Cinq-Mars fell madly in love with Marion Delorme and wished to make her "Madame la Grande," but the dowager Marquise de Cinq-Mars would not hear of it: Mlle. Marion Delorme, the Aspasia of her day, would be no honour to the ancestral tree of the Effiats of Cinq-Mars.
Headstrong and wilful, one early morning, Monsieur le Grand and his beloved, then only thirty, took coach from her hotel in the Rue des Tournelles at Paris for the old family castle in Touraine, sitting high on the hills above the feudal village which bore the name of Cinq-Mars. In the chapel they were secretly married, and for eight days the proverbial marriage-bell rang true. Their Nemesis appeared on the ninth day in the person of the dowager, and Cinq-Mars told his mother that the whole affair was simply a passe temps, and that Mlle. Delorme was still Mlle. Delorme. His mother would not be deceived, however, and she flew for succour to Richelieu, who himself was more than slightly acquainted with the charms of the fair Marion.
This was Cinq-Mars's downfall. He advised the king "by fair means or foul, let Richelieu die," and the king listened. A conspiracy was formed, by Cinq-Mars and others, to do away with the cardinal, and even the king, at whose death Gaston of Orleans was to be proclaimed regent for his nephew, the infant Louis XIV.
The court went to Narbonne, on the Mediterranean, that it might be near aid from Spain; all of which was a subterfuge of Cinq-Mars. The rest moves quickly: Richelieu discovered the plot; Cinq-Mars attempted to flee disguised as a Spaniard, was captured and brought as a prisoner to the castle at Montpellier.
Richelieu had proved the more powerful of the two; but he was dying, and this is the reason, perhaps, why he hurried matters. Cinq-Mars, "the amiable criminal," went to the torture-chamber, and afterward to the scaffold.
"Then," say the old chronicles, "Richelieu ordered that the feudal castle of Cinq-Mars, in the valley of the Loire, should be blown up, and the towers razed to the height of infamy."
From Cinq-Mars to Langeais, whose château is really one of the most appealing sights of the Loire, the characteristics of the country are topographically and economically the same; green hills slope, vine-covered, to the river, with here and there a tiny rivulet flowing into the greater stream.
As at Cinq-Mars, the chief commodity of Langeais is wine, rich, red wine and pale amber, too, but all of it wine of a quality and at a price which would make the city-dweller envious indeed.
There are two distinct châteaux at Langeais; at least, there is the château, and just beyond the ornamental stone-carpet of its courtyard are the ruins of one of the earliest donjons, or keeps, in all France. It dates from the year 990, and was built by the celebrated Comte d'Anjou, Foulques Nerra, "un criminel dévoyé des hommes et de Dieu," whose hobby, evidently, was building châteaux, as his "follies" in stone are said to have encumbered the land in those old days.
Taken and retaken, dismantled and in part razed in the fifteenth century, it gave place to the present château by the orders of Louis XI.