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.