At Moissac, where Louis XIII arrived in the first week in June, Condé approached Bassompierre and invited him to meet him “in a kind of chapel which is in the cloister of the abbey,” as he desired to confer with him on a matter of great importance. Thither Bassompierre repaired and found the prince in the company of his allies, Retz and Schomberg. All three forthwith began to inveigh against Puisieux, whose presumption, they declared, they were no longer able to endure. Although only a Secretary of State, he was admitted to greater intimacy with the King than Monsieur le Prince himself, sought to prejudice his Majesty against those with whom he was not on good terms, conducted separate negotiations, which he declined to communicate to them, and prevented the execution of the decisions of the Council, if he had not previously approved of them. Since the death of the late Constable, they had, they said, endeavoured “to prevent the King from embarking in a new affection,” and they were of opinion that it would be better for his Majesty to have no favourite.
“However, since they saw that his inclination was to be dominated by someone, they preferred that it should be by a brave man, of high birth and esteemed for his knowledge of the arts of peace as well as of those of war, rather than by a man of the pen like M. de Puisieux, who would turn everything upside down; and that they were all resolved to conspire to bring about his ruin, as they were to assist in the aggrandisement of my fortune, and to persuade the King, who was already favourably inclined towards me, to favour me entirely with the honour of his good graces, provided that I were willing to promise them two things: the one, to co-operate with them to ruin M. de Puisieux and to detach myself entirely from his friendship; the other, to associate myself entirely with them and combine our designs and counsels, in the first place, for the good of the King’s service, in the second, for our common interest and preservation. And they begged me to come to a prompt decision upon this matter and to acquaint them with it.”
Bassompierre felt quite certain that the proposal which had just been made to him was nothing but a skilfully-baited trap, and that the intention of Condé and his friends was “to penetrate his design and then to reveal it to the King, and that they desired to make use of him to ruin M. de Puisieux, and afterwards with greater facility to ruin him.”
“I accordingly replied that I was unable to understand what necessity there was for the King to have a favourite, since he had dispensed with one so easily for eight months; that his favourites ought to be his mother, his brother, his relatives and his good servants, wherein he would be following the example of the King his father, and that if some fatality inclined him to have one, the choice and the election ought to be left to him; that I had never heard tell of any prince who took his favourites according to the decrees of his council; but that, however that might be, it would not be I who would occupy that place, because I did not deserve it; because, also, the King would not wish to honour me with it, and because, finally, I would not accept it; that I aspired to a moderate degree of favour, and a fortune of the same kind acquired by my virtue and by my merit, and which might be securely preserved; that my lavish expenditure, and the little care I had taken up to the present to amass wealth, were sufficient proofs that I aspired rather to glory than to profit; that I wished to seek a moderate and a secure fortune, and despised favour to such a degree that, if it were lying on the ground before me, I should not condescend to stoop and pick it up; and that such was my unalterable resolution, which did not allow me to take advantage of their good-will towards me, for which I rendered them very humble thanks.”
As for their complaints about Puisieux, he said, it seemed to him that they were really complaining of the King and questioning his Majesty’s right to confer privately with, and demand advice from, whichever of his Ministers he pleased. Puisieux was his [Bassompierre’s] friend, and had always behaved as such, and, so long as he continued to do so, he declined to be a party to any intrigue against him.
Condé then warned Bassompierre that a time might come when he would regret having lost his friendship and that of his allies in order to preserve that of Puisieux; to which Bassompierre replied that he would be “extraordinarily grieved to lose their good graces, but that the consolation would remain to him of not having lost them through any fault of his own, and that he would never purchase those of anyone at the price of his reputation.”
That evening, Louis XIII decided to send a body of two hundred cavalry to scout in the direction of Montauban, and Valençay, who was lieutenant of Condé’s company of gensdarmes, asked to be allowed to go, and to take with him both his own men and Monsieur le Prince’s company of light horse; and to this the King consented. Condé was not at the council of war, and did not learn of what had been done until later in the evening, when he was extremely angry and went to the King to complain that an affront had been put upon him by sending his two companies of horse away without his knowledge, and that he felt quite certain that it was Bassompierre who had suggested it. The King assured him that Bassompierre had had nothing to do with the affair, and that Valençay had himself asked for the commission, which he had given him, never imagining that Monsieur le Prince would take it ill. Condé, however, insisted that Bassompierre must have been at the bottom of it, and declared that he was hostile to him. When he had gone, the King sent for Bassompierre and told him of what the prince had said, upon which he deemed it advisable to inform his Majesty of the proposal which Condé had made him that morning in the chapel. “But,” he says, “as it is very dangerous to be in the disfavour of a person of that rank who is your general, I begged the King very humbly either to reconcile us or to permit me to retire, since I did not wish to draw his hatred and his anger upon me.”
This the King promised to do, and the next evening, when the army had encamped at Villemode, near Montauban, he came into the camp, and having praised Bassompierre for the arrangements which he had made, he turned to Condé and said: “Monsieur, yesterday you were angry with him without cause, and you can learn from Valençay whether Bassompierre was in any way responsible for his being sent away. I beg you, for love of me, to live on good terms with him, for I assure you he is your servant; and, if he were lost to this army, you know yourself whether it would be our fault.” Condé promised to do as the King desired, and the same evening offered his apologies to Bassompierre, who begged him to regard him as his very humble servant, and that “when he happened to have any reason to be displeased with him, to do him the honour of telling him of it, and, if he did not give him satisfaction in the matter, to be angry with him with all his soul, and not before.”
On the following day—June 8—the army arrived before Négrepelisse, a little town on the left bank of the Aveyron. Louis XIII and his whole army were bitterly incensed against the inhabitants of Négrepelisse, who, one night during the previous winter, had revolted and massacred four hundred men of the Vaillac Regiment who had been placed in garrison there; while a report was current among the soldiers that, during the siege of Montauban, the sick and wounded of the Royal army who had been transported thither had been poisoned. However, as the town was believed to have returned to its allegiance, provided they admitted the King, there would not appear to have been any intention of punishing the inhabitants. But when the quartermaster who had been charged to select suitable quarters for his Majesty, approached the gates, he found them closed, and was received with a volley of musket-shots.
On learning of what had occurred, the King ordered Bassompierre, who was with the advance-guard, to invest the town, which he proceeded to do; but, on going forward to reconnoitre the place with Praslin and Chevreuse, he had a narrow escape of his life, being fired upon from a distance of twenty paces by a party of the enemy, whom he had mistaken for some of his own men.