The murderers of Concini robbed his dead body of money and jewellery and left it lying under a staircase in the court of the Louvre, near the gate through which crowds of Parisians of every rank, who had trembled before the Maréchal, came crowding to pay their homage to the King. During the day his house near the Louvre and his wife’s apartments were completely sacked and pillaged, their flying servants chased in all directions. In the evening his body was carried secretly across the way to the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois and buried, with no funeral rites, behind the organ.

But the fury and rage of the mob were far from being satisfied. The Parisians of 1617 were the ancestors of those of 1793. “The next morning,” says Pontchartrain, “the 25th of the said month of April, day of Saint Mark, about ten o’clock, a few women and children, in the Church of Saint-Germain of the Auxerrois, began to say one to another, standing over the place where he had been interred: ‘See where they have buried that tyrant: is it right that he, who did so much evil, should lie in holy ground and in a church? No, no; out with him; throw him on a dunghill!’ And exciting each other with such words, they began with sticks to break up the stone under which the body lay; the women using knives and scissors, until strong men began to lend a hand. In less than half an hour two or three hundred persons were assembled; they raise the stone, take out the body, tie cords round the neck, drag it out of the church and thence through the streets, with horrible shouts and yells, some saying it should be thrown into the river, others that it should be burnt, others that it should be hanged on a gibbet; each one worse than the last. Thus they found themselves at the end of the Pont Neuf, where there were two or three gibbets set up.”

Gibbets had been planted here and there in the city by Concini’s orders, “to frighten those who dared speak ill of him.” To cut the horrible story short, they hanged his dead body on one of these and then tore it to pieces with the savagery of wild beasts, burning part and throwing part into the river.

Richelieu was an eye-witness of these horrors. He was on his way to visit the Pope’s Nuncio, and his coach drove on to the bridge, a favourite thoroughfare, to find it a mass of people absorbed in their dreadful work and “so drunk with fury that there was no means of getting them to make way for the passage of coaches.”

The Bishop’s coachman was indiscreet enough to take matters with the usual high hand and to attempt to force his way. One of the men who was roughly hustled made a loud complaint.

“At that instant,” Richelieu writes, “I saw my peril, in case any one should cry out that I was a partisan of the Maréchal d’Ancre. To save myself, after violently threatening my coachman, I asked them what they were doing, and when they had answered me according to their fury against the Maréchal, I said to them, ‘You are men who would die to serve the King: shout, all of you, Vive le Roi!’ I led them off, and thus I gained free passage, and I took good care not to return the same way; I recrossed by the Pont Notre Dame.”

A few days later, after a painful interview with her son—at which her stony calm broke down and she wept bitterly—and after formal farewells from court and city, Marie de Médicis quitted Paris for an honourable captivity at the Château de Blois. Her younger children took leave of her at the gate of the city. She was accompanied by a train of faithful servants, French and Italian, among whom the most distinguished was the Bishop of Luçon; it was largely owing to his influence with Luynes that the Queen had not been treated with greater severity.

Two months later, after an unfair and absurd trial, the Maréchale d’Ancre was beheaded in the Place de Grève and her remains burnt to ashes. Most of the money, property, and possessions which she and her husband had accumulated during their years of power was bestowed upon the King’s friend and favourite, now Duc de Luynes and Lieutenant-General of Normandy. For his own not very considerable share in the ruin and death of Concini and his wife, Louis XIII. was rewarded by the French people with the title of “Le Juste.”

CHAPTER VII
1617-1619

Richelieu at Blois—He is ordered back to his diocese—He writes a book in defence of the faith—Marriage of Mademoiselle de Richelieu—The Bishop exiled to Avignon—Escape of the Queen-mother from Blois—Richelieu is recalled to her service.