"The King had ceased to love him," said a contemporary. The end came suddenly and without a note of warning. The King, awaking as from a dream, remembered all the services that Richelieu had rendered unto France. He was so grateful that he hastened to Tarascon and begged Richelieu's pardon for having wished "to lose him," in other words, for having wished to accomplish his fall. The King was ashamed, and despite his sickness he ordered his bearers to carry him into Richelieu's bed-chamber where the two gentlemen passed several hours together, each in his own bed, effecting a reconciliation.
But their hearts were not in their words; wrongs like those in question between the Cardinal and the King cannot be forgotten.[85] The King had abetted a conspiracy against the Cardinal's life, and had the Cardinal been inclined to forget it, the King's weak self-reproach would have kept it in the mind of his contemplated victim. Louis could not refrain from harking back to his sin; he humiliated himself, he begged the Cardinal to forgive him; he gave up everything, including the amiable young criminal who, in Scriptural language, had lain in his bosom and been to him as a daughter. The judgment of the moralist is disarmed by the fact that Louis was, and always had been, a physical wreck, morally handicapped by the essence of his being. He had loved Cinq-Mars with unreasoning passion; he was forced by circumstances to sacrifice him; but we need not pity him; there was much of the monster in him, and before the head of Cinq-Mars fell, all the King's love for his victim had passed away.
Louis XIII. was of all the sovereigns of France the one most notably devoted to the public interest; in crises his self-sacrifice resembled the heroism of the martyr; but the defects of his qualities were of such a character that he would have been incomprehensible had he not been sick in body and in mind.
During the crisis which followed the exposure of Cinq-Mars's conspiracy Monsieur surpassed himself; he was alternately trembler, liar, sniveller, and informer; his behaviour was so abject that the echoes of his shame reverberated throughout France and, penetrating the walls of the Tuileries, reached the ears of his daughter. Monsieur shocked Mademoiselle's theological conception of Princes of the Blood; she could not understand how a creature partaking of the nature of the Deity could be so essentially contemptible; she was crushed by the enigma presented by her father.
The close of the reign resembled the dramatic tragedies in which the chief characters die in the fifth act; all the principal personages departed this life within a period of a few months. Marie de Médicis was the first to go. She died at Cologne 3d July, 1642, not, as was reported, in a garret, or in a hovel, but in a house in which Rubens had lived. If we may judge by the names of her legatees, she died surrounded by at least eighty servants. It is true that she owed debts to the tradesmen who furnished her household with the necessaries of life, and it is true that her people had advanced money when their living expenses required such advances; but the two facts prove no more than that royal households in which there is no order closely resemble the disorderly households of the ordinary classes. People of respectability in our own midst are now living regardless of system, devoid of economy, and indebted to their tradesmen, as the household of Marie de Médicis lived in the seventeenth century. To the day of her death the aged Queen retained possession of silver dishes of all kinds, and had her situation justified the rumours of extreme poverty which have been circulated since then she would have pawned them or sold them. We may be permitted to trust that Marie de Médicis did not end her days tormented by material necessities. She died just at the time when she had begun to resort to expedients. The old and corpulent sovereign had lived an agitated life; her chief foes were of her own temperament. She was the victim of paroxysmal wrath and it was generally known that she had made at least one determined though unfruitful attempt to whip her husband, the heroic Henry IV., Conqueror of Paris. Her life had not been of a character to inspire the love of the French people, and when she died no one regretted her. Had not the Court been forced by the prevailing etiquette to assume mourning according to the barbarous and complicated rites of the ancient monarchy, her death would have passed unperceived. The customs of the old regimen obliged Mademoiselle to remain in a darkened room, surrounded by such draperies as were considered essential to the manifestation of royal grief. The world mourned for the handsome boy who had been forced to enter the King's house, and to act as the King's favourite against his will, to die upon the scaffold. Monsieur was despised for his part in Cinq-Mars's death. Mademoiselle was shunned because she was her father's daughter and her obligatory mourning was a convenient veil. Her own record of the death of the Queen is a frankly sorrowful statement of her appreciation of the facts in the case, and of her knowledge of her father's guilt:
I observed the retreat which my mourning imposed upon me with all possible regularity and rigour. If any one had come to see me it would not have been difficult for me to refuse to receive them; however, my case was the case of all who are undergoing misfortune; no one called for me.
Three months after the conspiracy against de Richelieu was exposed, Cinq-Mars was beheaded (12th September), and the Lyonnais, who had assembled in the golden mists of the season of the vintage to see him die, cried out against his death and said that it was "a sin against the earth to take the light from his gentle eyes." De Thou, Cinq-Mars's friend, was beheaded also. The victims faced death like tried soldiers; their attitude as they halted upon the confines of eternity elicited the commendation of the people. The fact that the people called their manner of leaving the world "beautiful and admirable" proves that simplicity in man's conduct, as in literature and in horticultural architecture, was out of date.
When the condemned were passing out of the tribunal they met the judges who had but just pronounced their sentence. Both Cinq-Mars and de Thou "embraced the judges and offered them fine compliments."