Richelieu, although very uneasy at the thought of leaving the King exposed to the hostile influences of the Queen-Mother and her friends, remained in Savoy for nearly a month after Louis XIII had returned to Lyons, although the King’s confessor, Père Suffren, wrote urging him to rejoin the Court, “in order to disperse all the clouds which had gathered.” At length, towards the end of August, the plague, which was devastating Savoy, attacked his own quarters, and obliged him to return.
On September 22, Louis XIII, who had been in very poor health for some weeks, was attacked by fever, accompanied by dysentery. By the 27th he was so ill that his physicians felt obliged to warn him that it was time to think of his conscience, and he demanded the Viaticum, bade farewell to his mother, his wife, and his Minister, and prepared for death. On the morning of the 30th no one believed that he could live through the day.
The two Queens and all the Court were loud in their expressions of grief; but this did not prevent them from making their arrangements for the morrow of the catastrophe which appeared so imminent, and, though we may discredit the story that Anne of Austria instructed her dame d’atours, the Comtesse du Fargis, to write to Monsieur reminding him of the project, more than once mooted, of a marriage between them in the event of the King’s death, there can be no doubt that the Queen-Mother was preparing to revenge herself upon “her ungrateful servant,” so soon as his protector should have drawn his last breath.
As for Richelieu, his state of mind may be imagined. He saw his power crumbling away, his liberty, and perhaps even his life, threatened, and, what he valued more than life, his work, on the point of being undone, and France stepping back into the chaos at home and impotence abroad from which he had extricated her. “I know not,” he wrote to Schomberg, “whether I am dead or alive.”
But, before the day was over, the sick monarch, to the astonishment of all, and the mortification, it is to be feared, of not a few, took a turn for the better, and on the morrow was out of danger. “By the grace of God,” wrote the Cardinal to d’Effiat, “the King is out of danger, but, to tell you the truth, I know not whether I am. I pray God that He sends me death in His mercy sooner than the occasion of relapsing into the state in which we have been.”
On learning that the King was ill and that his illness was “not without danger,” Bassompierre returned in all haste to Lyons, where he arrived on October 1, the day after the crisis. After paying his respects to the King, he went to salute the two Queens, the Princesses of the Blood, and the Cardinal, and then proceeded to the house of a M. d’Alaincourt, an old friend of his, with whom he always stayed when at Lyons.
Richelieu had received Bassompierre very cordially and had “spoken to him in great confidence.” But next day his manner changed and became cold and distant. The marshal sought out Châteauneuf, who, until he was so unfortunate as to succumb to the beaux yeux of Madame de Chevreuse, was one of the most faithful of the cardinal’s henchmen, and inquired what he could possibly have done to offend his Eminence. Upon which Châteauneuf told him that the Cardinal had been informed that Bassompierre had “brought certain messages on behalf of Monsieur to the Queen-Mother, with a power to arrest him [Richelieu] if harm came to the King.”
Bassompierre answered that “he dared swear that Monsieur never had such an idea, because when he [Bassompierre] left Paris, he was doubtful whether the King was in danger.”
Châteauneuf then said that there were certain circumstances which, in his Eminence’s opinion, appeared to confirm the rumour which had reached him, namely, that the Maréchal de Créquy was staying at the same house as Bassompierre; that the Duc de Guise had travelled part of the way from Paris with the marshal and was now occupying the adjoining house, and that Bassompierre visited the Queen-Mother every day, and the Princesse de Conti, M. de Guise’s sister and one of her Majesty’s most devoted adherents, every evening.
“I told him,” says Bassompierre, “that I had not seen Monsieur the morning I left Paris, and that I had not taken leave of him the previous evening; that I had not yet said a word to the Queen-Mother, except aloud; that it was the duty of a courier, and not of a marshal of France, to be the bearer of such powers, which would have come too late, if God had not miraculously cured the King; that, for ten years past, I had had no other lodging at Lyons except the house of my old friend M. d’Alaincourt; that it was not just of late that M. de Créquy and I had lived as brothers, but since our first acquaintance, and that I had frequented the Princesse de Conti’s society for thirty years; that La Ville-aux-Clercs[132] and Guillemeau,[133] who had travelled post with me, could bear witness that M. de Guise had left Paris after me, that he had passed me the first day of my journey when I slept at La Chapelle-la-Reine, that I had overtaken him the following evening at Poully, and that at Moulins, since he was unable to follow me, I preceded him; and that I begged him to assure the Cardinal that I was not a man of faction or intrigue; that I always concerned myself with serving the King well and faithfully first, and afterwards my friends, of whom he was one of the chief, and I had promised him very humble service. This he promised to do, and having been to see him [the Cardinal], I told him in substance the same things, with which he professed to be satisfied.”