About the same time, a loss more bitter even than that of his liberty befell Bassompierre. The Princesse de Conti, to whom he was secretly married and was undoubtedly most tenderly attached, died at the Château of Eu on the last day of April, a victim, according to her contemporaries, to the grief which the misfortunes which had overwhelmed those whom she held dear had occasioned her. For, not only had the Queen-Mother been disgraced and her husband sent to the Bastille, but her eldest brother, the Duc de Guise, had deemed it prudent to go into voluntary exile in Italy, to escape a worse fate.
Very discreet in general concerning the names of the ladies with whom he had successes—“Bassompierre fait l’amour sans dire mot,” writes a Court poet of the time—the marshal preserves about his relations with the princess a scrupulous reserve, and his restrained emotion when he announces her death is the only indication of his sentiments for her which are to be found in his Mémoires:
“I learned at the same time of the death of the Princesse de Conti, which occasioned me such affliction as was merited by the honour which, since my arrival at the Court, I had received from this princess, who, besides so many other perfections which have rendered her worthy of admiration, had that of being a very good and very obliging friend. I shall honour her memory and regret her for the rest of my days. She was so overwhelmed by grief at seeing herself separated from the Queen-Mother, with whom she had remained since the latter came to France, so afflicted at seeing her family persecuted and her friends and servants in disgrace, that she was neither willing nor able to survive, and died at Eu, on Monday, the last day of April, of that unhappy year 1631.”
Assured of the firm support of the King, Richelieu continued to carry matters with a high hand. The Parlement of Paris refused to register the Royal Declaration of March 30, which, without inculpating Monsieur, stigmatised the accomplices of his flight as guilty of lèse-majesté. On May 13 the magistrates were summoned in a body to the Louvre, where Louis XIII curtly reminded them that their duty was to render justice to his subjects, and not to concern themselves with affairs of State. And, to give point to this rebuke, several presidents and counsellors were banished from Paris.
The excitement which the dissensions in the Royal family had aroused, and the fact that public opinion was distinctly hostile to the Cardinal, rendered it essential to remove the Queen-Mother so far as possible from the Court and Paris. Louis XIII requested her to retire to Moulins, with the government of the Bourbonnais, as a kind of honourable exile. She consented, but quickly altered her mind, pretending that her son had fixed upon Moulins in order to send her from there to Florence. Then the King offered her Angers as a residence. To this also she objected, but agreed to go to Nevers for a time. When, however, she learned that Monsieur had quitted France, she declined to budge from Compiègne.
Early in July, the King, finding that neither his entreaties nor his orders had any effect upon his mother, sent her a kind of ultimatum. Instead of obeying, Marie resolved to retire to a frontier town and from there dictate her conditions. One of her adherents, Vardes, who commanded at La Capelle, in the name of his father, offered to deliver the place to her; but the King, warned of his intention, sent the old Marquis de Vardes in hot haste to La Capelle, who won over the garrison and expelled his son and the Queen-Mother’s friends from the town. When Marie, who had escaped from Compiègne on July 18, approached La Capelle, she was met by the younger Vardes, who informed her of the failure of their plans, which left her no alternative but to cross the Flemish frontier and seek an asylum with the Spaniards at Brussels.
At the beginning of 1632 some hope of his regaining his liberty was held out to Bassompierre. “But,” says he, “I believe that this was done rather to redouble my sufferings by deceiving my hopes than to alleviate my misfortunes.” Anyway, he remained a prisoner, and soon afterwards another sorrow befell him in the death of his brother, the Marquis de Removille, from an illness caused by the hardships he had undergone while serving in the Imperial army during the preceding year.
Early in May Bassompierre learned of the tragic fate of his fellow-marshal, Louis de Marillac, who, after having been kept a prisoner at Sainte-Menehould for several months, was brought to trial before a special commission sitting at Richelieu’s own château of Rueil, on charges of malversation committed while in command of the Army of Champagne, found guilty, condemned to death and executed in the Place de Grève two days later.
A still more striking example of the danger of crossing the path of the terrible Cardinal—for no one doubted that had not Louis de Marillac been so ill-advised as to desert Richelieu’s cause for that of the Queen-Mother, little or nothing would have been heard of his weakness for enriching himself at the expense of the State—was afforded in the following autumn.
In September Monsieur and his friends, counting on Austro-Spanish aid, which, however, failed them completely, attempted an invasion of France. The Duc de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, irritated by the growing power of Richelieu and his determination to reduce great nobles like himself to political impotence, took up arms in Gaston’s cause. Defeated and made prisoner by Schomberg at Castelnaudary, he was brought to trial for high treason before the Parlement of Toulouse. Extraordinary efforts were made to save him, but all to no purpose, and on October 29, 1632, the head of “the noblest, wealthiest, handsomest and most pious gentleman in the kingdom” rolled on the scaffold.[140]