Cardinal de Richelieu

If some of those who were privileged to watch, with short-sighted eyes, Richelieu’s apostolic work in the diocese of Luçon, could have read his thoughts and sometimes looked over his shoulder, they might have been somewhat startled. Probably his contemporaries knew nothing of certain rapidly scrawled sheets in the Cardinal’s familiar writing, which were discovered by M. Armand Baschet among the old manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale, about thirty years ago. The sheets are headed, “Instructions et Maximes que je me suis donné pour me conduire à la Cour.” At first the date was a little disputed; but internal evidence seems to show that Richelieu wrote these pages of notes in the winter of 1609, or early in 1610, when at the background of his thoughts, apparently all busy with evangelising Bas-Poitou, the desire for public life and power was waxing stronger every day. It was not likely indeed that such a young race-horse, keen, nervous, swift and delicate in body and brain, would long be contented to plough the heavy wastes of the muddiest diocese in France.

In his hours of solitude he dreamed of King and Court, and planned every detail of behaviour that might please the great Henry. From an eastern window, one may fancy, he gazed over the wide plains towards Paris, his Jerusalem, the real centre of his worship, the goal of that flaming ambition which, with him, largely usurped the place of all other passions. Then he wrote down his dreams, so clear, so businesslike, so full of prudence and self-control, that they could hardly fail to come true. It would have been amazing if the genius that so vividly pointed him the way had not led him to the height of his desires.

It seems worth while to give a few extracts from this curious Mémoire for the sake of the light it throws on Richelieu’s mind. He changed very little until absolute power made careful personal observation and dissimulation unnecessary.

Through all his pages there is only one mention of God or of religion; with this his first paragraph abruptly begins.

“There is so much licence and there are so many kinds of diversions, that if one does not give to God the first thoughts and the first hours of the day, it is hard, amid company and business, to serve Him at all.... I will therefore choose a lodging which is not far either from God or from the King.”

He thinks it is hardly advisable to make a point of waiting on the King every day. That is all very well for courtiers who have nothing else to do.

“... But in the first days after my arrival at Court, I shall present myself every day until he has been pleased to speak or to listen to me ... after which it will be enough to appear in Paris once a week and at Fontainebleau every third day.... If one presents one’s self merely to see the King, one must stand within sight when he is at table; if to speak to him, one must draw near to his chair. Take care to stay discourse when the King drinks.

“The words most agreeable to the King are those which exalt his royal virtues. He likes keen points and sudden repartees. He prefers those who speak boldly—but with respect. It is well to fall back constantly on the cadence that by ill luck one has been able to do him service only in small matters, and that there is nothing too great or impossible to be done, with good will, for so good a master and so great a king.

“It is important to notice which way the wind blows, and not to take him in a humour when he cares to speak to no one and kicks against everybody.

“As to other great men, one must visit them ... remembering that sacrifices are paid both to the harmful and the favourable gods.... The best time is the morning, in order to accompany them when they go out, and I think this the most honourable. Some choose the time when they return for dinner, and run the risk of being sent off without a word.”

He speaks scornfully of the “strange servitude” endured by those who “follow tables” day by day, wasting hours in search of a dinner.

“... At table, if one must talk, one should take care that the discourse is of indifferent matters; history; descriptions of countries; towns; powerful families; laws and customs. Questions of State, commerce, astrology, fortification, music and other science ... without pedantry, and without showing too curiously what one knows.

“And because in these conversations one learns more than by reading the best books ... they should be carefully noted down in a book, of which every page should be marked with some significant word or name.”

M. Baschet, and other students of Richelieu’s manuscripts, have noticed how curiously these words foreshadow the habit of his whole life—to write everything down, “maxims, reflexions, facts,” for correct remembrance and future use.

He dwells much on the need of discretion in dealing with the great, their sayings and doings, and on the serious peril that lies in pleading for one’s friends, so often malcontent and unreasonable. But he will not, he says, follow in the path of those who promise and do not perform.

As to more personal caution: “Turn away the ear from those who would tell of other people’s business, and never repeat what they say, still less what they do.”

This was hardly the favourite maxim in after life of the man who employed more spies than any one else in history.

Letters to friends he finds perilous, having had experience of the same.

“In letters written to friends one must take care that there is nothing to injure either him who writes or him who receives, for these are occasions much spied upon and desired by enemies, and which bring about repentance and confusion. As to that, I remember what I wrote on the execution of the Maréchal de Biron, whereof the King spoke to me, and after His Majesty Monsieur de Villeroy....

“In letters of compliment which may be shown, I shall write no new thing and no opinion except as to common things which may be published without peril.... I shall keep a copy of important letters.... Writing to the same person several letters in one packet, I shall mark by number those first to be read.... I shall reply to all those who write to me, and shall forget nothing which should be considered either in their quality or their discourse. No one, not even a Knight of the Order, should be dispensed from answering a letter from one greatly his inferior.... One should read letters more than once before answering them.... Letters of importance, carefully kept, serve more purposes than one thinks when one receives them.... The fire should keep those which the casket cannot keep with safety.... I shall carefully cultivate the acquaintance and friendship of one or two Commissioners of the Post, in order that letters may be more faithfully delivered and forwarded with care and diligence....”

So much for correspondence. The later notes deal with a courtier’s most difficult study, dissimulation, and here, as elsewhere, it strikes one how large a part of Richelieu’s commanding genius lay in “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” His advice to himself is mostly—“Silence.”

“Not to publish abroad what has been said in confidence: Not to divulge any affair that may cause scandal: Not to discover one’s own plans, which being discovered may fail: Not to show that we are aware of the faults and the bad actions of others, because men with these faults hate those who know them: Not to show that we perceive the ill-will men bear to ourselves or to those whom we love: Not to show that we know any harm men have done us, or that we feel ourselves offended: Not to run any risk of brawls and quarrels.... To all these ends, silence is necessary and is not reprehensible. And though it may be very hard to live with one’s friends in this manner and to be silent as to their affairs, nevertheless reason teaches us to fix our eyes on what signifies most, and to do no harm or prejudice to ourselves.”

Here, a thought of sinning against truth and sincerity seems to have troubled the Bishop a little, for he ends by trying to explain how a man may with difficulty steer between two risks, “the reproach of lying and the peril of truth.” His counsel is, “Make a timely and cautious retreat without downright falsehood, saying nothing that ought not to be said.” Finally, “Be very reserved in words and in writing, and neither say nor write what is not absolutely necessary.”

Altogether a severe set of rules to be followed by a fiery, proud and impatient nature.

Imagination, of course, should not be allowed to play with history: but considering that the exact date of Richelieu’s “Instructions et Maximes” is not and never can be known, one may venture to fancy that he laid down his pen on a certain day in May 1610, just as the post from Paris had clattered into his courtyard, bringing crushing news for France and for himself. Henry, “un si bon maître et si grand Roy,” had been stabbed to death by the fanatic hand of Ravaillac, leaving his country in the hands of a weak woman just crowned, a melancholy little boy, and a group of princes and great nobles, greedy of money and power.

We have the very letter in which this news came to Richelieu. His faithful Sébastien Bouthillier was in Paris at the time, and wrote to him immediately after the tragic event. He had intended, he said, to send him an account of the Queen’s coronation; but had been interrupted by “the most strange and fatal accident.”

“On Friday, the 14th, His Majesty had gone to the Rue Saint-Denis to see the preparations for the Queen’s entry, and, returning, was in the street called de la Ferronnerie, when a wicked man, or rather the most execrable monster on earth, climbed on the hinder part of the coach inside which His Majesty was, and, unrestrained by the respect and fear due to the Lord’s anointed and the greatest prince in the world, attacking him from behind whose face brought terror to his enemies and assurance to all his subjects, gave him two blows with a knife, of which the first was not mortal, although both went through the body. When the report ran through Paris that the King was dead, you cannot imagine, Sir, the grief of all the people, the amazement of the nobles, every one sad and cast down; and yet, in the midst of this general sadness, it was courageously resolved to establish the Queen as regent, so that, three hours after the catastrophe, the King having expired, the Court of Parliament assembled at the Augustins, M. le Prince de Conti, MM. de Guise, d’Épernon, de Montbazon and many others being present, and verified the letters patent of the Regency which the late King had caused to be made out.”

The Abbé goes on to describe the sorrowful and loyal reception of the young Louis XIII., on Saturday, at the Palais de Justice, and then adds what he knows will interest his Bishop more than any other Parisian news he can send him at the moment.

“I must tell you that M. le Cardinal du Perron shows on all occasions the esteem in which he holds you; for I hear that when there was talk a few months ago, in his presence, of the young prelates of France, and when some one spoke of you in terms of praise, according to the reputation you have gained, M. le Cardinal said that you should not be counted among the young prelates, that the oldest ought to give way to you, and that for his own part he was ready to be an example to the rest. M. de Richelieu, to whom this was said, repeated it to me in so many words.”

This penetrating Cardinal du Perron, Archbishop of Sens, was one of the loftiest ecclesiastical figures of the time. Theologian and politician, he had been Richelieu’s chief patron in Paris, and his words, as Sébastien Bouthillier very well knew, were not a mere piece of flattery addressed to Richelieu’s brother.

Though the terror and excitement in Paris were much greater than Bouthillier reported, France, as a whole, seems to have kept its head at this tragical time, the provinces remaining quiet. This may have been due to the fact that the news, as it travelled down with rolling wheels, galloping hoofs, running feet, into the depths of the country, caused more grief than surprise. It had long been prophesied that Henry would die a violent death, and such prophecies, no doubt, sometimes bring their own fulfilment. For the last four or five years, every natural marvel or disaster had been counted as an evil omen for the King. “Heaven and earth,” says Péréfixe, “had given only too many prognostications of what happened to him. A very great eclipse of the sun, which came to pass in the year 1608; a terrible comet, which appeared in the preceding year; quakings of the earth; monstrous births in divers parts of France; a rain of blood, which fell in several places; a great plague, which afflicted Paris in the year 1606; apparitions of phantoms, and many other prodigies, held men in dread of some horrible event.”

The King’s death was actually reported in Italy, Spain, and even Flanders, some time before it took place; written predictions were found in churches, and bells tolled of themselves; women, especially nuns, had frightful dreams and visions of murder; it was even known that Ravaillac, the melancholy madman of the Angoumois, was consulting his conscience as to whether a King who contemplated war with Catholic Spain ought to live or die. This tale reached the Queen, through an unlucky woman, the Dame d’Escoman, whose reward for having meddled in the matter was imprisonment for life. That Marie de Médicis, supported by her Concini favourites, secretly wished and plotted for Henry’s death, is probably one of the most cruel slanders ever invented by the enemies of a queen.

The prophecies and portents were not unknown to the King, and although he was certainly neither timid nor credulous, they depressed his gay spirit. During those last months he appeared, says Péréfixe, “as if he were condemned to death.” A heavy presentiment weighed upon him. He dreaded the Queen’s coronation—“ce maudit sacre”—and told Sully that he knew he would die in a coach. Indeed he, so daring in war, had long been curiously nervous when driving in the Paris streets; and on the fatal day, though he wished to visit the Arsenal, where his friend and Minister lay ill, he doubted and hesitated before leaving the Louvre. “Shall I go? Shall I not go?” he said several times to the Queen. Alarmed at his strange dejection, Marie begged him to stay; but he kissed her affectionately, bade her adieu, and went straight to his death in the Rue de la Ferronnerie.

Thus the Bishop of Luçon was deprived of the royal patron from whom he had hoped so much. But he seems to have wasted very little time in mourning his own and the country’s loss. His first thought was to bring himself before the Queen, to gain a footing in the new Court, different in many ways from the old. And this did not appear to be a difficult task for a young and quick-witted man. The day of old men, old soldiers, old courtiers and friends of “le Béarnais,” was over.

The Bishop of Luçon had already friends and supporters in the Regent’s intimate circle. His brother and brother-in-law, Henry de Richelieu and René de Vignerot, Seigneur du Pont-de-Courlay, were among her most favoured courtiers. The Marquise de Guercheville, her lady of honour, accustomed to courts since the days of Catherine de Médicis, was a connection on the Du Plessis side; and two at least of the young maids of honour bore familiar family names—Pont-de-Courlay, Meilleraye. At this time, too, the Père de Bérulle, Richelieu’s personal friend, had great influence with the Queen, and the same might be said of the Père Cotton, the late King’s confessor. The Jesuits did not yet regard Richelieu as an enemy.

It was not till after long delays, however, that the Bishop of Luçon reached the Queen-Regent’s distinguished favour and the front of affairs. His first step was a hurried and an unlucky one. On the 22nd of May he wrote out a curious document, a kind of oath of allegiance and declaration of loyalty to the young King and his mother, from himself as Bishop and Baron, his dean, canons, and clergy. He sent this paper to his brother in Paris, begging him to deliver it into the Queen’s own hands. Henry de Richelieu’s worldly wisdom at once refused this favour. Such zeal was quite out of place, he said: Cela ne se fait pas: nobody else in the kingdom had done anything of the sort, and he, an experienced courtier, would not allow his forward brother to push himself by such means. Bouthillier was employed to send this discouraging reply to the Bishop, whose restless eagerness it hardly served to check.

It convinced him, indeed, that nothing was to be done from a distance, and that the best of relations and friends would not help a man who was not on the spot to help himself. Early in June we find him writing to Madame de Bourges about a permanent lodging in Paris. As he intends to spend some time there every year, he wants advice as to situation and cost, also as to furniture, tapestry, plate, wine, etc. Poor as ever in purse, he is no less determined to make a good show in the capital: “C’est grande pitié que de pauvre noblesse, mais il n’y a remède: contre fortune bon cœur.”

He went to Paris, and remained there for some months; but it was an unhappy and a disappointing visit. During these early days of her regency, Marie de Médicis had neither power nor leisure to make new friends. Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre, and his wife Leonora, reigned at the Louvre, though hardly yet outside it. The peace of the kingdom, according to Richelieu’s own Memoirs, depended on the princes—Condé, Soissons, d’Épernon, Guise, and their like. In these first months they kept it unbroken, and all, Parliament, nobles, statesmen, churchmen, municipalities, governors of provinces, were ready “to serve the King under the guidance of the Queen.” The Huguenots were pacified, for the moment, by the renewal of the Edict of Nantes. But the “grands de la cour” did not give their allegiance for nothing. Henry’s old Ministers, holding on to power with many searchings of heart, were forced to consent to the enormous bribes demanded by everybody. These “gratifications extraordinaires” were scattered with open hand among greedy nobles and courtiers, and, added to the Queen’s own personal extravagance, were likely soon to empty Henry’s precious coffers, so painfully filled. As to the Duc de Sully, whose rough temper, bad manners and comparative honesty had long made him unpopular at Court, a conspiracy among the nobles forced on his retirement in the winter of 1610. All these warring interests and anxieties, with visits from special foreign embassies, with the young King’s coronation at Rheims, with the question of war or peace beyond the frontiers, made a social whirlpool of Paris and the Court.

The young provincial Bishop, without money or claims, whose few personal friends were naturally more interested in their own affairs than in his, found himself left behind in the race for power and fortune. His old enemy, fever, seized on him again and laid him low: Paris proved more unhealthy than even the marshes of Luçon. Terribly depressed by illness, he was irritated and annoyed by letters from his Cathedral chapter, complaining of disorders in the diocese, and he wrote sharply in answer, following his letters early in the year 1611. There was no advantage to be gained by staying in Paris, neglected and obscure.

Through all the first half of this year, Richelieu was in a Slough of Despond both mental and physical, brooding over difficulties and disappointments, and constantly ill with fever. It seems that in these dark days Père Joseph was his good angel.

The clever Capuchin had a troublesome affair on hand: the management of a woman who, though “illustre religieuse et grande servante de Dieu,” was resolved to follow her own way and not that which director, Pope and King had marked out for her. Père Joseph was a crusader by nature, and a reformer to the backbone, with a fiery obstinacy and positive, autocratic will. He had already reformed several convents in Poitou, in which the civil war, the invasion of an outside world, had strangely travestied the religious life. Some of these convents belonged to the great Benedictine Order of Fontevrault; and even in the Mother House itself, under the gentle and charitable guidance of Madame Eléonore de Bourbon, the strictness of the old Rule was half forgotten.

Madame Antoinette d’Orléans, of the Longueville family, the young widow of the Marquis de Belle-Isle, had become a nun at Toulouse, at a convent of the Feuillantines, and asked nothing better than to spend her remaining days there. But she was known to Père Joseph as a woman like-minded with himself, an enthusiast and a saint; and when, in 1604, a bull of Pope Paul V. appointed her Coadjutrix of her aunt the Abbess of Fontevrault, the young reformer welcomed her as an ally in his work. And as far as outside convents were concerned, she did not disappoint him. But though she loyally helped and supported the old Abbess in the government of the Order, her heart was never at Fontevrault. Her religious ideals were totally different from those of the two hundred or more Sisters who marched with such stately dignity through the venerable cloisters and took their high place in the choir where Plantagenets slept. Their rich possessions, their amusements—innocent enough, for Fontevrault, owing to the character of its long and regal line of abbesses, was never seriously touched by scandal; their little parties and cabals and gossip—good women, simple in faith and practice, but not lofty-minded or mystical: all this fell far below the standard of Madame d’Orléans, and her one desire was to escape from her dignity, to return to her “dear solitude.” As she had never formally accepted the office of Coadjutrix, with the prospect of succession, this did not seem impossible.

The difficulty was that Père Joseph would not let her go. In her authority and influence he saw the only means by which the reform of the great Abbey might be carried through. There were divisions in the community; some of the nuns being ready to welcome a change, others strongly opposed to it. Père Joseph and Madame de Bourbon both saw that no unanimity was to be hoped for, as long as the future was known to be uncertain.

Père Joseph took the matter into his own hands, and settled it by a coup d’état, secret and sudden. After a private consultation with the King in Council, he wrote to the Pope; and Paul V., convinced by his arguments, commanded Madame d’Orléans, under pain of excommunication, to accept her office immediately with all the duties it involved, and to assume the government of the Order, with the certainty of succeeding her aunt as Abbess of Fontevrault.

The command fell on Madame d’Orléans like a thunder-bolt, but she could only obey. The consequence was what Père Joseph had desired and foreseen. The new ruler, once forced to rule, advanced “à pas de géant” in the appointed way. In one short week Fontevrault was reformed; every one of the nuns accepting the inevitable, all giving up their worldly indulgences, and returning to the old strict regulation of work and prayer.

This happy state of things went on for two years, and Père Joseph, seeing his reformation well at work, was occupied with his other duties as a director of souls—especially of that of the Duchesse de Montpensier, living retired at Champigny and mourning both her husband and her father, the Capuchin Duc de Joyeuse, who did not long survive his son-in-law—when Madame d’Orléans played him the same trick he had played her. She wrote secretly to the Pope, imploring him to have compassion on her trouble of mind, explaining how seriously her “tumultuous occupations” interfered with her personal sanctification, and praying him to withdraw his command that she should succeed Madame de Bourbon and to allow her, on her aunt’s death, to return to her beloved Feuillantines of Toulouse. She begged His Holiness to inquire into the matter through commissaries of his own, without consulting Père Joseph. The Pope did as she wished, and she received full liberty to go where she pleased. Then she sent for Père Joseph and told him all, on condition that nothing should be said to Madame de Bourbon. The old Abbess was to die in peace, imagining that her Coadjutrix would succeed her.

Père Joseph needed all his prudence and self-control, says his biographer, to hide his vexation at being thus “joué par une Princesse.”

But the thing was done, and he made the best of it, secretly hoping that, “women being naturally inconstant,” the joy of supreme authority might yet induce Madame d’Orléans to change her mind.

On March 26, 1611, at the age of seventy-eight, Madame Eléonore de Bourbon died. To all appearance, her Coadjutrix was ready to accept the succession. She even seemed to listen with favour to the persuasions of Père Joseph, who pointed out in glowing terms her duty to the Order. It was near the end of Lent, and Madame d’Orléans held her peace until after the Festival of Easter. On Low Sunday, having assembled the Community, she announced to them that she was about to write to the King and the Queen Regent, praying them to nominate an abbess in her stead.

This was a heavy blow to Père Joseph, and the affair was complicated by his knowledge of the fact that Madame d’Orléans did not now wish to return to Toulouse, but dreamed of founding a new convent in the province of Poitou, where the religious life, as she understood it, would be lived in all devotion and austerity.

Père Joseph, who with all his cleverness and strength had an attractive modesty, felt himself unequal to dealing alone with this reverend lady, and with the discord and confusion she had caused at Fontevrault. This, at least, was the reason he gave for his appeal to the Bishop of Luçon, “whose superior and transcendent genius had enchanted him,” and who happened to be residing very near Fontevrault, at his Priory of Les Roches.

The Abbey of Fontevrault was quite independent of episcopal authority, and it was only as representing the Pope or the King that any bishop had the right to enter it. Père Joseph appealed to Richelieu as a friend; and, judging from his lifelong devotion, it may be imagined that he joyfully seized this opportunity of rousing the Bishop from the state of fever-stricken depression in which he had returned from Paris. Here, if ever, was a case of a man’s “sharpening the countenance of his friend.” The dying flame was blown into life; hope took suddenly the place of something very like despair. The Capuchin discussed his difficulties with the Bishop, and they agreed that the whole question must be laid before the Queen Regent. Therefore they travelled together to Fontainebleau, where the Court was staying, amid all the enchantment of its exquisite spring.

Marie de Médicis, at this time, was far from happy. A year had passed since Henry’s death; and to a woman both lazy and power-loving, the quarrels, ambitions, jealousies, of the princes and courtiers, each day harder to satisfy, were a constant torment; matters not being improved by the insolent pride of Concini, who posed as the equal of them all. The envoys from Poitou, asking nothing for themselves—no one dreamed that these two men, one ugly, grave, humble in appearance, the other delicate, worn, exhausted, would one day rule France and influence Europe—were graciously received by the Queen; and it appears that Père Joseph, in a few moments of private conversation after the Fontevrault business had been explained, spoke to her of his companion in terms of enthusiastic praise, as “a man of sublime genius and extraordinary merit, capable of the highest employments.” The words remained in the Queen’s mind and bore fruit, though not immediately.

The Bishop and the friar returned to Fontevrault, bearing the royal permission for the community to choose an abbess among themselves; but in the presence and with the consent of the Bishop of Luçon and Père Joseph. The solemn election took place in the summer, when the Grand Prioress, Madame Louise de Lavedan de Bourbon, was naturally chosen.

Madame Antoinette d’Orléans retired to Lencloître, a half-ruined convent of the Order near Poitiers, and was there joined by many nuns from all parts of France, and even from Fontevrault itself, who desired to lead a stricter life under her guidance. It was not long before she founded, with the help and approval of Père Joseph and the Bishops of Luçon and Poitiers, a congregation known as Les Filles du Calvaire, independent of Fontevrault, the object of which was the practice of the Rule of St. Benedict in all its austere purity.

Pushed constantly to the front by Père Joseph, and with no unwillingness on his own part, the Bishop of Luçon added much to his reputation by his conduct of these affairs; State affairs, they might almost be called, considering the rank of those concerned and the wealth and political importance of the great Order of Fontevrault.