It was a fine opportunity for Monsieur to once more break his engagements. Shame and anxiety drove him equally. He was universally reproached with Montmorency’s death; and he was by no means easy on the subject of his marriage, of which no mention had been made in the arrangements. He quitted Tours and withdrew to Flanders, writing to the king to complain of the duke’s execution, saying that the life of the latter had been the tacit condition of his agreement, and that, his promise being thus not binding, he was about to seek a secure retreat out of the kingdom. “Everybody knows in what plight you were, brother, and whether you could have done anything else,” replied the king.
“What think you, gentlemen, was it that lost the Duke of Montmorency his head?” said Cardinal Zapata to Bautru and Barrault, envoys of France, whom he met in the antechamber of the King of Spain. “His crimes,” replied Bautru. “No,” said the cardinal, “but the clemency of his Majesty’s predecessors.” Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu have assuredly not merited that, reproach in history.
So many and such terrible examples were at last to win the all-powerful minister some years of repose. Once only, in 1636, a new plot on the part of Monsieur and the Count of Soissons threatened not only his power, but his life. The king’s headquarters were established at the castle of Demuin; and the princes, urged on by Montresor and Saint-Ibal, had resolved to compass the cardinal’s death. The blow was to be struck at the exit from the council. Richelieu conducted the king back to the bottom of the staircase.
The two gentlemen were awaiting the signal; but Monsieur did not budge, and retired without saying a word. The Count of Soissons dared not go any further, and the cardinal mounted quietly to his own rooms, without dreaming of the extreme peril he had run. Richelieu was rather lofty than proud, and too clear-sighted to mistake the king’s feelings towards him. Never did he feel any confidence in his position; and never did he depart from his jealous and sometimes petty watchfulness. Any influence foreign to his own disquieted him in proximity to a master whose affairs he governed altogether, without ever having been able to get the mastery over his melancholy and singular mind.
Women filled but a small space in the life of Louis XIII. Twice, however, in that interval of ten years which separated the plot of Montmorency from that of Cinq-Mars, did the minister believe himself to be threatened by feminine influence; and twice he used artifice to win the monarch’s heart and confidence from two young girls of his court, Louise de La Fayette and Marie d’Hautefort. Both were maids of honor to the queen. Mdlle. d’Hautefort was fourteen years old when, in 1630, at Lyons, in the languors of convalescence, the king first remarked her blooming and at the same time severe beauty, and her air of nobility and modesty; and it was not long before the whole court knew that he had remarked her, for his first care, at the sermon, was to send the young maid of honor the velvet cushion on which he knelt for her to sit upon. Mdlle. d’Hautefort declined it, and remained seated, like her companions, on the ground; but henceforth the courtiers’ eyes were riveted on her movements, on the interminable conversations in which she was detained by the king, on his jealousies, his tiffs, and his reconciliations. After their quarrels, the king would pass the greater part of the day in writing out what he had said to Mdlle. d’Hautefort and what she had replied to him. At his death, his desk was found full of these singular reports of the most innocent, but also most stormy and most troublesome love-affair that ever was. The king was especially jealous of Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s passionate devotion to the queen her mistress, Anne of Austria. “You love an ingrate,” he said, “and you will see how she will repay your services.” Richelieu had been unable to win Mdlle. d’Hautefort; and he did his best to embitter the tiff which separated her from the king in 1635. But Louis XIII. had learned the charm of confidence and intimacy; and he turned to Louise de La Fayette, a charming girl of seventeen, who was as virtuous as Mdlle. d’Hautefort, but more gentle and tender than she, and who gave her heart in all guilelessness to that king so powerful, so a-weary, and so melancholy at the very climax of his reign. Happily for Richelieu, he had a means, more certain than even Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s pride, of separating her from Louis XIII.; Mdlle. de La Fayette, whilst quite a child, had serious ideas of becoming a nun; and scruples about being false to her vocation troubled her at court, and even in those conversations in which she reproached herself with taking too much pleasure, Father Coussin, her confessor, who was also the king’s, sought to quiet her conscience; he hoped much from the influence she could exercise over the king; but Mdlle. de La Fayette, feeling herself troubled and perplexed, was urgent. When the Jesuit reported to Louis XIII. the state of his fair young friend’s feelings, the king, with tears in his eyes, replied, “Though I am very sorry she is going away, nevertheless I have no desire to be an obstacle to her vocation; only let her wait until I have left for the army.” She did not wait, however. Their last interview took place at the queen’s, who had no liking for Mdlle. de La Fayette; and, as the king’s carriage went out of the court-yard, the young girl, leaning against the window, turned to one of her companions and said, “Alas! I shall never see him again!” But she did see him again often for some time. He went to see her in her convent, and “remained so long glued to her grating,” says Madame de Motteville, “that Cardinal Richelieu, falling a prey to fresh terrors, recommenced his intrigues to tear him from her entirely. And he succeeded.” The king’s affection for Mdlle. d’Hautefort awoke again. She had just rendered the queen an important service. Anne of Austria was secretly corresponding with her two brothers, King Philip IV. and the Cardinal Infante, a correspondence which might well make the king and his minister uneasy, since it was carried on through Madame de Chevreuse, and there was war at the time with Spain. The queen employed for this intercourse a valet named Laporte, who was arrested and thrown into prison. The chancellor removed to Val-de-Grace, whither the queen frequently retired; he questioned the nuns and rummaged Anne of Austria’s cell. She was in mortal anxiety, not knowing what Laporte might say or how to unloose his tongue, so as to keep due pace with her own confessions to the king and the cardinal. Mdlle. d’Hautefort disguised herself as a servant, went straight to the Bastille, and got a letter delivered to Laporte, thanks to the agency of Commander de Jars, her friend, then in prison. The confessions of mistress and agent being thus set in accord, the queen obtained her pardon, but not without having to put up with reproaches and conditions of stern supervision. Madame de Chevreuse took fright, and went to seek refuge in Spain. The king’s inclination towards Mdlle. d’Hautefort revived, without her having an idea of turning it to profit on her own account. “She had so much loftiness of spirit that she could never have brought herself to ask anything for herself and her family; and all that could be wrung from her was to accept what the king and queen were pleased to give her.”
Richelieu had never forgotten Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s airs: he feared her, and accused her to the king of being concerned in Monsieur’s continual intrigues. Louis XIII.‘s growing affection for young Cinq-Mars, son of Marshal d’Effiat, was beginning to occupy the gloomy monarch; and he the more easily sacrificed Mdlle. d’Hautefort. The cardinal merely asked him to send her away for a fortnight. She insisted upon hearing the order from the king’s own mouth. “The fortnight will last all the rest of my life,” she said: “and so I take leave of your Majesty forever.” She went accompanied by the regrets and tears of Anne of Austria, and leaving the field open to the new favorite, the king’s “rattle,” as the cardinal called him.
M. de Cinq-Mars was only nineteen when he was made master of the wardrobe and grand equerry of France. Brilliant and witty, he amused the king and occupied the leisure which peace gave him. The passion Louis XIII. felt for his favorite was jealous and capricious. He upbraided the young man for his flights to Paris to see his friends and the elegant society of the Marais, and sometimes also Mary di Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, wooed but lately by the Duke of Orleans, and not indifferent, it was said, to the vows of M. Le Grand, as Cinq-Mars was called. The complaints were detailed to Richelieu by the king himself in a strange correspondence, which reminds one of the “reports” of his quarrels with Mdlle. d’Hautefort. “I am very sorry,” wrote Louis XIII. on the 4th of January, 1641, “to trouble you about the ill tempers of M. Le Grand. I upbraided him with his heedlessness; he answered that for that matter he could not change, and that he should do no better than he had done. I said that, considering his obligations to me, he ought not to address me in that manner. He answered in his usual way: that he didn’t want my kindness, that he could do very well without it, and that he would be quite as well content to be Cinq-Mars as M. Le Grand, but, as for changing his ways and his life, he couldn’t do it. And so, he continually knagging at me and I at him, we came as far as the court-yard, when I said to him that, being in the temper he was in, he would do me the pleasure of not coming to see me. I have not seen him since. Signed, Louis.” This time the cardinal reconciled the king and the favorite, whom he had himself placed near him, but whose constant attendance upon the king his master he was beginning to find sometimes very troublesome. “One day he sent word to him not to be for the future so continually at his heels, and treated him even to his face with so much tartness and imperiousness as if he had been the lowest of his valets.” Cinq-Mars began to lend an ear to those who were egging him on against the cardinal.
Then began a series of negotiations and intrigues; the Duke of Orleans had come back to Paris, the king was ill and the cardinal more so than he; thence arose conjectures and insensate hopes; the Duke of Bouillon, being sent for by the king, who confided to him the command of the army of Italy, was at the same time drawn into the plot which was beginning to be woven against the minister; the Duke of Orleans and the queen were in it; and the town of Sedan, of which Bouillon was prince-sovereign, was wanted to serve the authors of the conspiracy as an asylum in case of reverse. Sedan alone was not sufficient; there was need of an army. Whence was it to come? Thoughts naturally turned towards Spain.