Then Cardinal de Richelieu bent all his energies to forcing on Gaston’s return to France and reconciliation with his brother. He regarded this as a necessity of State, and he was equally resolved that the Queen-mother, who had made some overtures on her own account, should never again set foot in France. Both Marie and Gaston, while quarrelling between themselves, played the Minister’s game by their own foolishness. A murderer, caught at Metz, was suspected with reason of being sent from Brussels by Chanteloube, Marie’s unwise counsellor, to attempt the life of Richelieu: he lost his own. The same fate befell others, in Lorraine and elsewhere, charged with the same designs; and while this secret campaign went on, Gaston and his favourite Puylaurens made an independent treaty with Spain, promising to invade France with a foreign army to be supplied by the Imperial generals in the Low Countries.
Well served by spies, Richelieu knew all this. He replied to Monsieur’s treason by representing to the King that such a prince, who could promise French fortresses to the enemy, was not fit to wear the crown; and with a bold decision before which, at such a crisis, not even the hereditary monarchy was sacred, he proposed a league of nobles and princes of the blood who should pledge themselves, in case of Louis’ death, against the unconditional succession of his brother. France after all, in the eyes of Richelieu, was greater than her kings.
By the autumn of 1634 Puylaurens and his master knew that they had made a huge mistake in allying themselves with Spain. No troops were forthcoming, and it began to be evident that the prospect was not one of triumph and revenge, but of ruin and perpetual exile. All through September M. de Puylaurens was negotiating secretly with Cardinal de Richelieu, promising for Monsieur, among other things, the renunciation of his marriage, and also making a good bargain for himself.
Gaston left Brussels one day in October, and galloped hard to the frontier. He had been an exile for two years, and was enchanted to see France again. His little daughter, Mademoiselle, now seven years old, met him at Limours, and flew joyfully into the arms of a gay and fascinating father.
As to Madame, left behind in Flanders, her marriage was solemnly declared null and void by an assembly of French clergy, as having been contracted against the civil law. In this decision, however, the clergy acted on Gallican lines, independently of the Pope, who was of a different opinion; and although, after long resistance, Monsieur formally submitted, he had protected himself in advance by a letter to Urban VIII. refusing to be bound by any extorted promise. The consequence was, that Richelieu’s apparent triumph in this affair of the Lorraine marriage only lasted his life. Gaston and Marguerite remained faithful to each other; and the stiff Madame who reigned in after years at Blois and at the Luxembourg was the same Princess, the heroine, in her adventurous girlhood, of a secret marriage and a romantic escape.
It was that private letter of Gaston’s to the Pope which brought about the ruin of the unlucky Puylaurens. He had gained high favour with Richelieu, who had purchased his faithful service, as he thought, by making him a duke and a peer of France and by marrying him to his own first cousin, Mademoiselle Philippe de Pontchâteau, younger daughter of his aunt, Louise du Plessis, his father’s sister. The marriage took place in Paris at the end of November 1634, and on the same day the Duc de la Valette, son of the Duc d’Épernon and widower of Henry IV.’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Verneuil, was married to the elder sister, Marie de Pontchâteau, and the Comte, afterwards Maréchal, de Guiche to another cousin, Mademoiselle du Plessis de Chivray. The Cardinal celebrated the triple wedding by a magnificent fête. At this time the first nobles in France found it politic to quarrel for the honour of his alliance, and it was matter of general talk in society that he meant to marry Monsieur to Madame de Combalet, the Lorraine marriage being set aside. This report even reached the ears of Monsieur’s little daughter, and filled her with just indignation.
A few weeks after the wedding the Cardinal’s spies brought him not only the secret, well kept by Puylaurens, of Monsieur’s letter to Rome, but proofs of a fresh treasonable correspondence carried on by the new Duke with Spain. Swiftly fell Richelieu’s vengeance. Puylaurens, with several of his friends, was arrested at the Louvre on February 14, and carried off by royal order to Vincennes. The entreaties of Monsieur, newly reconciled at Court, delayed his trial, but he died after four months of prison. “His good fortune,” says Richelieu, “withdrew him from this world, and saved him from the infamy of a shameful death, which he could not have escaped.”
Whether the fatal atmosphere of the dungeons of Vincennes was assisted by poison of a more active kind, will never be known. That suspicion hung about the deaths of many of the Cardinal’s prisoners. Richelieu consoled the young widow of Puylaurens by marrying her to the Comte d’Harcourt, of the House of Lorraine, younger brother of the Duc d’Elbeuf, a queer personage, but a fine soldier. He had fought a successful duel with Bouteville, in itself a distinction. He proved himself worthy of the Cardinal’s favour by serving His Eminence faithfully for the rest of his life.
But for Richelieu, the Thirty Years’ War might have ended with the death of Wallenstein and the imperial victories which followed it. Even the Protestant princes of Germany were ready for a compromise with the Emperor. But Richelieu had no intention of accepting a general peace which would leave his Swedish friends weak and dissatisfied, his own conquests incomplete, Spain and Austria easily predominant in Italy and the Low Countries. He resolved that France, as an ally of Sweden, Holland, and the German Protestants, should now take an active part in the war, and he prepared for the actual declaration by a treaty with the Dutch for the partition of the Spanish Netherlands, to be followed by one with the Dukes of Savoy, Parma, and Mantua, for the conquest and division of the Milanese.
In May 1635, after some military provocation on the part of Spain, Louis XIII. sent his herald-at-arms to Brussels—a noble Gascon, Jean Gratiollet, Captain of Abbeville—and solemnly declared war against his brother-in-law, Philip IV., while publicly inviting the Low Countries to rebel against Spain. “Europe was amazed,” says a modern French writer, “to see Richelieu suddenly take up arms for those same Huguenots whom he had crushed with such good will at La Rochelle.”