François de Richelieu became Henry’s trusted servant. Certainly there was nothing of the mignon about him. Very tall, thin, solemn and dismal, his looks were suitable to his dreary but necessary office—first Provost of the King’s house, then Grand Provost of France, charged with arresting malefactors and presiding over their punishment. He was known at Court as “Tristan l’Hermite,” so that he must have struck his contemporaries as resembling, not in his office alone, the famous Provost of Louis XI.
François de Richelieu was affianced in early youth, before the Mausson affair drove him abroad, to Suzanne de la Porte, who belonged by birth to the higher bourgeoisie of his native province. Circumstances brought about this marriage, to which one cannot imagine that the proud Françoise de Rochechouart gave a very willing consent.
The family of La Porte, highly respectable, and clever with all the Poitevin shrewdness, possessed estates in Poitou and elsewhere. François de la Porte, the Cardinal’s maternal grandfather, was a brilliant scholar at the University of Poitiers, only second in fame to that of Paris, and first in Europe for the study of Roman law in the original spirit; keen, solid, logical, practical.
François de la Porte became a learned and distinguished advocate in the law-courts of Paris, but did not lose interest in his own province and his neighbours there. He appears to have been specially concerned with the affairs of Louis de Richelieu, who, according to Tallemant, was not only very poor, but “embrouilla furieusement sa maison,” and left his family in real distress. M. de la Porte made himself very useful to Dame Françoise de Richelieu, no doubt partly as to the management of her more distant property, difficult enough in those desperate times, and satisfied the vanity with which his contemporaries credit him by marrying his daughter to her son. The exact date of the marriage does not seem to be known.
As Grand Provost, François de Richelieu had a house in Paris, in the Rue du Bouloy, and all probabilities point to the fact of his son Armand having been born there. He was certainly baptized in Paris, though not till eight months after his birth, the delay being caused partly by his extreme delicacy, partly by the long and dangerous journey from Poitou which had to be made by his grandmother, who was present at the church of Saint-Eustache as one of his sponsors.
The others were two Marshals of France, Armand de Gontaut-Biron and Jean d’Aumont; each of whom gave the child a name. Both these gallant soldiers are celebrated by Voltaire in the Henriade:
“D’Aumont, qui sous cinq Rois avoit porté les armes;
Biron, dont le seul nom repandoit les alarmes....”
Both were intimate friends of the Grand Provost, and joined him later in placing their swords at the command of Henry IV.
The name of François de Richelieu is frequently to be met with in the documents of Henry III.’s reign. He received the highest honour Royalty could bestow, the Order of the Holy Spirit. The King’s personal safety depended largely on him, and allowing for the general corruption of the time, he seems to have performed his duties, often secret and mysterious, with honesty, loyalty, and courage. On that wild day in 1588, when the Duc de Guise had been welcomed by Paris with mad enthusiasm, when the streets were chained and barricaded against the King’s troops, and Henry was escaping from his “ungrateful city,” it was the Grand Provost who checked the pursuers at the Porte de la Conférence. Old writers say that the gate took its name from that circumstance, and tell how “François de Richelieu, Grand Prévôt de France, père du Cardinal de même nom, arrêta les Parisiens qui vouloient suivre le Roi, pour tâcher de le surprendre.”