“I believe, and I repeat it to your Majesty, that the queen conspires against the power of the king, but I have not said against his honor.”
“And I—I tell you against both. I tell you the queen does not love me; I tell you she loves another; I tell you she loves that infamous Buckingham! Why did you not have him arrested while in Paris?”
“Arrest the Duke! Arrest the prime minister of King Charles I.! Think of it, sire! What a scandal! And if the suspicions of your Majesty, which I still continue to doubt, should prove to have any foundation, what a terrible disclosure, what a fearful scandal!”
“But as he exposed himself like a vagabond or a thief, he should have been—”
Louis XIII. stopped, terrified at what he was about to say, while Richelieu, stretching out his neck, waited uselessly for the word which had died on the lips of the king.
“He should have been—?”
“Nothing,” said the king, “nothing. But all the time he was in Paris, you, of course, did not lose sight of him?”
“No, sire.”
“Where did he lodge?”
“Rue de la Harpe. No. 75.”