“Therefore,” he says, “I employed the leisure of my solitude in answering it; and owing to the length of time during which I had been diverted from the exercise of my profession, I laboured with such ardour that in six weeks I finished the work.”
This Defence of the Catholic Faith was a book of 250 pages, full of theological learning, and written with moderation, tact, and practical good sense. The Bishop here preached again those doctrines of toleration, of conversion by reasoning, not by force, with which he had met the Huguenots of his diocese ten years before. It was the book of a statesman as much as of a theologian. He marshalled an army of arguments to prove the ministers in the wrong; enjoined on the schismatics loyalty and obedience to the laws; but for the King he advised gentleness and patience; the object to be sought by all being national unity and peace. The book was printed at Poitiers, and published within three months of its beginning. It was greatly admired, and added much to its author’s reputation; but also, as he notes rather sadly, “it burdened me with envy.” His enemies saw that they had not silenced the Bishop of Luçon by banishing him to his diocese.
There, during these months of enforced residence, he seems to have worked with all the freshness and “ardour” consequent on absence and change of thoughts. He writes in August to the Nuncio: “I am here in my diocese, where I try to make known by all my actions that I have and shall have no other passion than doing all I can for the glory of God.” A word of personal complaint in his letters is rare. He was surrounded by his friends, living in a pleasant and healthy little château where the people loved him. Sébastien Bouthillier was now Dean of Luçon and his constant companion. He had his books, collected in the days when he, La Rocheposay, Saint-Cyran and the rest found their diversion in study; and if all these things were not the passion of his life, yet he loved them still. He might have been far more of a bookworm than he really was, from the tone of his letters at this time. “I live at a little hermitage among books” ... “I am living quietly here in the enjoyment of my books” ... “Serving God and my friends, I am resolved to spend the time quietly among my books and my neighbours;” and much more of the same kind. Now and then, it is true, when news from the great outside world comes to him, sitting helpless in his hermitage, he is seized with restless impatience and confesses himself malheureux. But this is only in letters to his own family and to his friend Père Joseph: the face turned to the King and to all public personages is dignified, grave and serene.
Richelieu watched, from distance and obscurity, the still rising fortunes of the Duc de Luynes. The lucky Provençal, of doubtful nobility, was able to choose a wife among the noblest, richest and most beautiful women in France. He refused Mademoiselle de Vendôme, Henry IV.’s daughter—who afterwards married the Duc d’Elbeuf—probably from fear and dislike of her odious brother. He would have nothing to say to Mademoiselle d’Ailly and her enormous fortune, but arranged a marriage for her with his younger brother Cadenet, a dashing soldier, who took the title of Duc de Chaulnes from one of her estates. His own choice fell on Marie de Rohan, daughter of the Duc de Montbazon, then a lovely wild girl of seventeen. After his death she married the Duc de Chevreuse, a younger brother of the Duc de Guise, and was for years the most admired beauty and most mischievous woman in Europe.
Another piece of news was the removal of the Prince de Condé, “ce petit brouillon,” whom Luynes had not dared to set free, from the Bastille to the Château de Vincennes. His wife, Charlotte de Montmorency, was now allowed to share his imprisonment, and the consequence was the birth of Princess Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, afterwards the famous Madame de Longueville. Louis de Bourbon, the great Condé, was not born till after his father’s release.
Later in the year, the Duc de Villeroy died at seventy-four. He was one of the best of those old Ministers of State whom Henry IV. left to his widow, the Regent. The Pope’s Nuncio, Bentivoglio, had a high opinion of him. “Great was his experience, great his integrity; ... a good Frenchman and a good Catholic,” says the Italian diplomat. Richelieu describes him as a sincere man of good judgment, but narrow-minded and jealous, and adds that he died after fifty-one years’ service with clean hands, possessing little more than he had inherited from his fore-fathers. It was a fine testimonial to Villeroy from the young rival who, if only for a few months, had thrown him into the shade.
Richelieu was less generous with regard to Jacques-Auguste de Thou, the “faithful and austere,” “light of France” and “prince of historians,” as Camden called him, who died in that same year. Richelieu observes of him that his piety was not equal to his learning, that knowledge and action are different things, and that the speculative science of government needs certain qualities of mind not always found to match it. The inwardness of this criticism lies in the fact that de Thou, in his Latin History of the sixteenth century, made certain scornful and severe remarks on Richelieu’s ancestors and the part they took in the Wars of Religion. Richelieu, exceedingly sensitive as to the honour of his family, never forgave this, and when in 1642 François-Auguste de Thou lost his head in the Cinq-Mars catastrophe, it was currently believed that the Cardinal might have spared him but for those paragraphs in his father’s history.
In November 1617 Nicole du Plessis-Richelieu, the Bishop’s younger sister, was married quietly in Paris to a distinguished but eccentric Angevin noble, the Marquis de Maillé-Brézé. Nicole was now a woman of thirty. She had lived at Richelieu until her mother’s death; her portion cannot have been large; of her brothers, one was a more or less struggling courtier, one a monk, one a politician out of office. She possessed little beyond a singular beauty and charm; the Marquis de Brézé, who married her for love, cannot have foreknown the brilliant thing he was doing. Brother-in-law to the most powerful man in Europe, father-in-law of the great Condé, Marshal of France, governor of Anjou, Viceroy of Catalonia, the Marquis had everything; and, “extravagant” as he was, cared most of all for a good dog and a new book. But the marriage turned out unhappily. Nicole de Richelieu went out of her mind—one of her mad fancies being that she was made of glass—and died shut up in the castle of Saumur. M. de Brézé was a bad husband, though a clever and accomplished man. According to the stories of the time, it was his unkindness and brutal infidelity that upset poor Nicole’s weak brain.
The Bishop, of course, was not present at his sister’s marriage; but he appears to have made all the necessary arrangements with M. de Brézé, leaving the actual ceremony to be managed by Henry de Richelieu and his young wife.
The Duc de Luynes was nervous on his lonely pinnacle of power. The presence of the Queen-mother at Blois was a constant anxiety to him; she was not only, in his eyes, an enemy to the State, but his own personal and unforgiving enemy. And more than the Queen-mother he feared her friends; certain of the great nobles, who were already beginning to resent his exaltation, and those former ministers who had been the real strength of her rule. Barbin was still in the Bastille. With an appearance of leniency, Luynes made his imprisonment easier and winked at a correspondence between him and the Queen. Copies of every letter came into the hands of Luynes. Marie’s messengers boasted of their mistress’s new freedom and speedy return to the Court.