The cardinal did not think it necessary to wait for the sentence. He had arrived at his house at Lyons, in a sort of square chamber, covered with red damask, and borne on the shoulders of eighteen guards; there, stretched upon his couch, a table covered with papers beside him, he worked and chatted with whomsoever of his servants he had been pleased to have as his companion on the road. It was in the same equipage that he left Lyons to gain the Loire and return to Paris. On his passage, it was necessary to pull down lumps of wall and throw bridges over the fosses to make way for this vast litter and the indomitable man that lay dying within it.
It was on the 12th of September, 1642, that the accused appeared before the commission; there were now but two of them; the Duke of Bouillon had made his private arrangement with the cardinal, confessing everything, and requesting “to have his life spared in order that he might employ it to preserve to the Catholic church five little children whom his death would leave to persons of the opposite religion.” In consideration of this pardon, a demand was made upon him to give up Sedan to the king, “though it were easy to gain possession of-it by investment.” The duke consented to all, and he awaited in his dungeon at Pierre-Encise the execution of his accomplices who had no town to surrender. Their death was to be the signal of his liberation.
The two accused denied nothing. M. de Thou merely maintained that he had not been in any way mixed up with the conspiracy, proving that he had blamed the treaty with Spain, and that his only crime was not having revealed it. “He believed me to be his friend, his one faithful friend,” said he, speaking of Cinq-Mars, “and I had no mind to betray him.” The grand equerry told in detail the story of the plot, his connection with the Duke of Orleans, who had missed no opportunity of paying court to him, the resolutions taken in concert with the Duke of Bouillon, and the treaty concluded with Spain, “confessing that he had erred, and had no hope but in the clemency of the king, and of the cardinal, whose generosity would be so much the more shown in asking pardon for him as he was the less bound to do so.” There was not long to wait for the decree; the votes were unanimous against the grand equerry, a single one of the judges pronouncing in favor of M. de Thou. The latter turned towards Cinq-Mars, and said, “Ah! well, sir; humanly speaking, I might complain of you; you have placed me in the dock, and you are the cause of my death; but God knows how I love you. Let us die, sir, let us die courageously, and win Paradise.”
The decree against Cinq-Mars sentenced him to undergo the question in order to get a more complete revelation of his accomplices. “It had been resolved not to put him to it,” says Tallemant des Reaux: “but it was exhibited to him nevertheless; it gave him a turn, but it did not make him do anything to belie himself, and he was just taking off his doublet, when he was told to raise his hand in sign of telling the truth.”
The execution was not destined to be long deferred; the very day on which the sentence was delivered saw the execution of it. “The grand equerry showed a never-changing and very resolute firmness to the death, together with admirable calmness and the constancy and devoutness of a Christian,” wrote M. du Marca, councillor of state, to the secretary of state Brionne; and Tallemant des Reaux adds, “He died with astoundingly great courage, and did not waste time in speechifying; he would not have his eyes bandaged, and kept them open when the blow was struck.” M. de Thou said not a word save to God, repeating the Credo even to the very scaffold, with a fervor of devotion that touched all present. “We have seen,” says a report of the time, “the favorite of the greatest and most just of kings lose his head upon the scaffold at the age of twenty-two, but with a firmness which has scarcely its parallel in our histories. We have seen a councillor of state die like a saint after a crime which men cannot justly pardon. There is nobody in the world who, knowing of their conspiracy against the state, does not think them worthy of death, and there will be few who, having knowledge of their rank and their fine natural qualities, will not mourn their sad fate.”
“Now that I make not a single step which does not lead me to death, I am more capable than anybody else of estimating the value of the things of the world,” wrote Cinq-Mars to his mother, the wife of Marshal d’Effiat. “Enough of this world; away to Paradise!” said M. de Thou, as he marched to the scaffold. Chalais and Montmorency had used the same language. At the last hour, and at the bottom of their hearts, the frivolous courtier and the hare-brained conspirator, as well as the great soldier and the grave magistrate, had recovered their faith in God.