The two gentlemen were awaiting the signal; but Monsieur did not budge, and retired without saying a word. The Count of Soissons dared not go any further, and the cardinal mounted quietly to his own rooms, without dreaming of the extreme peril he had run. Richelieu was rather lofty than proud, and too clear-sighted to mistake the king’s feelings towards him. Never did he feel any confidence in his position; and never did he depart from his jealous and sometimes petty watchfulness. Any influence foreign to his own disquieted him in proximity to a master whose affairs he governed altogether, without ever having been able to get the mastery over his melancholy and singular mind.

Women filled but a small space in the life of Louis XIII. Twice, however, in that interval of ten years which separated the plot of Montmorency from that of Cinq-Mars, did the minister believe himself to be threatened by feminine influence; and twice he used artifice to win the monarch’s heart and confidence from two young girls of his court, Louise de La Fayette and Marie d’Hautefort. Both were maids of honor to the queen. Mdlle. d’Hautefort was fourteen years old when, in 1630, at Lyons, in the languors of convalescence, the king first remarked her blooming and at the same time severe beauty, and her air of nobility and modesty; and it was not long before the whole court knew that he had remarked her, for his first care, at the sermon, was to send the young maid of honor the velvet cushion on which he knelt for her to sit upon. Mdlle. d’Hautefort declined it, and remained seated, like her companions, on the ground; but henceforth the courtiers’ eyes were riveted on her movements, on the interminable conversations in which she was detained by the king, on his jealousies, his tiffs, and his reconciliations. After their quarrels, the king would pass the greater part of the day in writing out what he had said to Mdlle. d’Hautefort and what she had replied to him. At his death, his desk was found full of these singular reports of the most innocent, but also most stormy and most troublesome love-affair that ever was. The king was especially jealous of Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s passionate devotion to the queen her mistress, Anne of Austria. “You love an ingrate,” he said, “and you will see how she will repay your services.” Richelieu had been unable to win Mdlle. d’Hautefort; and he did his best to embitter the tiff which separated her from the king in 1635. But Louis XIII. had learned the charm of confidence and intimacy; and he turned to Louise de La Fayette, a charming girl of seventeen, who was as virtuous as Mdlle. d’Hautefort, but more gentle and tender than she, and who gave her heart in all guilelessness to that king so powerful, so a-weary, and so melancholy at the very climax of his reign. Happily for Richelieu, he had a means, more certain than even Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s pride, of separating her from Louis XIII.; Mdlle. de La Fayette, whilst quite a child, had serious ideas of becoming a nun; and scruples about being false to her vocation troubled her at court, and even in those conversations in which she reproached herself with taking too much pleasure, Father Coussin, her confessor, who was also the king’s, sought to quiet her conscience; he hoped much from the influence she could exercise over the king; but Mdlle. de La Fayette, feeling herself troubled and perplexed, was urgent. When the Jesuit reported to Louis XIII. the state of his fair young friend’s feelings, the king, with tears in his eyes, replied, “Though I am very sorry she is going away, nevertheless I have no desire to be an obstacle to her vocation; only let her wait until I have left for the army.” She did not wait, however. Their last interview took place at the queen’s, who had no liking for Mdlle. de La Fayette; and, as the king’s carriage went out of the court-yard, the young girl, leaning against the window, turned to one of her companions and said, “Alas! I shall never see him again!” But she did see him again often for some time. He went to see her in her convent, and “remained so long glued to her grating,” says Madame de Motteville, “that Cardinal Richelieu, falling a prey to fresh terrors, recommenced his intrigues to tear him from her entirely. And he succeeded.” The king’s affection for Mdlle. d’Hautefort awoke again. She had just rendered the queen an important service. Anne of Austria was secretly corresponding with her two brothers, King Philip IV. and the Cardinal Infante, a correspondence which might well make the king and his minister uneasy, since it was carried on through Madame de Chevreuse, and there was war at the time with Spain. The queen employed for this intercourse a valet named Laporte, who was arrested and thrown into prison. The chancellor removed to Val-de-Grace, whither the queen frequently retired; he questioned the nuns and rummaged Anne of Austria’s cell. She was in mortal anxiety, not knowing what Laporte might say or how to unloose his tongue, so as to keep due pace with her own confessions to the king and the cardinal. Mdlle. d’Hautefort disguised herself as a servant, went straight to the Bastille, and got a letter delivered to Laporte, thanks to the agency of Commander de Jars, her friend, then in prison. The confessions of mistress and agent being thus set in accord, the queen obtained her pardon, but not without having to put up with reproaches and conditions of stern supervision. Madame de Chevreuse took fright, and went to seek refuge in Spain. The king’s inclination towards Mdlle. d’Hautefort revived, without her having an idea of turning it to profit on her own account. “She had so much loftiness of spirit that she could never have brought herself to ask anything for herself and her family; and all that could be wrung from her was to accept what the king and queen were pleased to give her.”

Richelieu had never forgotten Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s airs: he feared her, and accused her to the king of being concerned in Monsieur’s continual intrigues. Louis XIII.‘s growing affection for young Cinq-Mars, son of Marshal d’Effiat, was beginning to occupy the gloomy monarch; and he the more easily sacrificed Mdlle. d’Hautefort. The cardinal merely asked him to send her away for a fortnight. She insisted upon hearing the order from the king’s own mouth. “The fortnight will last all the rest of my life,” she said: “and so I take leave of your Majesty forever.” She went accompanied by the regrets and tears of Anne of Austria, and leaving the field open to the new favorite, the king’s “rattle,” as the cardinal called him.

M. de Cinq-Mars was only nineteen when he was made master of the wardrobe and grand equerry of France. Brilliant and witty, he amused the king and occupied the leisure which peace gave him. The passion Louis XIII. felt for his favorite was jealous and capricious. He upbraided the young man for his flights to Paris to see his friends and the elegant society of the Marais, and sometimes also Mary di Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, wooed but lately by the Duke of Orleans, and not indifferent, it was said, to the vows of M. Le Grand, as Cinq-Mars was called. The complaints were detailed to Richelieu by the king himself in a strange correspondence, which reminds one of the “reports” of his quarrels with Mdlle. d’Hautefort. “I am very sorry,” wrote Louis XIII. on the 4th of January, 1641, “to trouble you about the ill tempers of M. Le Grand. I upbraided him with his heedlessness; he answered that for that matter he could not change, and that he should do no better than he had done. I said that, considering his obligations to me, he ought not to address me in that manner. He answered in his usual way: that he didn’t want my kindness, that he could do very well without it, and that he would be quite as well content to be Cinq-Mars as M. Le Grand, but, as for changing his ways and his life, he couldn’t do it. And so, he continually knagging at me and I at him, we came as far as the court-yard, when I said to him that, being in the temper he was in, he would do me the pleasure of not coming to see me. I have not seen him since. Signed, Louis.” This time the cardinal reconciled the king and the favorite, whom he had himself placed near him, but whose constant attendance upon the king his master he was beginning to find sometimes very troublesome. “One day he sent word to him not to be for the future so continually at his heels, and treated him even to his face with so much tartness and imperiousness as if he had been the lowest of his valets.” Cinq-Mars began to lend an ear to those who were egging him on against the cardinal.

Then began a series of negotiations and intrigues; the Duke of Orleans had come back to Paris, the king was ill and the cardinal more so than he; thence arose conjectures and insensate hopes; the Duke of Bouillon, being sent for by the king, who confided to him the command of the army of Italy, was at the same time drawn into the plot which was beginning to be woven against the minister; the Duke of Orleans and the queen were in it; and the town of Sedan, of which Bouillon was prince-sovereign, was wanted to serve the authors of the conspiracy as an asylum in case of reverse. Sedan alone was not sufficient; there was need of an army. Whence was it to come? Thoughts naturally turned towards Spain.

For so perilous a treaty a negotiator was required, and the grand equerry proposed his friend, Viscount de Fontrailles, a man of wit, who detested the cardinal, and who would have considered it a simpler plan to assassinate him; he consented, however, to take charge of the negotiation, and he set out for Madrid, where his treaty was soon concluded, in the name of the Duke of Orleans. The Spaniards were to furnish twelve thousand foot and five thousand horse, four hundred thousand crowns down, twelve thousand crowns’ pay a month, and three hundred thousand livres to fortify the frontier-town which was promised by the duke. Sedan, Cinq-Mars, and the Duke of Bouillon were only mentioned in a separate instrument.

The king was then at Narbonne, on his way to his army, which was besieging Perpignan. The grand equerry was with him. Fontrailles went to call upon him. “I do not intend to be seen by anybody,” said he, “but to make speedily for England, as I do not think I am strong enough to undergo the torture the cardinal might put me to in his own room on the least suspicion.” On the 21st of April, the cardinal was dangerously ill, and the king left him at Narbonne a prey to violent fever, with an abscess on the arm which prevented him from writing, whilst Cinq-Mars, ever present and ever at work, was doing his best to insinuate into his master’s mind suspicion of the minister, and the hopes founded upon his disgrace or death. The king listened, as he subsequently avowed, in order to discover his favorite’s wicked thoughts and make him tell all he had in his heart. “The king was tacitly the head of this conspiracy,” says Madame de Motteville: “the grand equerry was the soul of it; the name made use of was that of the Duke of Orleans, the king’s only brother; and their counsel was the Duke of Bouillon, who joined with them because, having belonged to the party of M. de Soissons, he was in very ill odor at court. They all formed fine projects touching the change that was to take place to the advantage of their aggrandizement and fortunes, persuading themselves that the cardinal could not live above a few days, during which he would not be able to set himself right with the king.” Such were their projects and their hopes when the Gazette de France, on the 21st of June, 1642, gave these two pieces of news both together. “The cardinal-duke, after remaining two days at Arles, embarked on the 11th of this month for Tarascon, his health becoming better and better. The king has ordered under arrest Marquis de Cinq-Mars, grand equerry of France.”

Great was the surprise, and still greater was the dismay, amongst the friends of Cinq-Mars. “Your grand designs are as well known at Paris as that the Seine flows under the Pont Neuf,” wrote Mary di Gonzaga to him a few days previously.

Those grand designs so imprudently divulged caused a presentiment of great peril. When left alone with his young favorite, and suddenly overwhelmed, amidst his army, with cares and business of which his minister usually relieved him, the king had too much wit not to perceive the frivolous insignificance of Cinq-Mars compared with the mighty capability of the cardinal. “I love you more than ever,” he wrote to Richelieu: “we have been too long together to be ever separated, as I wish everybody to understand.” In reply, the cardinal had sent him a copy of the treaty between Cinq-Mars and Spain.

The king could not believe his eyes; and his wrath equalled his astonishment. Together with that of the grand equerry he ordered the immediate arrest of M. de Thou, his intimate friend; and the order went out to secure the Duke of Bouillon, then at the head of the army of Italy. He, caught, like Marshal Marillac, in the midst of his troops, had vainly attempted to conceal himself; but he was taken and conducted to the castle of Pignerol. Fontrailles had seen the blow coming. He went to visit the grand equerry, and, “Sir,” said he, “you are a fine figure; if you were shorter by the whole head, you would not cease to be very tall; as for me, who am already very short, nothing could be taken off me without inconveniencing me and making me cut the poorest figure in the world; you will be good enough, if you please, to let me get out of the way of edged tools.” And he set out for Spain, whence he had hardly returned.

What had become of the most guilty, if not the most dangerous, of all the accomplices? Monsieur, “the king’s only (unique) brother,” as Madame de Motteville calls him, had come as far as Moulins, and had sent to ask the grand equerry to appoint a place of meeting, when he heard of his accomplice’s arrest, and, before long, that of the Duke of Bouillon. Frightened to death as he was, he saw that treachery was safer than flight, and, just as the king had joined the all but dying cardinal at Tarascon, there arrived an emissary from the Duke of Orleans bringing letters from him. He assured the king of his fidelity; he entreated Chavigny, the minister’s confidant, to give him “means of seeing his Eminence before he saw the king, in which case all would go well.” He appealed to the cardinal’s generosity, begging him to keep his letter as an eternal reproach, if he were not thenceforth the most faithful and devoted of his friends.

Abbe de La Riviere, who was charged to implore pardon for his master, was worthy of such a commission: he confessed everything, he signed everything, though he “all but died of terror,” and, at the cardinal’s demand, he soon brought all those poltrooneries written out in the Duke of Orleans’ own hand. The prince was all but obliged to appear at the trial and deliver up his accomplices in the face of the whole world. The respect, however, of Chancellor Seguier for his rank spared him this crowning disgrace. The king’s orders to his brother, after being submitted to the cardinal, bore this note in the minister’s hand: “Monsieur will have in his place of exile twelve thousand crowns a month, the same sum that the King of Spain had promised to give him.”

“Paralysis of the arm did not prevent the head from acting;” the dying cardinal had dictated to the king, stretched on a couch at his side, in a chamber of his house at Monfrin, near Tarascon, those last commands which completed the dishonor of the Duke of Orleans and the ruin of the favorite. Louis XIII. slowly took the road back to Fontainebleau in the cardinal’s litter, which the latter had lent him. The prisoners were left in the minister’s keeping, who ordered them before long to Lyons, whither he was himself removed. The grand equerry coming from Montpellier, M. de Thou from Tarascon, in a boat towed by that of the cardinal, and the Duke of Bouillon from Pignerol, were all three lodged in the castle of Pierre-Encise. Their examination was put off until the arrival of such magistrates “as should be capable of philosophizing and perpetually thinking of the means they must use for arriving at their ends.” That was useless, inasmuch as the grand equerry “never ceased to say quite openly that he had done nothing to which the king had not consented.”

Louis XIII. was, no doubt, affected by such language; for, scarcely had he arrived at Fontainebleau, whither he had been preceded by news of the end of the queen his mother, who had died at Cologne in exile and poverty, when he wrote to all the parliaments of his kingdom, to the governors of the provinces, and to the ambassadors at foreign courts, to give his own account of the arrest of the guilty and the part he himself had played in the matter. “The notable and visible change which had for the last year appeared in the conduct of Sieur de Cinq-Mars, our grand equerry, made us resolve, as soon as we perceived it, to carefully keep watch on his actions and his words, in order to fathom them and discover what could be the cause. To this end, we resolved to let him act and speak with us more freely than heretofore.” And in a letter written straight to the chancellor, the king exclaims in wrath, “It is true that having seen me sometimes dissatisfied with the cardinal, whether from the apprehension I felt lest he should hinder me from going to the siege of Perpignan, or induce me to leave it, for fear lest my health might suffer, or from any other like reason, the said Sieur de Cinq-Mars left nothing undone to chafe me against my said cousin, which I put up with so long as his evil offices were confined within the bounds of moderation. But when he went so far as to suggest to me that the cardinal must be got rid of, and offered to carry it out himself, I conceived a horror of his evil thoughts, and held them in detestation. Although I have only to say so for you to believe it, there is nobody who can deem but that it must have been so; for, otherwise, what motive would he have had for joining himself to Spain against me, if I had approved of what he desired?”

The trial was a foregone conclusion; the king and his brother made common cause in order to overwhelm the accused, “an earnest of a peace which was not such as God announced with good will to man on Christmas day,” writes Madame de Motteville, “but such as may exist at court and amongst brothers of royal blood.”

The cardinal did not think it necessary to wait for the sentence. He had arrived at his house at Lyons, in a sort of square chamber, covered with red damask, and borne on the shoulders of eighteen guards; there, stretched upon his couch, a table covered with papers beside him, he worked and chatted with whomsoever of his servants he had been pleased to have as his companion on the road. It was in the same equipage that he left Lyons to gain the Loire and return to Paris. On his passage, it was necessary to pull down lumps of wall and throw bridges over the fosses to make way for this vast litter and the indomitable man that lay dying within it.

It was on the 12th of September, 1642, that the accused appeared before the commission; there were now but two of them; the Duke of Bouillon had made his private arrangement with the cardinal, confessing everything, and requesting “to have his life spared in order that he might employ it to preserve to the Catholic church five little children whom his death would leave to persons of the opposite religion.” In consideration of this pardon, a demand was made upon him to give up Sedan to the king, “though it were easy to gain possession of-it by investment.” The duke consented to all, and he awaited in his dungeon at Pierre-Encise the execution of his accomplices who had no town to surrender. Their death was to be the signal of his liberation.

The two accused denied nothing. M. de Thou merely maintained that he had not been in any way mixed up with the conspiracy, proving that he had blamed the treaty with Spain, and that his only crime was not having revealed it. “He believed me to be his friend, his one faithful friend,” said he, speaking of Cinq-Mars, “and I had no mind to betray him.” The grand equerry told in detail the story of the plot, his connection with the Duke of Orleans, who had missed no opportunity of paying court to him, the resolutions taken in concert with the Duke of Bouillon, and the treaty concluded with Spain, “confessing that he had erred, and had no hope but in the clemency of the king, and of the cardinal, whose generosity would be so much the more shown in asking pardon for him as he was the less bound to do so.” There was not long to wait for the decree; the votes were unanimous against the grand equerry, a single one of the judges pronouncing in favor of M. de Thou. The latter turned towards Cinq-Mars, and said, “Ah! well, sir; humanly speaking, I might complain of you; you have placed me in the dock, and you are the cause of my death; but God knows how I love you. Let us die, sir, let us die courageously, and win Paradise.”

The decree against Cinq-Mars sentenced him to undergo the question in order to get a more complete revelation of his accomplices. “It had been resolved not to put him to it,” says Tallemant des Reaux: “but it was exhibited to him nevertheless; it gave him a turn, but it did not make him do anything to belie himself, and he was just taking off his doublet, when he was told to raise his hand in sign of telling the truth.”

The execution was not destined to be long deferred; the very day on which the sentence was delivered saw the execution of it. “The grand equerry showed a never-changing and very resolute firmness to the death, together with admirable calmness and the constancy and devoutness of a Christian,” wrote M. du Marca, councillor of state, to the secretary of state Brionne; and Tallemant des Reaux adds, “He died with astoundingly great courage, and did not waste time in speechifying; he would not have his eyes bandaged, and kept them open when the blow was struck.” M. de Thou said not a word save to God, repeating the Credo even to the very scaffold, with a fervor of devotion that touched all present. “We have seen,” says a report of the time, “the favorite of the greatest and most just of kings lose his head upon the scaffold at the age of twenty-two, but with a firmness which has scarcely its parallel in our histories. We have seen a councillor of state die like a saint after a crime which men cannot justly pardon. There is nobody in the world who, knowing of their conspiracy against the state, does not think them worthy of death, and there will be few who, having knowledge of their rank and their fine natural qualities, will not mourn their sad fate.”

“Now that I make not a single step which does not lead me to death, I am more capable than anybody else of estimating the value of the things of the world,” wrote Cinq-Mars to his mother, the wife of Marshal d’Effiat. “Enough of this world; away to Paradise!” said M. de Thou, as he marched to the scaffold. Chalais and Montmorency had used the same language. At the last hour, and at the bottom of their hearts, the frivolous courtier and the hare-brained conspirator, as well as the great soldier and the grave magistrate, had recovered their faith in God.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND THE PROVINCES.

The story has been told of the conspiracies at court and the repeated checks suffered by the great lords in their attempts against Cardinal Richelieu. With the exception of Languedoc, under the influence of its governor the Duke of Montmorency, the provinces took no part in these enterprises; their opposition was of another sort; and it is amongst the parliaments chiefly that we must look for it.

“The king’s cabinet and his bed-time business (petit coucher) cause me more embarrassment than the whole of Europe causes me,” said the cardinal in the days of the great storms at court; he would often have had less trouble in managing the parliaments and the Parliament of Paris in particular, if the latter had not felt itself supported by a party at court. For a long time past a pretension had been put forward by that great body to give the king advice, and to replace towards him the vanished states-general. “We hold the place in council of the princes and barons, who from time immemorial were near the person of the kings,” was the language used, in 1615, in the representations of the Parliament, which had dared, without the royal order, to summon the princes, dukes, peers, and officers of the crown to deliberate upon what was to be done for the service of the king, the good of the state, and the relief of the people.

This pretension on the part of the parliaments was what Cardinal Richelieu was continually fighting against. He would not allow the intervention of the magistrates in the government of the state. When he took the power into his hands, nine parliaments sat in France—Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen, Aix, Rennes, and Pau: he created but one, that of Metz, in 1633, to severe in a definitive manner the bonds which still attached the three bishoprics to the Germanic empire. Trials at that time were carried in the last resort to Spires.

Throughout the history of France we find the Parliament of Paris bolder and more enterprising than all the rest: and it did not belie its character in the very teeth of Richelieu. When, after Dupes’ Day was over, Louis XIII. declared all the companions of his brother’s escape guilty of high treason, the Parliament of Dijon, to which the decree was presented by the king himself, enregistered it without making any difficulty. All the other parliaments followed the example; that of Paris alone resisted, and its decision on the 25th of April contained a bitter censure upon the cardinal’s administration. On the 12th of May, the decision of that Parliament was quashed by a decree of the royal council, and all its members were summoned to the Louvre; on their knees they had to hear the severe reprimand delivered by Chateauneuf, keeper of the seals; and one president and three counsellors were at the same time dismissed. When the Parliament, still indomitable, would have had those magistrates sit in defiance of the royal order, they were not to be found in their houses; the soldiery had carried them off.

The trial of Marshal Marillac, before a commission, twice modified during the course of proceedings, of the Parliament of Dijon, was the occasion of a fresh reclamation on the part of the Parliament of Paris; and the king’s ill-humor against the magistrates burst forth on the occasion of a commission constituted at the Arsenal to take cognizance of the crime of coining. The Parliament made some formal objections the king, who was at that time at Metz with his troops, summoned President Seguier and several counsellors. He quashed the decree of the Parliament. “You are only constituted,” said he, “to judge between Master Peter and Master John (between John Doe and Richard Roe); if you go on as at present, I will pare your nails so close that you’ll be sorry for it.” Five counsellors were interdicted, and had great trouble in obtaining authority to sit again. So many and such frequent squabbles, whether about points of jurisdiction or about the registration of edicts respecting finances, which the Parliament claimed to have the right of looking into, caused between the king, inspired by his minister, and the Parliament of Paris an irritation which reached its height during the trial of the Duke of La Valette, third son of the Duke of Epernon, accused, not without grounds, of having caused the failure of the siege of Fontarabia from jealousy towards the Prince of Conde. The affair was called on before a commission composed of dukes and peers, some councillors of state and some members of the Parliament, which demanded that the duke should be removed to its jurisdiction. “I will not have it,” answered the king; “you are always making difficulties; it seems as if you wanted to keep me in leading-strings; but I am master, and shall know how to make myself obeyed: It is a gross error to suppose that I have not a right to bring to judgment whom I think proper and where I please.” The king himself asked the judges for their opinion. [Isambert, Recueil des anciennes Lois Francaises, t. xvi.] “Sir,” replied Counsellor Pinon, dean of the grand chamber, “for fifty years I have been in the Parliament, and I never saw anything of this sort; M. de La Valette had the honor of wedding a natural sister of your Majesty, and he is, besides, a peer of France; I implore you to remove him to the jurisdiction of the Parliament.” “Your opinion!” said the king, curtly. “I am of opinion that the Duke of La Valette be removed to be tried before the Parliament.” “I will not have that; it is no opinion.” “Sir, removal is a legitimate opinion.” “Your opinion on the case!” rejoined the king, who was beginning to be angry; “if not, I know what I must do.” President Bellievre was even bolder. “It is a strange thing,” said he to Louis XIII.‘s face, “to see a king giving his vote at the criminal trial of one of his subjects; hitherto kings have reserved to themselves the rights of grace, and have removed to their officers’ province the sentencing of culprits. Could your Majesty bear to see in the dock a nobleman, who might leave your presence only for the scaffold? It is incompatible with kingly majesty.” “Your opinion on the case!” bade the king. “Sir, I have no other opinion.” The Duke of La Valette had taken refuge in England: he was condemned and executed in effigy. The attorney-general, Matthew Mold, “did not consider it his business to carry out an execution of that sort: “and recourse was obliged to be had to the lieutenant-governor of convicts at the Chatelet of Paris.

The cup had overflowed, and the cardinal resolved to put an end to an opposition which was the more irritating inasmuch as it was sometimes legitimate. A notification of the king’s, published in 1641, prohibited the Parliament from any interference in affairs of state and administration. The whole of Richelieu’s home-policy is summed up in the preamble to that instrument, a formal declaration of absolute power concentrated in the hands of the king. “It seemeth that, the institution of monarchies having its foundation in the government of a single one, that rank is as it were the soul which animates them and inspires them with as much force and vigor as they can have short of perfection. But as this absolute authority raises states to the highest pinnacle of their glory, so, when it happens to be enfeebled, they are observed, in a short time, to fall from their high estate. There is no need to go out of France to find instances of truth. . . . The fatal disorders and divisions of the League, which ought to be buried in eternal oblivion, owed their origin and growth to disregard of the kingly authority Henry the Great, in whom God had put the most excellent virtues of a great prince, on succeeding to the crown of Henry III., restored by his valor the kingly authority which had been as it were cast down and trampled under foot. France recovered her pristine vigor, and let all Europe see that power concentrated in the person of the sovereign is the source of the glory and greatness of monarchies, and the foundation upon which their preservation rests. . . . We, then, have thought it necessary to regulate the administration of justice, and to make known to our parliaments what is the legitimate usage of the authority which the kings, our predecessors, and we have deposited with them, in order that a thing which was established for the good of the people may not produce contrary effects, as would happen if the officers, instead of contenting themselves with that power which makes them judges in matters of life and death and touching the fortunes of our subjects, would fain meddle in the government of the state which appertains to the prince only.”

The cardinal had gained the victory. Parliament bowed the head; its attempts at independence during the Fronde were but a flash, and the yoke of Louis XIV. became the more heavy for it. The pretensions of the magistrates were often foundationless, the restless and meddlesome character of their assemblies did harm to their remonstrances; but for a long while they maintained, in the teeth of more and more absolute kingly power, the country’s rights in the government, and they had perceived the dangers of that sovereign monarchy which certainly sometimes raises states to the highest pinnacle of their glory, but only to let them sink before long to a condition of the most grievous abasement.

Though always first in the breach, the Parliament of Paris was not alone in its opposition to the cardinal. The Parliament of Dijon protested against the sentence of Marshal Marillac, and refused, to its shame, to bear its share of the expenses for the defence of Burgundy against the Duke of Lorraine, in 1636, a refusal which cost it the suspension of its premier president.

The Parliament of Brittany, in defence of its jurisdictional privileges, refused to enregister the decree which had for object the foundation of a company trading with the Indies, “for the general trade between the West and the East,” a grand idea of Richelieu’s, the seat of which was to be in the roads of Morbihan; the company, already formed, was disheartened, thanks to the delays caused by the Parliament, and the enterprise failed. The Parliament of Grenoble, fearing a dearth of corn in Dauphiny, quashed the treaties of supply for the army of Italy, at the time of the second expedition to Mantua; it went so far as to have the dealers’ granaries thrown open, and the superintendent of finance, D’Emery, was obliged to come to terms with the deputies of Dauphiny, “in order that they of the Parliament of Grenoble, who said they had no interests but those of the province, might have no reason to prevent for the future the transport of corn,” says Richelieu himself in his Memoires.

The Parliament of Rouen had always passed for one of the most recalcitrant. The province of Normandy was rich, and, consequently, overwhelmed with imposts; and several times the Parliament refused to enregister financial edicts which still further aggravated the distress of the people. In 1637 the king threatened to go in person to Rouen and bring the Parliament to submission, whereat it took fright and enregistered decrees for twenty-two millions. It was, no doubt, this augmentation of imposts that brought about the revolt of the Nu-pieds (Barefoots) in 1639. Before now, in 1624 and in 1637, in Perigord and Rouergue, two popular risings of the same sort, under the name of Croquants (Paupers), had disquieted the authorities, and the governor of the province had found some trouble in putting them down. The Nu-pieds were more numerous and more violent still; from Rouen to Avranches all the country was a-blaze. At Coutances and at Vire, several monopoliers and gabeleurs, as the fiscal officers were called, were massacred; a great number of houses were burned, and most of the receiving-offices were pulled down or pillaged. Everywhere the army of suffering (armee de souffrance), the name given by the revolters to themselves, made, appeal to violent passions; popular rhymes were circulated from hand to hand, in the name of General Nu-pieds (Barefoot), an imaginary personage whom nobody ever saw. Some of these verses are fair enough.

The tumult was more violent at Rouen than anywhere else, and the Parliament energetically resisted the mob. It had sent two counsellors as a deputation to Paris to inform the king about the state of affairs. “You may signify to the gentlemen of the Parliament of Rouen,” said Chancellor Seguier, in answer to the delegates, “that I thank them for the trouble they have taken on this occasion; I will let the king know how they have behaved in this affair. I beg them to go on as they have begun. I know that the Parliament did very good service there.”

In fact, several counsellors, on foot in the street and in the very midst of the revolters, had, at the peril of their lives, defended Le Tellier de Tourneville, receiver-general of gabels, and his officers, whilst the whole Parliament, in their robes, with the premier president at their head, perambulated Rouen, amidst the angry mob, repairing at once to the points most threatened, insomuch that the presidents and counsellors were “in great danger and fear for their skins.” [Histoire du Parlement de Normandy, by M. Floquet, t. iv.] It was this terror, born of tumults and the sight of an infuriated populace, which, at a later period, retarded the Parliament in dealing out justice, and brought down upon it the wrath of the king and of the cardinal.

Meanwhile the insurrection was gaining ground, and the local authorities were powerless to repress it. There was hesitation at the king’s council in choosing between Marshal Rantzau and M. de Gassion to command the forces ordered to march into Normandy. “That country yields no wine,” said the king “that will not do for Rantzau, or be good quarters for him.” And they sent Colonel Gession, not so heavy a drinker as Rantzau, a good soldier and an inflexible character. First at Caen, then at Avranches, where there was fighting to be done, at Coutances and at Elbeuf, Gassion’s soldiery everywhere left the country behind them in subjection, in ruin, and in despair. They entered Rouen on the 31st of December, 1639, and on the 2d of January, 1640, the chancellor himself arrived to do justice on the rebels heaped up in the prisons, whom the Parliament dared not bring up for judgment. “I come to Rouen,” he said, on entering the town, “not to deliberate, but to declare and execute the matters on which my mind is made up.” And he forbade all intervention on the part of the archbishop, Francis de Harlay, who was disposed, in accordance with his office of love as well as the parliamentary name he bore, to implore pity for the culprits, and to excuse the backward judges. The chancellor did not give himself the trouble to draw up sentences. “The decree is at the tip of my staff,” replied Picot, captain of his guards, when he was asked to show his orders. The executions were numerous in Higher and Lower Normandy, and the Parliament received the wages of its tardiness. All the members of the body, even the most aged and infirm, were obliged to leave Rouen. A commission of fifteen councillors of the Parliament of Paris came to replace provisionally the interdicted Parliament of Normandy; and, when the magistrates were empowered at last to resume their sitting, it was only a six months’ term: that is, the Parliament henceforth found itself divided into two fragments, perfect strangers one to the other, which were to sit alternately for six months. “A veritable thunderbolt for that sovereign court, for by the six months’ term,” says M. Floquet, “there was no longer any Parliament, properly speaking, but two phantoms of Parliament, making war on each other, whilst the government had the field open to carve and cut without control.”

“All obedience is now from fear,” wrote Grotius to Oxenstiern, chancellor of Sweden; “the idea is to exorcise and annihilate hatred by means of terror.” “This year,” wrote an inhabitant of Rouen, “there have been no New Year’s presents [etrennes], no singing of ‘the king’s drinking-song [le roi boit], in any house. Little children will be able to tell tales of it when they have attained to man’s estate; for never, these fifty years past, so far as I can learn, has it been so.” [Journal de l’Abbe de la Rue.] The heaviest imposts weighed upon the whole province, which thus expiated the crime of an insignificant portion of its inhabitants. “The king shall not lose the value of this handkerchief that I hold,” said the superintendent Bullion, on arriving at Rouen. And he kept his word: Rouen alone had to pay more than three millions. The province and its Parliament were henceforth reduced to submission.

It was not only the Parliaments that resisted the efforts of Cardinal Richelieu to concentrate all the power of the government in the hands of the king. From the time that the sovereigns had given up convoking the states-general, the states-provincial had alone preserved the right of bringing to the foot of the throne the plaints and petitions of subjects. Unhappily few provinces enjoyed this privilege; Languedoc, Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Dauphiny, and the countship of Pau alone were states-districts, that is to say, allowed to tax themselves independently and govern themselves to a certain extent. Normandy, though an elections-district, and, as such, subject to the royal agents in respect of finance, had states which continued to meet even in 1666. The states-provincial were always convoked by the king, who fixed the place and duration of assembly.

The composition of the states-provincial varied a great deal, according to the districts. In Brittany all noblemen settled in the province had the right of sitting, whilst the third estate were represented by only forty deputies. In Languedoc, on the contrary, the nobility had but twenty-three representatives, and the class of the third estate numbered sixty-eight deputies. Hence, no doubt, the divergences of conduct to be remarked in those two provinces between the Parliament and the states-provincial. In Languedoc, even during Montmorency’s insurrection, the Parliament remained faithful to the king and submissive to the cardinal, whilst the states declared in favor of the revolt: in Brittany, the Parliament thwarted Richelieu’s efforts in favor of trade, which had been enthusiastically welcomed by the states.

In Languedoc as well as in Dauphiny the cardinal’s energy was constantly directed towards reducing the privileges which put the imposts, and, consequently, the royal revenues, at the discretion of the states. Montmorency’s insurrection cost Languedoc a great portion of its liberties, which had already been jeoparded, in 1629, on the occasion of the Huguenots’ rising; and those of Dauphiny were completely lost; the states were suppressed in 1628.

The states of Burgundy ordinarily assembled every three years, but they were accustomed, on separating, to appoint “a chamber of states-general,” whereat the nobility, clergy, and third estate were represented, and which was charged to watch over the interests of the province in the interval between the sessions. When, in 1629, Richelieu proposed to create, as in Languedoc, a body of “elect” to arrange with the fiscal agents for the rating of imposts without the concurrence of the states, the assembly proclaimed that “it was all over with the liberties of the province if the edict passed,” and, in the chamber of the nobility, two gentlemen were observed to draw their swords. But, spite of the disturbance which took place at Dijon, in 1630, on occasion of an impost on wines, and which was called, from the title of a popular ditty, la Sedition de Lanturlu, the province preserved its liberties, and remained a states-district.

It was the same subject that excited in Provence the revolt of the Cascaveous, or bell-bearers. Whenever there was any question of elections or “elect,” the conspirators sounded their bells as a rallying signal, and so numerous was the body of adherents that the bells were heard tinkling everywhere. The Prince of Conde was obliged to march against the revolters, and the states assembled at Tarascon found themselves forced to vote a subsidy of one million five hundred thousand livres. At this cost the privileges of Provence were respected.

The states of Brittany, on the contrary, lent the cardinal faithful support, when he repaired thither with the king, in 1626, at the time of the conspiracy of Chalais; the Duke of Vendome, governor of Brittany, had just been arrested; the states requested the king “never to give them a governor issue of the old dukes, and to destroy the fortifications of the towns and castles which were of no use for the defence of the country.” The petty noblemen, a majority in the states, thus delivered over the province to the kingly power, from jealousy of the great lords. The ordinance, dated from Nantes on the 31st of July, 1626, rendered the measure general throughout France. The battlements of the castles fell beneath the axe of the demolishers, and the masses of the district welcomed enthusiastically the downfall of those old reminiscences of feudal oppression.

As a sequel to the systematic humiliation of the great lords, even when provincial governors, and to the gradual enfeeblement of provincial institutions, Richelieu had to create in all parts of France, still so diverse in organization as well as in manners, representatives of the kingly power, of too modest and feeble a type to do without him, but capable of applying his measures and making his wishes respected. Before now the kings of France had several times over perceived the necessity of keeping up a supervision over the conduct of their officers in the provinces. The inquisitors (enquesteurs) of St. Louis, the ridings of the revising-masters (chevauehees des maitres des requetes), the departmental commissioners (commissaires departis) of Charles IX., were so many temporary and travelling inspectors, whose duty it was to inform the king of the state of affairs throughout the kingdom. Richelieu substituted for these shifting commissions a fixed and regular institution, and in 1637 he established in all the provinces overseers of justice, police, and finance, who were chosen for the most part from amongst the burgesses, and who before long concentrated in their hands the whole administration, and maintained the struggle of the kingly power against the governors, the sovereign courts, and the states-provincial.

At the time when the overseers of provinces were instituted, the battle of pure monarchy was gained; Richelieu had no further need of allies, he wanted mere subjects; but at the beginning of his ministry he had felt the need of throwing himself sometimes for support on the nation, and this great foe of the states-general had twice convoked the Assembly of Notables. The first took place at Fontainebleau, in 1625-6. The cardinal was at that time at loggerheads with the court of Rome: “If the Most Christian King,” said he, “is bound to watch over the interests of the Catholic church, he has first of all to maintain his own reputation in the world. What use would it be for a state to have power, riches, and popular government, if it had not character enough to bring other people to form alliance with it?” These few words summed up the great minister’s foreign policy, to protect the Catholic church whilst keeping up Protestant alliances. The Notables understood the wisdom of this conduct, and Richelieu received their adhesion. It was just the same the following year, the day after the conspiracy of Chalais; the cardinal convoked the Assembly of Notables. “We do protest before the living God,” said the letters of convocation, “that we have no other aim and intention but His honor and the welfare of our subjects; that is why we do conjure in His name those whom we convoke, and do most expressly command them, without fear or desire of displeasing or pleasing any, to give us, in all frankness and sincerity, the counsels they shall judge on their consciences to be the most salutary and convenient for the welfare of the commonwealth.” The assembly so solemnly convoked opened its sittings at the palace of the Tuileries on the 2d of December, 1626. The state of the finances was what chiefly occupied those present; and the cardinal himself pointed out the general principles of the reform he calculated upon establishing. “It is impossible,” he said, “to meddle with the expenses necessary for the preservation of the state; it were a crime to think of such a thing. The retrenchment, therefore, must be in the case of useless expenses. The most stringent rules are and appear to be, even to the most ill-regulated minds, comparatively mild, when they have, in deed as well as in appearance, no object but the public good and the safety of the state. To restore the state to its pristine splendor, we need not many ordinances, but a great deal of practical performance.”

The performance appertained to Richelieu, and he readily dispensed with many ordinances. The Assembly was favorable to his measures; but amongst those that it rejected was the proposal to substitute loss of offices and confiscation for the penalty of death in matters of rebellion and conspiracy. “Better a moderate but certain penalty,” said the cardinal, “than a punishment too severe to be always inflicted.” It was the notables who preserved in the hands of the inflexible minister the terrible weapon of which he availed himself so often. The Assembly separated on the 24th of February, 1627, the last that was convoked before the revolution of 1789. It was in answer to its demands, as well as to those of the states of 1614, that the keeper of the seals, Michael Marillac, drew up, in 1629, the important administrative ordinance which has preserved from its author’s name the title of Code Michau.

The cardinal had propounded to the Notables a question which he had greatly at heart—the foundation of a navy. Already, when disposing, some weeks previously, of the government of Brittany, which had been taken away from the Duke of Vendome, he had separated from the office that of admiral of Brittany; already he was in a position to purchase from M. de Montmorency his office of grand admiral of France, so as to suppress it and substitute for it that of grand master of navigation, which was personally conferred upon Richelieu by an edict enregistered on the 18th of March, 1627.

“Of the power which it has seemed agreeable to his Majesty that I should hold,” he wrote on the 20th of January, 1627, “I can say with truth, that it is so moderate that it could not be more so to be an appreciable service, seeing that I have desired no wage or salary so as not to be a charge to the state, and I can add without vanity that the proposal to take no wage came from me, and that his Majesty made a difficulty about letting it be so.”

The Notables had thanked the king, for the intention he had “of being pleased to give the kingdom the treasures of the sea which nature had so liberally proffered it, for without [keeping] the sea one cannot profit by the sea nor maintain war.” Harbors repaired and fortified, arsenals established at various points on the coast, organization of marine regiments, foundation of pilot-schools, in fact, the creation of a powerful marine which, in 1642, numbered sixty-three vessels and twenty-two galleys, that left the roads of Barcelona after the rejoicings for the capture of Perpignan and arrived the same evening at Toulon—such were the fruits of Richelieu’s administration of naval affairs. “Instead,” said the bailiff of Forbin, “of having a handful of rebels forcing us, as of late, to compose our naval forces of foreigners and implore succor from Spain, England, Malta, and Holland, we are at present in a condition to do as much for them if they continue in alliance with us, or to beat them when they fall off from us.”

So much progress on every point, so many efforts in all directions, eighty-five vessels afloat, a hundred regiments of infantry, and three hundred troops of cavalry, almost constantly on a war footing, naturally entailed enormous expenses and terrible burdens on the people. It was Richelieu’s great fault to be more concerned about his object than scrupulous as to the means he employed for arriving at it. His principles were as harsh as his conduct. “Reason does not admit of exempting the people from all burdens,” said he, “because in such case, on losing the mark of their subjection, they would also lose remembrance of their condition, and, if they were free from tribute, would think that they were from obedience also.” Cruel words those, and singularly destitute of regard for Christian charity and human dignity, beside which, however, must be placed these: “If the subsidies imposed on the people were not to be kept within moderate bounds, even when they were needed for the service of the country, they would not cease to be unjust.” The strong common sense of this great mind did not allow him to depart for long from a certain hard equity. Posterity has preserved the memory of his equity less than of his hardness: men want sympathy more than justice.

CHAPTER XL.

LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU,
THE CATHOLICS AND THE PROTESTANTS.

Cardinal Richelieu has often been accused of indifference towards the Catholic church; the ultramontanes called him the Huguenots’ cardinal; in so speaking there was either a mistake or a desire to mislead; Richelieu was all his life profoundly and sincerely Catholic; not only did no doubt as to the fundamental doctrines of his church trouble his mind, but he also gave his mind to her security and her aggrandizement. He was a believer on conviction, without religious emotions and without the mystic’s zeal; he labored for Catholicism whilst securing for himself Protestant alliances, and if the independence of his mind caused him to feel the necessity for a reformation, it was still in the church and by the church that he would have had it accomplished.

Spirits more fervent and minds more pious than Richelieu’s felt the same need. On emerging from the violent struggles of the religious wars, the Catholic church had not lost her faith, but she had neglected sweetness and light. King Henry IV.‘s conversion had secured to her the victory in France, but she was threatened with letting it escape from her hands by her own fault. God raised up for her some great servents who preserved her from this danger.

The oratorical and political brilliancy of the Catholic church in the reign of Louis XIV. has caused men to forget the great religious movement in the reign of Louis XIII. Learned and mystic in the hands of Cardinal Berulle, humane and charitable with St. Vincent de Paul, bold and saintly with M. de Saint Cyran, the church underwent from all quarters quickening influences which roused her from her dangerous lethargy.

The effort was attempted at all points at once. The priests had sunk into an ignorance as perilous as their lukewarmness. Mid all the diplomatic negotiations which he undertook in Richelieu’s name, and the intrigues he, with the queen-mother, often hatched against him, Cardinal Berulle founded the congregation of the Oratory, designed to train up well-informed and pious young priests with a capacity for devoting themselves to the education of children as well as the edification of the people. “It is a body,” said Bossizet, “in which everybody obeys and nobody commands.” No vow fettered the members of this celebrated congregation, which gave to the world Malebranche and Massillon. It was, again, under the inspiration of Cardinal Berulle, renowned for the pious direction of souls, that the order of Carmelites, hitherto confined to Spain, was founded in France. The convent in Rue St. Jacques soon numbered amongst its penitents women of the highest rank.

The labors of Mgr. de Berulle tended especially to the salvation of individual souls; those of St. Vincent de Paul embraced a vaster field, and one offering more scope to Christian humanity. Some time before, in 1610, St. Francis de Sales had founded, under the direction of Madame de Chantal, the order of Visitation, whose duty was the care of the sick and poor; he had left the direction of his new institution to M. Vincent, as was at that time the appellation of the poor priest without birth and without fortune, who was one day to be celebrated throughout the world under the name of St. Vincent de Paul. This direction was not enough to satisfy his zeal for charity; children and sick, the ignorant and the convict, all those who suffered in body or spirit, seemed to summon M. Vincent to their aid; he founded in 1617, in a small parish of Bresse, the charitable society of Servants of the poor, which became in 1633, at Paris, under the direction of Madame Legras, niece of the keeper of the seals Marillac, the sisterhood off Servants of the sick poor, and the cradle of the Sisters of Charity. “They shall not have, as a regular rule,” said St. Vincent, “any monastery but the houses of the sick, any chapel but their parish-church, any cloister but the streets of the town and the rooms of the hospitals, any enclosure but obedience, any grating but the fear of God, or any veil but the holiest and most perfect modesty.” Eighteen thousand daughters of St. Vincent de Paul, of whom fourteen thousand are French, still testify at this day to the far-sighted wisdom of their founder; his regulations have endured like his work and the necessities of the poor.

It was to the daughters of Charity that M. Vincent confided the work in connection with foundlings, when his charitable impulses led him, in 1638, to take up the cause of the poor little abandoned things who were perishing by heaps at that time in Paris. Appealing for help, on their account, to the women of the world, one evening when he was in want of money, he exclaimed at the house of the Duchess of Aiguillon, Cardinal Richelieu’s niece, “Come now, ladies; compassion and charity have made you adopt these, little creatures as your own children; you have been their mothers according to grace, since their mothers according to nature have abandoned them. Consider, then, whether you too will abandon them; their life and their death are in your hands; it is time to pronounce their sentence, and know whether you will any longer have pity upon them. They will live if you continue to take a charitable care of them; they will die and perish infallibly if you abandon them.” St. Vincent de Paul had confidence in human nature, and everywhere on his path sprang up good works in response to his appeals; the foundation of Mission-priests or Lazarists, designed originally to spread about in the rural districts the knowledge of God, still testifies in the East, whither they carry at one and the same time the Gospel and the name of France, to that great awakening of Christian charity which signalized the reign of Louis XIII. The same inspiration created the seminary of St. Sulpice, by means of M. Olier’s solicitude, the brethren of Christian Doctrine and the Ursulines, devoted to the education of childhood, and so many other charitable or pious establishments, noble fruits of devoutness and Christian sacrifice.

Nowhere was this fructuating idea of the sacrifice, the immolation of man for God and of the present in prospect of eternity, more rigorously understood and practised than amongst the disciples of John du Vergier de Hauranne, Abbot of St. Cyran. More bold in his conceptions than Cardinal Berulle and St. Vincent de Paul, of a nature more austere and at the same time more ardent, he had early devoted himself to the study of theology. Connected in his youth with a Fleming, Jansen, known under the name of Jansenius and afterwards created Bishop of Ypres, he adopted with fervor the doctrines as to the grace of God which his friend had imbibed in the school of St. Augustin, and employing in the direction of souls that zealous ardor which makes conquerors, he set himself to work to regenerate the church by penance, sanctity, and sacrifice; God supreme, reigning over hearts subdued, that was his ultimate object, and he marched towards it without troubling himself about revolts and sufferings, certain that he would be triumphant with God and for Him.