Cardinal de Richelieu

The Cardinal and his palaces—The château and town of Richelieu—The Palais-Cardinal—Richelieu’s household, daily life, and friends—The Hôtel de Rambouillet—Mademoiselle de Gournay—Boisrobert and the first Academicians—Entertainments at the Palais-Cardinal—Mirame.

The restless, ambitious energy and the passion for detail which made Cardinal de Richelieu the hardest worker of his time in politics, were thrown equally into his characteristic amusements. His love of building and furnishing splendidly carried him far beyond such pleasant country-houses as Rueil, Limours, or Bois-le-Vicomte, luxurious as they were. The Palais-Cardinal itself, in the heart of Paris and almost royal, had certain limitations, the architect being blamed for a lack of height and dignity. Le Mercier excused himself, we are told, by the Cardinal’s own orders: he desired to give no cause for jealousy to the great ones of the kingdom who did not love him “because of the extreme hauteur with which he treated them, and to show moderation, even in the disposing of his palace, in the sight of those powerful persons who were envious of such prodigious credit and grandeur.”

No scruples interfered in the lonely valley of the Mable, where for miles around the name of Richelieu now had no rival. Even Champigny, the once dreaded house of the Montpensiers, had come into the Cardinal’s possession by a more or less forced exchange with Gaston d’Orléans, his little daughter’s untrustworthy guardian. The fine old château was pulled down; its former outbuildings make the château of to-day; and the chapel, with its precious windows, its tombs and picturesque cloister, was only saved by the Pope’s refusal to consent to its destruction. The Cardinal-Duc, though First Minister of France and head of her army and navy, could not flatly disobey the Church in a private matter.

There is more actually left of the old Montpensier buildings than of the magnificent palace, foreshadowing the splendour of Versailles, into which Cardinal de Richelieu transformed the river-fortress of his ancestors. Wide lawns, stiff alleys and avenues, still moats with water-lilies, one small pavilion looking sadly over the trees towards a high gateway where no one seems to enter; this is all that remains of the far-famed Château de Richelieu.

It was in the year 1625, soon after he came to power, that the Cardinal visited Richelieu with Madame de Combalet, and resolved on the transformation. After this the work went on for years, and was hardly finished when he died, though long before that the palace was the admiration of Europe, only surpassed in France by Fontainebleau. It was approached by an avenue a mile and a quarter long, ending in an immense demi-lune on which the first court opened by a stately gateway with flanking pavilions. This court led to a second; a bridge over the moat which, as in old days, surrounded the actual château, gave admittance to another gateway under a dome, guarded by a figure of Renown and other mythological statues. Within this was the cour d’honneur, a square of great buildings, with high pavilions at the four corners and in the centre opposite the gateway. Here was the grand staircase of variegated marble; and here, after the ruin of the House of Montmorency, stood the famous Slaves of Michel Angelo, brought from the Duke’s Château of Écouen. Statues and busts were everywhere.

The further front, beyond another bridge, looked upon square gardens “embroidered with flowers,” where peacocks strutted, and through which flowed the imprisoned Mable in a broad canal full of fish. Beyond this again was another vast half-moon space of garden and parterre, with statues, fountains, grottoes, an orangery, and a chapel; and all was surrounded by the great deer-park and the woods in ordered beauty, long alleys striking into them, lost in the shade.

The decoration, in and out, of this wonderful place shared the Cardinal’s thoughts with the keenest interests of his political life; and the collection of works of art, for Richelieu and the Palais-Cardinal, meant in itself a large correspondence. Besides all this, he had undertaken to create a town outside the gates of his new palace, its main street to be of hôtels on one dignified plan, after the model of the Place Royale, built for themselves by his chief officers and the nobles whom he meant to attend his Court at Richelieu. That Court was never held, but the town rose out of the earth, “as if by enchantment,” with all kinds of privileges and immunities granted by the King, and its symmetrical buildings have long survived their raison d’être, the château. There is indeed more life now in that seventeenth-century street than when La Fontaine wrote of its admired but monotonous rows of houses:

The Cardinal’s devoted friend, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, acted as surveyor of the works at Richelieu, and in a letter to him in June 1632, between the execution of Marillac and Monsieur’s invasion of Languedoc, we have evidence of the way in which every exterior and interior detail was thought out by an unresting brain. The painting of the rooms was now in full swing, being mostly designed by Simon Vouet, the King’s favourite painter, and carried out by him and other artists.

After giving orders as to the decoration of a large room above the entrance, the Cardinal proceeds:

“The vaulted cabinet at the side should be painted in grisaille on the stone vaulting, partly by the painter from Lyons, and partly by other painters, who will enrich the grisaille with gold. M. de Bordeaux, being on the spot, will make them agree together as to what each shall do. In this cabinet there must be a wainscot six feet high with a recess to hold rarities, and the said wainscot shall be painted in grisaille of one tint and gilded to match the vaulting. M. Vouet can very well design the paintings.”

Architectural details regarding the level of different rooms, their respective heights, their flat or vaulted ceilings, fill a good part of the letter. Everywhere there are six-foot wainscotings with shelves or recesses for “rarities”; for His Eminence’s collection of objets d’art was already famous in Europe.

Then he goes on to the gardens.

“My uncle tells me that the canal at Richelieu is full of weeds. At the end of the summer, when the lawns are levelled and the masons are no longer working on the banks of the said canal, it must be entirely drained and all the weeds must be rooted up and burnt in its bed; and when it is clean and dry let it be filled again, and put a boat on it, and make a bargain with a strong and vigorous man who has nothing else to do, that he will not suffer a weed in it but will tear them up as they grow, which may be done with tools of iron made for the purpose. In that country it suffices a man if he have enough to live on, so that I think a hundred francs or forty crowns will acquit me.”

With quite as eager an interest, both now and again later, even when Monsieur is “drawing towards Languedoc” and political storms are darkening all the horizon, he writes of pictures from Mantua that he is sending to Richelieu, of the preservation, with new floors and beams, of his father’s old rooms—a fancy which, in Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s opinion, spoiled the grandeur of the house—of building a park wall; and last, not least, of the new town and the houses that his friends are building there. A little hurry, he thinks, would not be out of place, for he is bent on making Richelieu, his own town, a centre of trade, of justice, of enlightenment, to all the western country.

Though almost incredible, it appears to be a fact that the Cardinal died in 1642 without ever having visited his new palace and little city of Richelieu. Various royal and distinguished guests, however, were entertained there in his lifetime by his niece or other representatives.

But Paris knew the Cardinal intimately well. His last eight years of life and work were chiefly spent at the Palais-Cardinal. From its completion, in the winter of 1633-4, he lived there in almost royal splendour. Though the exterior may have suffered from jealousy in high places, the apartments were far more gorgeous, more heavily luxurious, than those at Richelieu—which must have possessed, from descriptions, a kind of cool beauty and delicate grace suited to the tender lines and colouring of Poitou. At the Palais-Cardinal, the windows were glazed with “large squares of crystal mounted in silver.” Rooms, halls, staircases, galleries, cabinets, were a blaze of colour; there were ceilings all gold, with allegorical pictures in mosaic, to the Cardinal’s glory. The walls were hung with pictures by the greatest artists, French and Italian; there was a gallery of famous men, some of the portraits painted by Philippe de Champagne, others by Simon Vouet. The furniture throughout was magnificent, and the art treasures of every kind represented the work of collectors all over Europe. The gardens, in those early days, were charming in their formal beauty; lawns and clipped box hedges, a mosaic of flowers, long alleys of trees, and a high terrace with a famous iron-work balustrade which was destroyed in 1786 by the bad taste of the Duc de Chartres, then possessor of the palace.

The Cardinal’s household was large, and devoted to him; whatever his character at Court and abroad, at home he was neither an ogre nor a sphinx, but a hard-working, autocratic, fiery, not ungenerous gentleman. His chaplains and almoners could bear witness to his widespread charity, ranging from the sick and poor in the streets of Paris to peasants ruined by war, and from colleges and hospitals to small forgotten convents which found themselves supplied, by his orders, with bread and meat they had no money to buy.

The Cardinal’s household included at least five-and-twenty pages of noble birth, who received the same training in arms, horsemanship, mathematics, and dancing as if they had belonged to Royalty. A number of “gentlemen of condition” waited on him constantly and dined at his second table; the first was reserved for himself—when well enough to be there—and for his intimate friends, relations, and special guests. He had five hard-worked private secretaries, clerical and lay: the Prieur des Roches, Charpentier, Chéré, Mulot, Rossignol; his private physician, M. Citoys, often served him in the same way. Among his State secretaries and special agents, who directed, as we know, an army of spies at home and abroad, Père Joseph and his Capuchin clerks held the first place. “Ezéchiéli,” as the Cardinal called him, had his offices in the palace, and visited His Eminence by day and by night.

The Bouthilliers, father and son, with M. de Noyers, were among his most confidential counsellors and fellow-workers; and in more private fashion Laffemas, head of the Paris police and known as “le bourreau du Cardinal,” brought him the evil report of his enemies. In later years Mazarin became his trusted diplomatic agent and chosen successor. The Cardinal de la Valette, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the Marquis de Brézé, the Marquis de la Meilleraye—these two being created by him Marshals of France—may be described as his aides-de-camp; and beyond all these buzzed a crowd of political pamphleteers and other writers in the Cardinal’s pay; conspicuous among them Renaudot—founder under him of the Gazette de France, the first approach to a modern newspaper—Corneille the poet, and various members of the young Academy.

The Cardinal was fond of music, and his band of twelve instruments attended him everywhere. But what really made his train “august and majestic,” says Aubery, was the strong force of guards always present for his defence. The King had added two hundred musketeers and a company of gendarmes to the hundred horse originally granted him, and these troops were quartered in and around his palace, being on duty by turns, as if attending on Royalty.

The officers of the guard were not always lucky enough to please His Eminence. This is a characteristic story:

“He had said one day to Saint-Georges, his captain of the guard, that he wished to walk after dinner in his gallery at the Palais-Cardinal and would see no one there; nevertheless, entering with M. de Noyers, he found two Capuchins. After giving them a favourable audience, and finishing his business with M. de Noyers, he scolded his captain of the guard for disobeying his orders, and treated him to hard words, telling him plainly that he would be obeyed, and that if he ever committed such a fault again, he would not come off so cheaply.

“The gentleman, furious at such disgrace, and believing that he could not remain in the service with honour, took leave to retire, without farewell, to some inn in the Rue St. Honoré. So that M. le Cardinal, seeing him no more, asked for news of him; and learning what had happened, begged the Commander de la Porte to go and find him and bring him back. But the Commander failing to do so, His Eminence charged M. de la Meilleraye to go in his turn, and to bring him back by any means in his power. Which at last he did, after trouble enough in persuading him. So that His Eminence, seeing him enter the room, went five or six steps to meet him, and embracing him with much kindness, said: ‘Saint-Georges, we were both very hasty; but if you are like me, you will never think of it again. God forbid that my hastiness should ruin the fortunes of a gentleman such as you: on the contrary, I will do you all the good I can.’”

After which one does not wonder that the Cardinal’s own people liked him.

His constant ill-health, with the weight of State affairs, made a regular life necessary to him. He went to bed at eleven, but after three or four hours of restless sleep he was generally to be found sitting up in his room, his worn face bent over portfolio or writing-table, his thin hand and active brain guiding the politics of Europe. Thus he would work from candlelight to dawn, writing and dictating, till fatigue obliged him to lie down and sleep again. But he was up before eight and working with his secretaries; then, when dressed, he received the King’s other Ministers; then heard mass, which he celebrated himself on great festivals; and then, before the mid-day dinner, gave audience in the garden to any one who wished to see him. After dinner he talked with his friends and guests till it was necessary to visit the King, to receive ambassadors and great men, to attend in public to important affairs of State. It was not till evening that he allowed himself any real quiet and recreation. Then we may see him strolling again in the garden, playing with his favourite cats, listening to music, laughing with the few familiars, such as the lively Abbé de Boisrobert, whose privilege it was to amuse him; and so, with private prayers that lasted half an hour, ended his days at the Palais-Cardinal.

He was always, of course, unpopular at Court and in society; not only because he was feared and mistrusted, but owing to an air of pedantry and affectation which was unpleasing to everybody and especially so to women; yet he particularly liked to make himself agreeable to them. When all the fables of his love-affairs are cleared away, this characteristic trait remains. He despised women, but he was ready to bid pretty high, sometimes, for their confidence and admiration. Several times, for instance, Madame de Chevreuse escaped with the punishment of temporary exile for plots and treasons which would have cost a man his head. The Cardinal would have been glad to stand high in her favour, as well as in that of her royal mistress. As their hatred grew with years, so did his hardness and severity, till the Duchess, leaving Queen Anne in danger and disgrace, fled finally to Spain.

His niece, with whom he was on the most intimate, affectionate terms, seems to have been the only woman who really cared for Cardinal de Richelieu. For her he planned various great marriages in France and Lorraine, all of which came to nothing. He gave her the Petit-Luxembourg when he moved to his new palace, but she still overlooked his housekeeping and was the leading figure in his entertainments. Society realized her power, and treated her with considerable reverence, though it laughed behind her back and told many malicious stories. As a fact, Madame de Combalet—created Duchesse d’Aiguillon in 1638—filled a difficult position well; strengthening it by friendships with distinguished women such as the Princesse de Condé and Mademoiselle d’Angennes, the famous Julie of the poets, the star of her mother’s salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The Marquis de Rambouillet has been already mentioned as a steady friend of Cardinal de Richelieu, and though His Eminence was not to be seen at Madame de Rambouillet’s assemblies—the centre of civilising influence long before his noonday of power—he took a keen and partly sympathetic interest in all that went on there. His brilliant intelligence could not fail to recognise the great work done for society by “the divine Arthénice” in her blue drawing-room, where savage manners were softened and refined, military roughness was smoothed, coarse gossip discouraged; some touch of culture and literary taste being made a passport to the hostess’s favour. It seems certain that political intrigue found no place at the Hôtel de Rambouillet; but it is characteristic of Richelieu’s nervous, suspicious mind that he was not convinced of this. The long flirtation carried on by his friend the Cardinal de la Valette with the Princesse de Condé, both of them constant guests there, caused him some anxiety, and the story goes that he sent Père Joseph to Madame de Rambouillet with promises of advancement for her husband if she would keep him informed of the “intrigues” of these two. The Marquise replied: “I do not believe, Father, that Madame la Princesse and M. le Cardinal de la Valette have any intrigues; but if they have, I should not be the person to act as a spy!” It seems that Cardinal de la Valette, who was clever and witty, did indulge in the dangerous pleasure of laughing at Richelieu’s pedantries, and with Madame de Rambouillet herself, “in whom he had entire confidence,” and who enjoyed the joke.

Richelieu’s keenness of intellect and political intuition were not matched by the delicate wit and lightness of touch that are usually a Frenchman’s birthright. He was rather fond of making jokes, but they were often heavy, if not grim, and better calculated to amuse himself than his hearers. Mademoiselle de Gournay had experience of this. She was a clever literary woman in a time when such women were rare. Montaigne adopted her as a daughter, and by his wish she published an edition of his works after his death, with a preface of her own. This was in 1595. At the height of Richelieu’s fame she was an old and eccentric woman, living in Paris, known as the author of L’Ombre, a poetical work full of ancient and far-fetched words and high-flown sentiments. The fashionable young poets and literary men of Paris found pleasure in teasing and ridiculing Mademoiselle de Gournay.

In 1635 she edited a new edition of Montaigne, which she dedicated to Cardinal de Richelieu. She was invited to an audience at the Palais-Cardinal. Richelieu paid her the necessary compliments, but in obsolete words which he had carefully chosen out of L’Ombre. He was highly pleased with himself, and his attendants were choking with laughter. But Mademoiselle de Gournay was an aristocrat. Not for nothing was she bien demoiselle, as Tallemant says. “Elle avoit vu le beau monde.”

“‘You are laughing at the poor old woman,’ she said. ‘Laugh, great genius, laugh: it is right that every one should contribute to your diversion.’”

The Eminentissime was ashamed of himself, and asked her pardon. Afterwards he pensioned her handsomely, and not only her, but her old servant Mademoiselle Jamyn and her favourite cat Piaillon, not forgetting Piaillon’s kittens. The Abbé de Boisrobert, Mademoiselle de Gournay’s good friend, brought these claims irresistibly before a lover of cats.

At the height of favour as jester, verse-maker and confidential gossip, Boisrobert was a fount of honours and pensions at the Palais-Cardinal. Poor poets and other literary men were the special objects of his care. He was a clever busybody who went everywhere and knew every one of the scribblers in verse and prose, social, political, theological, classical, dramatic, or of more trifling kind, who had drifted up mostly from the provinces into Parisian garrets and hung about the hôtels of the great, depending on patronage for their daily bread. It was among these scattered units of varied birth and talent, all belonging to “the republic of letters,” that the French Academy began to exist, and Boisrobert has the right to be called one of its founders.

His character of favourite and of universal patron, as well as his literary skill, admitted him to weekly meetings of a few chosen spirits in the Marais, at the house of Valentin Conrart, bourgeois, Protestant, and man of letters. Boisrobert’s position at the Palais-Cardinal made it natural that he should carry the report of these meetings direct to Richelieu. The Minister was not altogether pleased. He disliked private assemblies; too often, in his experience, they meant conspiracy, and he would gladly have made them illegal.

The arguments of Boisrobert, if they did not quite reassure the Cardinal, suggested to him a means of utilising these literary meetings to the advantage of the State and of the French language. He proposed to Conrart and his friends, through Boisrobert, that they should become a public body with letters-patent, bound by its own statutes and holding its assemblies under royal authority, with the object of purifying and regularising the language and literature of France. The men of letters struggled a little, for liberty was sweet. But they soon submitted, and the Forty Immortals took their place among those French institutions which have survived the old world in which they were born.

As long as Richelieu lived the Academy worked under his presiding authority. He encouraged no frivolity, no discussion of trifles, but insisted on hard, steady work. The great Dictionary, first planned by the poet Chapelain, was seriously begun in 1634 and carried on by the most methodical among the new academicians, some of whom were considerably laughed at by the free literary world outside. They were, in fact, slaves to a Minister who, besides having an unfounded faith in his own taste, was a critic swayed by reasons extra-literary: one need hardly mention that the Academy, under Richelieu, snubbed Corneille and condemned Le Cid, too Spanish and too independent to please His Eminence.

The slavery was profitable: places and pensions made life liveable for the wiser academicians of Richelieu’s day—whose survivors were described by La Bruyère as “vieux corbeaux,” croaking as their master had taught them. And they grew to love their chains, while pouring flattery at the great man’s feet. Guillaume Colletet, more drunkard than poet, composed a rondeau which was presented by Boisrobert to the Cardinal:

It is to the honour of Pierre Corneille that he did not, till many years later, find a place among these “roys des esprits.” The Cardinal had been disappointed in him. Before the Academy existed he was one of five poetical secretaries who were employed by His Eminence to arrange his own original ideas in poetry and drama. The other four were Boisrobert, l’Estoile, Colletet, and Rotrou. It seems that Corneille was too honest for his place; his criticism too frank and his opinion too positive. He was soon dismissed, the Cardinal finding that he lacked “esprit de suite”; which may be translated as the gift of following blindly wherever his patron chose to lead.

Richelieu had a passion for plays and ballets, and employed a troup of actors of his own. They were the third company in Paris, the others belonging to the Théâtre des Marais and the Hôtel de Bourgogne. There were two theatres at the Palais-Cardinal, and the smaller was generally used for the comedies, dances, and other entertainments constantly attended by their Majesties and the Court. Here were performed pieces arranged by the Cardinal’s own authors: Les Tuileries and L’Aveugle de Smyrne, dull comedies magnificently staged; livelier pieces such as Clorise, by Baro, a very popular play-writer; other fashionable plays; ballets in which young Royalties danced—Mademoiselle, Gaston’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Longueville, Mademoiselle de Vendôme, the Duc d’Enghien; his future wife Mademoiselle de Maillé-Brézé, and other nieces and cousins of the Cardinal. These gay fantastic ballets, even more than regular plays, were the delight of society, young and old. All the courtiers and great ladies joined in them; Louis XIII. himself often composed both the words and the music of lutes, spinets, violins, and forgot his gloomy stiffness in dancing.

In the intervals of the performances the Cardinal’s guests enjoyed rare fruits and dainty sweetmeats, handed round by his pages in baskets tied with English ribbons of gold and silver tissue. When comedy and dance were over the company was offered a gorgeous supper on the great service of plate which the Cardinal left to the King.

The entertainments at the Palais-Cardinal reached their zenith in January 1641, with the representation of Mirame. Richelieu, to quote a contemporary, “témoigna des tendresses de père pour cette pièce”; and it seems actually to have been in great part his work, in collaboration with the academician Desmarets. The larger of his two theatres, holding three thousand persons, was used for the first time and decorated with special magnificence. It was rather a vast saloon than a theatre, with gilded galleries for the most distinguished guests; the ordinary admiring crowd finding place on the floor. His Eminence, happy and triumphant, was near the Queen: the Abbé de Marolles, once a timid student, now a critical spectator, describes him as dressed in a long mantle of flame-coloured taffeta over a black soutane, with collar and facings of ermine.

The scenery of the play, with the new machinery which astonished all eyes, had been ordered from Italy by Cardinal Mazarin, now a familiar figure in Paris and Richelieu’s right hand. There was a long perspective of palaces and gardens, with terraces, grottos, fountains, statues, all looking out over the sea, “with agitations,” says the Gazette, “which seemed natural to the waves of that vast element, and two large fleets, one appearing two leagues distant, both of which passed in sight of the spectators.”

Over this lovely scene night gradually fell, and all was lit up by the moon. Then, just as naturally, day dawned and the sun rose, taking his turn in this “agréable tromperie.”

The majority of the guests were amazed and transported beyond measure. A few critics, among whom was the Abbé de Marolles, did not particularly care for all this “fine machinery and grand perspective.” He found it fatiguing to the eyes and the mind: in his opinion a comedy should depend for success on story, poetry, and fine acting. “Le reste n’est qu’un embarras inutile.”

There were other more malicious critics who saw in the story of the play—the love of Princess Mirame, daughter of the King of Bithynia, for the daring sailor Arimant, commanding the fleet of Colchos, with all the tragical events which at last brought about a happy ending—a veiled allusion to the old romance of Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham. It is very improbable, to say the least, that Richelieu, who had at this time ceased to persecute the Queen, should choose to offend her afresh by stirring up grievances fifteen years old. His object, never indeed attained, was to live at peace among princes and nobles who had learnt their lesson. What really annoyed him in connection with this performance of Mirame was the discovery by his watchful enemies of various disreputable persons among the invited guests. The King was displeased; Monsieur enjoyed the incident; and the Cardinal could only revenge himself on an unlucky official who had been too free with his cards of admittance.

In spite of fault-finders Mirame was a triumph. Standing up in his place, the Cardinal joyfully acknowledged the constant thunders of applause, then waving his hand for silence, that none of his fine lines might be missed. When the play was over, and the Queen had passed on a golden bridge drawn by peacocks to a silver throne prepared for her beyond the lifted curtain of the stage, to preside over a grand ball that ended the evening, there was no prouder man in Europe than her host—the weary, sickly statesman who had already given provinces to France and made her paramount in Italy and Spain.