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.
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....”