feared their hatred and their influence. The King resisted long, but at last, by sheer angry obstinacy, the Cardinal gained his point, and the four gentlemen were dismissed from the Court, though not from the army; the King showing “great displeasure, even to shedding of tears.”

In November His Eminence moved from Rueil to the Palais-Cardinal, and there, still magnificent though gloomy of spirit and too ill to be actually present, he entertained the Court with the performance of an “heroic comedy” called Europe, partly his own, partly the work of Desmarets. Here were celebrated the victories of France over Germany, Spain, and her own internal disloyalties, as well as her triumphs in art, commerce, and luxury. In truth, the piece was a glorification of the ministry of Armand de Richelieu.

It was not long before Nature took her revenge and justified the doctors. “On Friday, November 28, 1642, in the night,” says Aubery, “the Cardinal-Duc was attacked by a great pain in his side with fever. On Sunday, the pain and fever having much augmented, it was found necessary to bleed him twice, and the Duchesse d’Aiguillon and the Maréchaux de Brézé and de la Meilleraye decided to sleep at the Palais-Cardinal.” On Monday morning the Cardinal was better; but in the afternoon and night he became so much worse, with difficulty of breathing, that the doctors bled him again. On Tuesday the King ordered special prayers in all the Paris churches, and came himself from Saint-Germain to visit his dying Minister. Whether sorry or glad, who knows! At this supreme hour, as all through Richelieu’s career, there are contradictory accounts of the relations between the two men. Aubery’s dignified narrative shows us a gracious and sympathetic King, handing nourishment to the invalid, listening with sorrowful attention to the last counsels of the statesman who had led him and France so far, and who now, while reminding His Majesty of his past services and recommending his family and friends to his care, was chiefly concerned that Monsieur should have no share, now or ever, in the government, and that Cardinal Mazarin, the fittest of all the present Ministers, should take up the burden which must be laid down. For it was plain to Richelieu himself, as well as to King, friends, and physicians, that he had not many hours to live.

Louis did more than listen to the Cardinal’s dying prayers and counsels; he respected them. But gossips and memoir-writers agree that he left the Palais-Cardinal “fort gai,” laughing and joking with the Cardinal’s relations and admiring the splendours of the great house which now, by his will, was to become royal property.

When the King was gone, Richelieu asked his physicians how long he had to live. They replied evasively—they could not tell; there was no cause to despair, and so forth. Then he called for M. Chicot, the King’s physician, and told him to answer truly, not as doctor, but as friend. Chicot gave him twenty-four hours. “C’est parler, cela!” said Richelieu, and sent for the Curé of Saint-Eustache, his parish church, to receive his confession and to administer the last Sacraments.

“Treat me as the meanest of your parishioners,” he said to the priest; and the crowd in his room could hear, through their own sobs, the voice of their master repeating Pater and Credo, joining in prayers, declaring his faith in God and the Church, answering to the question whether he forgave his enemies: “I have had no enemies but those of the State.” It was a bold assertion from the lips of such a man, and the Bishop of Lisieux, standing by, was startled by the confident words. But one may very well imagine that Armand de Richelieu believed it of himself.

On Wednesday the doctors, having bled him again, the pain and fever growing steadily worse, made their bows and retired; they could do no more. A country quack was then allowed to try his skill: many such, probably, haunted the gates of the palace; but this man, Le Fèvre by name, had some friend at Court who admitted him to the sick-room, and the Cardinal did not refuse his remedies. At first they seemed successful. Soothing draughts and opium pills lulled the sharp pain, and when the King, who had remained at the Louvre, paid his second visit in the afternoon, the Cardinal appeared slightly better. The gossips say that Louis departed “less joyful.”

A quiet night brought so calm a morning—Thursday, December 4, 1642—that the Cardinal’s own people began to rejoice in the hope of his recovery; and if the doctors, knowing better, shook their heads, M. Le Fèvre had his moment of triumph. But the patient himself was not deceived.

Those to whom he gave audience in the course of that morning—gentlemen sent by the Queen and Monsieur—listened to the words of a dying man. Only on his death-bed assuredly would Richelieu have humbly begged Anne’s pardon for any causes of grievance which, “in the course of our lives,” she might have had against him.

“A little before noon,” says Aubery, “he felt extraordinarily weak, and perceiving thus that his end infallibly drew near, he said, with a tranquil countenance, to the Duchesse d’Aiguillon: ‘My niece, I am very ill; I am going to die; I pray you to leave me. Your tenderness affects me. Do not suffer the pain of seeing me die.’”

She, the person he had loved best, left him unwillingly and in tears, and his confessor was instantly called to say the prayers for the dying. A few minutes of unconsciousness, then two heavy sighs, and Cardinal de Richelieu was dead.

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He was only fifty-seven; but the worn face, wasted body and whitened hair were those of a much older man. The Parisians came in immense crowds to look on him as he lay in state at the Palais-Cardinal, where the royal guards, even before he was dead, had replaced his own. He lay on a bed of brocade in his magnificent Cardinal’s robes and cap, with the ducal coronet and mantle at his feet. The captain of his guards, M. de Bar, sat in deep mourning at his right hand; and on either side, by the light of many tall wax tapers in great silver candlesticks, a double choir of monks intoned psalms perpetually.

TOMB OF CARDINAL DE RICHELIEU
IN THE CHURCH OF THE SORBONNE

On the evening of December 13 “the body of the Cardinal-Duc was transported from his palace to the Church of the Sorbonne on a magnificent car, covered with a great pall of black velvet crossed with white satin and enriched with the arms of His Eminence, embroidered in gold and silver—the six horses which drew it entirely covered with drapery of the same—surrounded by his pages, each holding a large candle of white wax, preceded and followed by so great a quantity of the same lights, which were carried and borne before the relations, connexions, friends, servants, and officers of the deceased, who were present in coaches, on horseback, and on foot, that the evening of the day on which that funeral took place was brighter than the noon: the wide streets of this city being found too narrow for the innumerable crowds of people by which they were lined, as in the greatest and most august ceremonies.”

So far the Gazette de France. With every mark, as it seems, of outward respect, the gleaming cavalcade made its way through the darkness of the city. They carried him over the Pont Neuf, where Henry’s statue commanded Paris and the Seine, and up the hill, through the old University quarter for which he had done so much, and laid him in the vault he had prepared for himself and his family under the stately new Church of the Sorbonne. His funeral ceremonies extended for weeks, far into the following year, with grand state services at Notre Dame and solemn requiems in all the churches of Paris. A long and flattering epitaph, engraved on copper and fastened to the wall of the crypt where he lay, was meant to keep his fame alive till France herself should be no more. It began: “Icy repose le grand Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, Duc et Pair de France: Grand en naissance, grand en esprit, grand en sagesse, grand en science, grand en courage, grand en fortune, mais plus grand encore en piété....” After describing the hero’s fine deeds and wonderful qualities, his genius, grace, and majesty, the epitaph—said to have been composed by Georges de Scudéry—went on to announce that “il est mort comme il a vécu, grand, invincible, glorieux et pour dernier honneur, pleuré de son Roi; et pour son éternel bonheur, il est mort humblement, chrétiennement et saintement....”

It was not till towards the end of the century that the marble tomb by Girardon was placed above the vault in the Church of the Sorbonne.

By his will, made at Narbonne, the Cardinal confirmed the promised gift he had made to the Crown in 1636 of the Palais-Cardinal, most of his magnificent gold and silver plate, diamonds, and a large sum of money. He divided his lands, châteaux, and other property between his nephew and great-nephews and Madame d’Aiguillon, leaving the lion’s share with his name and title, as has been said, to Armand de Vignerot, who was also entrusted with his precious library. Many of his artistic treasures and all his remaining jewellery went to Madame d’Aiguillon. With the most particular care and in the strongest words he guarded against any future dismemberment of the estates he left to his family. Fortunate for him that his fame and honour did not depend on the châteaux, the gardens, the forests, the collections and possessions of every kind which had so long shared his thoughts with France and her glory.

The legacies to his servants and humbler friends showed the Cardinal in his pleasantest light, as a just and generous master. Not one was forgotten, from his chaplains, officers and gentlemen, his secretaries and le petit Mulot, secretary’s clerk, to cooks, grooms, muleteers, and footmen. The smallest legacy was six years’ wages. That he did not forget past benefits was shown by a legacy to a M. de Broyé, the necessitous nephew of that Claude Barbin who had helped him to his place in the Ministry in the days of the Maréchal d’Ancre.

“He was extremely regretted,” says Montglat, “by his relations, friends, and servants, who were numerous; for he was the best master, relation, or friend that ever was; and provided that he was convinced a man loved him, his fortune was made; for he never forsook those who attached themselves to him.” At the same time, he was personally solitary and inaccessible, and after the death of Père Joseph, though surrounded by those whom loyalty or interest kept faithful to him, no man could call himself his intimate friend.

“Il est mort un grand politique”—a great politician is dead: these were the short cold words with which Louis XIII. honoured the memory of the man who had “raised France to her highest point since Charlemagne; crushed the Huguenot party, which had rebelled against five kings; humbled the House of Austria, which claimed to be the law-giver of Christendom; and established the King’s power so firmly, by subduing the princes, that nothing in the kingdom could resist him any more.”

As a King, there is no doubt that Louis regretted his great Minister; he had proved over and over again that he knew how to value the statesman who had given him new authority and France new prestige; he had proved it to the bitter cost of those who reckoned on his personal impatience, as a man, of the yoke laid upon him by a tyrannical and worrying tutor. That yoke was now removed; and though the King appeared to be Richelieu’s chief mourner, while following his last counsels and carrying out his policy, contemporaries were very sure that in the depths of his soul he was glad to be rid of him.

France, as a whole, drew a long breath of relief and joy. It was not only “les grands du royaume,” soon to be flocking back from prison and from exile, Monsieur, appearing once more at Court, the Duc de Vendôme, leaving his refuge in England, who welcomed their freedom from the political terror which had weighed down their gay lives; it was also the people of lower degree, citizens, peasants, who had felt the oppression of Richelieu’s heavy taxes. They had paid for his wars by pinching and starvation; for his objects they cared little, the vision of most of them being naturally bounded by their own parish. All through the provinces, in the villages, in the towns, large and small, even in Paris itself, blazing bonfires lit up the winter nights when the Eminentissime lay dead.

“Il est passé, il a plié bagage

Ce Cardinal ...

Il est en plomb l’éminent personnage

Qui de nos maux a ri plus de vingt ans ...

Il est passé....”

That well-known rondeau was one of the mildest among the satirical poems full of hatred, violence, and indecency which circulated in society after the death of him whom they called “le ministre des enfers.” And if his countrymen had listened for an echo of their rejoicing, they might have heard it in the “great contentment” of the enemies of France.

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Cardinal de Richelieu’s noblest monument in Paris is his stately building of the Sorbonne. His resting-place in the crypt of its Church was disturbed in the Revolution, and his bones were scattered, but his embalmed face-mask was preserved by reverent hands and ultimately replaced in his tomb. The Church is no longer used for worship; but Armand de Richelieu still reclines there in marble peace. His eyes are raised to the heaven in which he certainly believed. He is supported in his mortal weakness by Religion, holding the book he wrote, when Bishop of Luçon, in defence of the Catholic Faith; and Science—in the likeness of his beloved niece, Madame d’Aiguillon—lies mourning at his feet.