The head of this household, according to immemorial French custom, was the grandmother, Françoise de Rochechouart. Her rule, no doubt, was severe, and there are evidences that her daughter-in-law, a woman of gentler type, suffered under it. The hard old aristocrat who had condescended in her marriage with Louis du Plessis was scornful of the bourgeoise mother of her grandchildren. She was soured too by the losses and troubles of her life. Probably Suzanne brought from Paris the habits of a civilisation that did not suit that rough old home, that “ancient house of stone, roofed with slates,” strongly fortified with walls and moats as useful now as in the time of the English wars, when they were new. In 1590, the civil wars were by no means at an end. The province, devastated for years by Catholics and Huguenots flying at each other’s throats, now suffered equally in the struggle between Henry IV. and the League. Poitiers took the latter side, and for three years, from 1591 to 1594, the King’s army besieged it in vain. All the neighbouring country, including the valley of the Mable, was ruined and unsafe. A band of ruffian soldiers sacked the small town of Faye-la-Vineuse, on the hills overlooking Richelieu. No wonder if the gentle Suzanne, “loyal lady” and tender mother, was kept sleepless by burning horizons as often as by her little Armand, shivering with fever in the unwholesome mists of that river valley.
Her anxieties indeed were many; for though Dame Françoise might be mistress of the house, all the business connected with her children and her inheritance devolved on her. And the Richelieu affairs were in an embarrassed state. The Grand Provost had left heavy debts behind him. There was the management of various small estates and châteaux in Poitou, which by some means or other had become possessions of the family: one of these was Mausson, name of ill-omen, which had been taken in exchange for an estate in Picardy, part of the dowry of Suzanne de la Porte.
She was an excellent woman of business, with hereditary instincts of law and order. All her tact and capacity, directed by strong affection, were devoted to the interests of her children. The words she wrote to Armand, years later, when he was Bishop of Luçon, seem to have been the key-note of her life:
“L’inquiétude que j’ai me tue et je vois bien que je n’aurai jamais de joie que lorsque, vous sachant tous heureux, je serai en paradis.”
With such a mother, and with an indulgent aunt in Madame de Marconnay—in spite of a fierce grandmother, barred gates and alarms of war—the children’s life at Richelieu need not have been unhappy. Indeed it was not so, if one may judge by the Cardinal’s recollections of it, and his constant devotion to the old place where most of his childhood was spent. After all, the family was on the winning side. France was growing tired of the League, attracted by the sunny, accommodating patriotism of Henry IV. If the harvests of Poitou were destroyed, woods cut down, villages burnt and pillaged, it was often, odd as this may sound, the work of friends, and in the intervals of these stormy visits of robber bands, country life went on cheerfully.
The strong old manor nestled snugly on the islet in the river-bed, something after the fashion of Chenonceaux in Touraine or Bazouges in Anjou. On the border of these two provinces and of Poitou, the country round Richelieu had something of the character of all three. The rich fertility of Touraine, the vineyards and gardens, though not unknown here, soon gave way to the forests and marshes of the wilder provinces. But Richelieu had its park and its avenues, leading from the high road which ran south from Chinon and Champigny into Poitou. By this road came all the travellers, all the visitors: Amador de la Porte, the beloved uncle, with news from Paris; Jacques du Plessis, the great-uncle, the non-resident Bishop of Luçon, with his eye on a young successor; or, less welcome to the heads of the family, the Duc de Montpensier, the feudal neighbour, with his pack of wolf-hounds and swaggering troop of guards and followers. One may fancy, even then, that the dark eyes of Armand watched the owner of Champigny, scarred from the wars, without much friendliness.
There are signs that the family at Richelieu was on kindly terms with its neighbours of lower estate. The curé of Braye, M. Yver, who said mass often in the chapel of the château, was an intimate friend. There was no oppression of the peasants, who lived round about in their low, mud-floored, one-roomed cottages, and eked out their poor harvest by catching game in the forest or fishing in the river. All through the western provinces, indeed, then and for long afterwards, seigneur and peasant lived well together; the contrary was the exception. And the contrary came to pass, in great measure, through the action of the founder of absolute monarchy, the boy who ran about hand in hand with his mother at Richelieu.
In the meanwhile, Dame Suzanne befriended and doctored the people, knew them all by name, visited them, gossiped with them. She and her children witnessed their marriages, were sponsors at the baptism of their babes; a few years later, in 1618, the old registers of Braye bear witness that the infant son of young Henry du Plessis was named at the font, in the chapel at Richelieu, by two “poor orphans,” assisted by “ten other poor persons.” The gates of the château were open to any humble neighbours who suffered in the wars; the kitchen supplied them with food, sometimes not too plentiful even there; and holy-days found the courtyard full of peasants playing their bagpipes, dancing their quaint provincial dances, singing the songs of Poitou. Thus masters and servants alike managed to forget the hardships and terrors of the time.
Among scenes like these the Cardinal’s early childhood was spent, and to his dying day, with all France at his feet, he loved that corner of Poitou. It must be added that the traditions of Richelieu itself, supported by many writers of the seventeenth century, declare that he was born there. When Mademoiselle de Montpensier, in 1637, paid her visit to Madame d’Aiguillon at the magnificent palace into which the Cardinal had transformed the little stronghold of his fathers, and found some of the rooms inconceivably small and mean, compared with the stately exterior, it was explained to her that the Cardinal had ordered Le Mercier, his architect, to preserve unaltered that part of the old building where his parents had lived and where he was born. The witnesses on the same side are too many to quote. On the other hand, Richelieu himself declared on more than one occasion that he was born in Paris, a Parisian, a native of the city which always had his heart; and his enemies dwelt strongly on the same fact, treating the Poitevin theory as an outcome of that immense pride and vanity which encouraged the Cardinal’s worshippers to represent his family and their possessions as older and greater than they really were; feudal magnates of centuries, instead of country gentlemen with their fortune to seek.