“And, afterwards, when it was mentioned to the Cardinal de Richelieu, he observed that it was very strange that I should ask money of the King for my corn, seeing that I was so rich that I was building a sumptuous house at Chaillot; that I was having such splendid furniture made that the King had nothing like it, and that during the six years I had been in prison I still maintained such great state that it was impossible to equal it.[145]
“A few days later, in the same month, the Duke of Weimar was authorised by the King to refresh his army in the county of Vaudemont and in my marquisate of Harouel, which was delivered over to pillage. This he executed so well, that every kind of plunder, cruelty, and atrocity was practised there, and my estate entirely destroyed, save the château, which could not be taken by this army, which had no artillery.
“At the end of the month of May the troops of the said Duke of Bernard of Weimar attacked our château of Removille, where five or six hundred peasants of both sexes and of every age had taken refuge. They carried it by assault on the 28th, and killed the men and the old women who were there, carried away the young women, after violating them, and, having pillaged the château, burned it with the children who were in it.”
In July of the following year the Château of Harouel, which had been occupied by the troops of the Duke of Lorraine, was bombarded by the King’s troops, and, after seventy cannon-shot had been fired at it, was surrendered to the French commander, who left a garrison of thirty soldiers there, to be maintained at Bassompierre’s expense.
In August, 1636, Bassompierre’s niece, Madame de Beuvron, went to the Cardinal to solicit her uncle’s liberty.
“But he answered her, in mockery, that I had been only three years in the Bastille and that M. d’Angoulême had been there fourteen; that the duke was returning very opportunely to give some good advice on the subject of my liberation. I omitted to mention that, at the alarm of the passage of the Somme,[146] MM. d’Angoulême, de la Rochefoucauld, M. de Valençay and other persons who had been exiled were recalled; but anger and hatred continued against me in such fashion, that, not only had they neither consideration nor compassion for my long sufferings, but, on the contrary, wished to increase them by this derision and mockery.”
It might be supposed that if, in these circumstances, Bassompierre had little to hope for, he had little to fear. Such, however, was not the case. Some notes written by him in the margin of a history of the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII, composed by the Historiographer Royal, Scipion Dupleix, the proofs of which are said to have been corrected by Richelieu himself, were published under his name, but entirely without his authority, by a monk named Père Renaud, the confessor of his fellow-prisoner the Abbé de Foix, to whom he had lent the copy containing them. The marshal’s criticisms were probably pretty stringent, but those which appeared in print were a great deal more so, and the work aroused a considerable sensation. Dupleix complained to the Cardinal, and, says Bassompierre, “they did not fail to report the matter to the King and to tell him that it appeared evident from these memoirs that I entertained an aversion to his person and State.”
About the same time, a soldier of the Light Cavalry named Valbois was arrested and brought to the Bastille, charged with having recited a sonnet against the Cardinal, beginning, ‘Mettre Bassompierre en prison;’ and the marshal was warned by his friends outside to destroy all his papers which might be capable of injuring him, as it was intended to seize them, with a view to bringing him to trial.
“I confess,” writes Bassompierre, “that this last warning, which followed so many unfortunate incidents, was almost sufficient to destroy my reason. It was the 9th of October [1637] that I received it. I passed six nights without closing an eye, and in an agony which was worse to me than death.”
Finally, however, Valbois, after being interrogated several times, probably with the object of ascertaining whether Bassompierre had had anything to do with the composition of the objectionable sonnet, was set at liberty, and, as no action was taken against him, the marshal’s mind became calmer. Nevertheless, he appears to have lived in constant apprehension lest his papers should be impounded; and this no doubt accounts for the fact that, in his Mémoires, the composition of which were now his chief occupation, he exercises a rigorous discretion in his comments on current events, although he was kept informed by his friends of everything that was happening in the world outside. “I shall say nothing,” he writes naïvely, as though to shelter himself from all reproach, “of the quarrel between the King and the Queen ... of the punishment of the nuns of the Val-de-Grâce ... of the dismissal of the King’s confessor, Père Caussin ... nor, finally, of the entry of the Chancellor into the Val-de-Grâce, where he caused the Queen’s cabinets and caskets to be broken open, in order to seize the papers which she had placed in them.”