In the spring of 1627 Bouteville was in Flanders, having made France too hot to hold him. The Archduchess Isabel, from her Court at Brussels, wrote to ask his pardon of Louis XIII., who refused it, adding, however, that he might return to France safe from justice, on condition that he appeared neither in Paris nor at Court. This answer touched Bouteville’s pride. He had a quarrel with the Baron de Beuvron; he resolved to fight it out in Paris in the teeth of King, Cardinal, and edicts new and old. Each man had two seconds: it was a triple duel with swords, three against three; and it was fought in broad daylight in the Place Royale, the most fashionable square in Paris. The windows of the high red houses were crowded with spectators.
Both principals escaped unhurt; but the Comte des Chapelles, Bouteville’s second, killed his adversary, M. de Bussy d’Amboise, governor of Vitry. Honour being satisfied, the survivors fled for their lives. M. de Beuvron and two other men got away safely to England. M. de Bouteville and M. des Chapelles, on their way to Lorraine, were foolhardy enough to sleep at Vitry, where the fatal news had outrun them, and “the dead man’s mother,” says Bassompierre, “arrested them.”
They were brought back to Paris, imprisoned in the Bastille, and after a short trial sentenced to death. Then the whole opinion of society rose passionately in their favour. Such edicts were useless; human nature could not obey them. Men must quarrel, and there was one honourable, approved way of settling their quarrels: they must fight. If they did not they were scorned as cowards; the King himself sneered at their prudence, their obedience to his own edicts. Thus cried every gentleman in France, and the Cardinal’s heart must have echoed the cry. Though he would not save the victims, saying that it was a question which throat should be cut—that of the duel or that of the law; though he listened unmoved to the prayers of their friends and relations—the Princesse de Condé and the Duc de Montmorency were Bouteville’s cousins, for the best blood of France ran in his veins—yet the words with which, in his Memoirs, he mourns the two young men, have a ring of sincerity. Famous for courage in their lives, it did not fail them, he says, at the approach of a disgraceful death.
“There was nothing feeble in their speech, nothing low in their actions. They received the news of death as if it had been that of pardon.... They were well prepared to die.... There was one difference between them: Bouteville appeared sad in those last hours, and the Comte des Chapelles joyful; Bouteville sad for the faults he had committed, and the other joyful for the hope he had of Paradise.”
The two were beheaded in the Place de Grève on June 21, 1627. Their deaths, following on his signal triumphs of the preceding year, made the name of Richelieu hateful and terrible to the nobles of France. They began to feel that he might be as almighty in power as he was relentless in action. But they did not cease to fight duels.
Another tragic event in the early summer of that year was the death of Monsieur’s young wife, a few days after the birth of her child—not the prince whose arrival had been anxiously expected all the winter, the suspense adding pride and importance to Monsieur and Madame, gloom and jealousy to the King and Queen—but a princess, afterwards known as the Grande Mademoiselle, the greatest heiress in Europe, whose distinguished, eccentric presence was to be familiar to the French Court for more than sixty years.
“That death,” says Bassompierre, “changed the face of the Court, gave rise to new designs, and in short was the cause of many evils which have since come to pass.”
The Duchess had no more sincere mourner than Cardinal de Richelieu. “Deplorable ... prejudicial to the welfare of the State,” he writes of the death of Madame, “... who in ten months was wife of a great prince, sister-in-law of the three first and greatest kings of Christendom, a mother, and a corpse.”
The Cardinal had good reasons for his regret. Monsieur, who since his marriage had lived peaceably, content with his own trifling amusements, influenced by his wife’s gentle attraction rather than by a set of ambitious favourites, now became once more a centre of varied intrigue. And it was not only his ready disloyalty, but the constant scandal of his private life, which induced Louis XIII. and Richelieu to do their best to satisfy his restless spirit. The foolish and vicious boy, a widower at nineteen, was after all the only hope of the direct royal line.
By way of consoling the Prince and occupying his mind, “the King,” says a memoir-writer of that century, “proposed to him all kinds of honest exercise, principally that of the chase: there being hardly a day on which His Majesty did not so divert himself, he imagined that Monsieur would take the same pleasure in it”—which he did not, being a Parisian and a gambler. “And since Monsieur possessed no house near Paris where he could sometimes take the air, His Majesty thought well to give him that of Limours, belonging to the Cardinal de Richelieu; thus gratifying His Highness in the belief that he would take pleasure in beautifying it. It was purchased at the same price for which it had been acquired, which amounted to 400,000 livres, including the domain of Montlhéry; and with a further payment of 300,000 livres to the Cardinal de Richelieu, as well for the furniture as for his expenditure and the improvements he had made.”