The Court was buzzing with intrigues all through 1636, the “year of Corbie,” while the King still enjoyed, as far as possible, the society of the only woman who had ever loved him for his own sake. Mademoiselle de la Fayette, torn between conscience and affection, was dragged one way and the other by two sets of advisers, each headed by a dignified ecclesiastic moved by reasons beyond mere anxiety for her welfare and that of the King. The Père Carré, Superior of the Dominicans in Paris and a favourite director of Court ladies, was one of Richelieu’s chief spies and most devoted servants. Mademoiselle de la Fayette came to him for counsel. He encouraged her scruples and blessed her vocation: “Il faisait parler Dieu,” says M. Cousin, “selon l’intérêt et au commandement de Richelieu.”
On the other hand Père Caussin, a Jesuit, and apparently an honest man, took advantage of his place as the King’s confessor to advise Mademoiselle de la Fayette to remain at Court. He saw no reason why Louis should be deprived of a perfectly innocent friendship for the sake of foolish scruples and a half-imaginary vocation. Such an opinion, if disinterested, would have been worthy of all respect; but at the French Court, divided between Richelieu’s spies and Richelieu’s enemies, this was almost impossible. The reasons that had moved Cardinal de Bérulle and the brothers Marillac, the grievances of the Queen-mother, of the Pope and of the princes, all found voice in Père Caussin. He was closely allied, too, with another distinguished Jesuit, Père Monot, the confessor of Christine, Duchess of Savoy, who was at this very time in Paris working against Richelieu in the interests of Spain. Considering all this, it is no great wonder that Père Caussin presently found himself disgraced and banished to Brittany, a harmless Jesuit of eighty years old being appointed royal confessor in his place. It seems that Richelieu did not wish to break the tradition which gave the care of the King’s conscience to that Order.
Tired of intrigue, pushed on by Père Carré and her own doubts, Louise de la Fayette entered the Convent of the Visitation in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in May 1637. For some months the King continued to visit her there, until Richelieu, whose influence had been a good deal shaken by her arguments, had regained his personal power, and Mademoiselle de Hautefort, still at Court, her old dominion.
The tragi-comedy known as “the Affair of the Val-de-Grâce,” which played itself out in the summer of 1637, proved that Richelieu’s star was still in the ascendant. The war with Spain had added fresh distress to Queen Anne’s position, so long a false and lonely one. The secret sympathy of half the Court and of all the malcontents in the kingdom did not compensate the Queen for the loss of her friends, exiled one by one as Richelieu came to suspect them, or for the entire separation from her own family and its allies in Austria, the Netherlands, and Lorraine. The Queen did not easily resign herself. In spite of espionnage, she wrote and sent letters to her brothers, the King of Spain and the Cardinal-Infant, as well as to Madame de Chevreuse, living in banishment at Tours. These letters were written in a refuge to which spies did not penetrate: the Benedictine Abbey of the Val-de-Grâce in the Faubourg St. Jacques. The Abbess, of Spanish origin, was a devoted servant of the Queen.
It is no insult to Richelieu’s patriotism to believe that he had never pounced on smaller game with equal satisfaction. The famous letters themselves, if we may believe Madame de Motteville, contained no actual treason against the King or the State; but they did contain “railleries” against the Cardinal, and in any case they were written to the enemies of France, and belonged to the political opposition so long irreconcilable, which he crushed more sternly every year he lived. We may think what we please about his more personal motives of spite and revenge: that he had made love to the Queen and that she had laughed at him seemed to the gossips of the time a sufficient explanation of everything. The Cardinal, they said, wished to send her back to Spain, to divorce her from the King, to marry him to Madame de Combalet! In the following year that much-talked-of lady was consoled for the loss of so many great matches by being created Duchesse d’Aiguillon in her own right. Her uncle paid an enormous sum of money for the title and the estates belonging to it.
The Queen’s troubles in the summer of 1637 began with the intercepting, by Richelieu’s people, of a letter in cypher which she had written to Madame de Chevreuse. The bearer, La Porte, her valet-de-chambre, was the person to whom she trusted all her secret correspondence. Suddenly thrown into the Bastille, examined first by Richelieu’s terrible agents and then by the Cardinal himself, threatened with torture and death, the faithful man refused to say one word that could incriminate his royal mistress. Even the Cardinal admired his fidelity.
It was in August, and the Court was at Chantilly. The Queen in her alarm first denied everything, solemnly and on oath; then thought it prudent to make some kind of confession. She sent for the Cardinal, who came accompanied by his two chief secretaries, M. de Chavigny and M. de Noyers. Madame de Sénecé, the mistress of her household, was in attendance on the Queen.
The Cardinal, according to himself, was respectful, fatherly, but severe. When the Queen began to assure him of the harmlessness of her letters, he said at once that he did not believe her, but promised her his own faithful service and the King’s forgiveness if she would confess everything. On this, Anne sent the witnesses out of the room and remained alone with Richelieu. We have only his word for what passed: that the Queen, speaking “with much displeasure and confusion,” confessed to a correspondence with Spain and with Flanders, carried on by secret means and in terms which might justly displease the King; that she exclaimed several times, “Quelle bonté faut-il que vous ayez, Monsieur le Cardinal!”; that she protested her eternal gratitude, saying, “Give me your hand,” while holding out her own, famous for its beauty; which the Cardinal respectfully refused to touch.
ANNE OF AUSTRIA, CONSORT OF LOUIS XIII