However, assurances of his approaching liberty were not wanting. First, the younger Bouthillier told Madame de Beuvron that the delay in setting her uncle at liberty was due solely to the suspicious conduct of Monsieur, of whom apparently the marshal was regarded as so devoted an adherent that it would be imprudent to give him his freedom until the King could feel sure that his brother had no intention of causing further trouble. Then, towards the end of June, Du Tremblay came to inform Bassompierre that he was charged by the Bouthilliers, père et fils, that he might never regard them again as honest men if he were still a prisoner in a fortnight’s time. Finally, a week later the son wrote that the Cardinal had given him his word that the marshal was to be set at liberty, and had authorised him to tell him so.

And so the miserable game went on month after month, year after year, the Cardinal gratifying his malignity by wantonly sporting with the hopes of his hapless prisoner, who was continually receiving the most confident assurances that his freedom was at hand, only to discover that they were worthless. It is indeed astonishing that so great a man should have descended to such paltry exhibitions of spite, and have persuaded, not only his colleagues in the Ministry, but his sovereign as well, to lend themselves to them. But Richelieu was a strange character, and combined in a singular degree qualities worthy of the most profound admiration with others which can provoke nothing but contempt.

But the cruel disappointments inflicted upon him by the malice of the Cardinal were far from the only mortifications which Bassompierre had to endure. His financial affairs were not in a prosperous condition, and his sojourn in the Bastille brought him to the verge of ruin. His creditors, whose appetites appear only to have been whetted by the sops which the sale of his post of Colonel-General of the Swiss had enabled him to fling to them, grew more clamorous than ever; his men of affairs proved unworthy of the trust he reposed in them and pilfered the débris of his fortune, and an Italian bank, by means of a forged document, seized upon a magnificent tapestry which he would not have parted with upon any consideration. Nor was this all. With the entry of France as a principal into the Thirty Years’ War, Lorraine had become the battle-ground of the hostile armies, and Frenchmen, Imperialists, and Swedes vied with one another in pillaging the châteaux and estates of the marshal and his family:

The destruction of this château, which was situated near Briey, may, of course, have been an act of military necessity; but it was more probably one of pure spite, since, as we know, there was little love lost between the marshal and Condé.

Harouel was spared, though it is doubtful whether this was done out of any consideration for its unfortunate owner.

In the following May Bassompierre succeeded in obtaining an ordinance from the King for the restoration of his corn. But Gobelin, Intendant of Justice and Finance in Lorraine, who in the days of the marshal’s prosperity had been his intimate friend, protested against this; and it was finally decided that he should be allowed to keep it for the use of the army, nor was Bassompierre able to obtain any pecuniary compensation.

In July of the following year the Château of Harouel, which had been occupied by the troops of the Duke of Lorraine, was bombarded by the King’s troops, and, after seventy cannon-shot had been fired at it, was surrendered to the French commander, who left a garrison of thirty soldiers there, to be maintained at Bassompierre’s expense.

In August, 1636, Bassompierre’s niece, Madame de Beuvron, went to the Cardinal to solicit her uncle’s liberty.

It might be supposed that if, in these circumstances, Bassompierre had little to hope for, he had little to fear. Such, however, was not the case. Some notes written by him in the margin of a history of the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII, composed by the Historiographer Royal, Scipion Dupleix, the proofs of which are said to have been corrected by Richelieu himself, were published under his name, but entirely without his authority, by a monk named Père Renaud, the confessor of his fellow-prisoner the Abbé de Foix, to whom he had lent the copy containing them. The marshal’s criticisms were probably pretty stringent, but those which appeared in print were a great deal more so, and the work aroused a considerable sensation. Dupleix complained to the Cardinal, and, says Bassompierre, “they did not fail to report the matter to the King and to tell him that it appeared evident from these memoirs that I entertained an aversion to his person and State.”

About the same time, a soldier of the Light Cavalry named Valbois was arrested and brought to the Bastille, charged with having recited a sonnet against the Cardinal, beginning, ‘Mettre Bassompierre en prison;’ and the marshal was warned by his friends outside to destroy all his papers which might be capable of injuring him, as it was intended to seize them, with a view to bringing him to trial.

Finally, however, Valbois, after being interrogated several times, probably with the object of ascertaining whether Bassompierre had had anything to do with the composition of the objectionable sonnet, was set at liberty, and, as no action was taken against him, the marshal’s mind became calmer. Nevertheless, he appears to have lived in constant apprehension lest his papers should be impounded; and this no doubt accounts for the fact that, in his Mémoires, the composition of which were now his chief occupation, he exercises a rigorous discretion in his comments on current events, although he was kept informed by his friends of everything that was happening in the world outside. “I shall say nothing,” he writes naïvely, as though to shelter himself from all reproach, “of the quarrel between the King and the Queen ... of the punishment of the nuns of the Val-de-Grâce ... of the dismissal of the King’s confessor, Père Caussin ... nor, finally, of the entry of the Chancellor into the Val-de-Grâce, where he caused the Queen’s cabinets and caskets to be broken open, in order to seize the papers which she had placed in them.”

Bassompierre did not confine his literary activity to his Mémoires; he wrote also the history of his embassies to Spain, Switzerland, and England, which was first published in 1668. In 1802 an octavo volume, bearing the title of Nouveaux Mémoires du Maréchal de Bassompierre, recueillis par le président Hénault et imprimés sur le manuscrit de cet académicien, appeared; but the best authorities on the period are agreed in regarding this work as apocryphal.

The years passed, and Bassompierre still remained in the Bastille. So far from uttering complaints, he sought rather, by his words and acts, to disarm the enmity of the all-powerful Minister. He protested vigorously whenever he learned that the malcontents or the enemies of Richelieu claimed him as one of their number; he lent his house at Chaillot to the Cardinal every time that he asked for it; and, what does him more honour, when in 1636 France was invaded, he offered to serve as a simple volunteer. All was useless. The most distinguished personages solicited his liberty; the poets interested themselves in his fate and attested by their verses a courageous gratitude for the favours which the marshal had bestowed upon them in the days of his prosperity. Richelieu remained deaf to all appeals.

It is little wonder that, if the question of his liberty, after more than eight years of detention, was treated in this fashion, the hapless victim of the vindictive Minister and the cold-hearted King was sometimes plunged into the depths of despair.

In this state of depression we can well understand the bitter grief which the death of a little dog, which was his constant companion, appears to have occasioned him:—

Bassompierre’s Mémoires conclude in October, 1640, with a reference to the death in exile of his brother-in-law Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, the news of which had just reached him and appears to have caused him much distress.

CHAPTER XLII

Henri d’Arnauld, Abbé of Saint-Nicolas d’Angers, in a journal addressed to the wife of Président Barillon, describes the incidents of this deliverance, which the invisible influence of Richelieu seemed still to be hindering:

Some weeks later, and very shortly before his death, Louis XIII authorised the Maréchaux de Bassompierre and de Vitry and the Comte de Cramail to reappear at Court.

It is related that when Bassompierre went to pay his respects to the King, his Majesty received him very graciously and inquired how old he was. “Fifty, Sire,” was the reply. “Surely you are much older than that?” exclaimed the King, in surprise. “I deduct the twelve years passed in the Bastille, since they were not employed in the service of your Majesty.” And on being presented to a beautiful young girl, he observed: “Mademoiselle, how much do I regret my youth when I see you!”

Nevertheless, so greatly had the tone and manners of fashionable society changed since that fatal day when he had lost his liberty, that poor Bassompierre—Bassompierre who had formerly passed for the marvel of the old Court!—appears, with his habits of magnificence and gallantry, to have been regarded as a trifle antiquated, though, in the opinion of Madame de Motteville, “the remains of the Maréchal de Bassompierre were worth more than the youth of some of the most polished of that time.” The young men to whom Madame de Motteville refers formed the cabal of the “Importants,” whose ephemeral reign was terminated by the imprisonment of the Duc de Beaufort (September, 1643). To this cabal belonged the Marquis de la Châtre, who, on the death of Coislin, who had died in 1641 from wounds received at the siege of Aire, had succeeded him as Colonel-General of the Swiss. He was obliged to surrender this post, of which the marshal resumed possession, on condition of paying Le Châtre the 400,000 livres which he had received from Coislin. Bassompierre’s resignation was considered as null and void, and the post as not having been vacated.

Bassompierre did not long enjoy this return of favour. On October 12, 1646, his servants found him dead in his bed at Provins, where he had stopped for the night, while returning to Paris from a visit to the elder Bouthillier’s country-house. He had evidently passed away peacefully in his sleep, “as he was found in his customary position, one hand under the pillow at the place where his head rested, and his knees a little raised.”[151] His body was brought in a coach to Chaillot; the intestines, the tongue, and the brain were buried in the parish church before the high altar; the heart and the rest of the body were delivered by the curé to the Minims of Migeon, whose convent was close to the château, and deposited in a chapel to the left of the high altar, in the choir of their church. The Duc de Chevreuse and “other nobles and ladies of high quality, with a great number of bourgeois and inhabitants of Chaliot (sic),” assisted at the funeral ceremony.

The Maréchal de Bassompierre left two sons; one by Marie d’Entragues, the other by the Princesse de Conti. The first, who was called Louis de Bassompierre, took Holy Orders, and, after being provided, doubtless through his father’s influence, with two rich abbeys, was consecrated Bishop of Oloron, a see which he subsequently exchanged for the more important one of Saintes. He was, in later years, appointed almoner to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV; but this post he resigned, in order that he might reside continuously in his diocese, in which respect he set an example which other bishops would have done well to follow.

The Bishop of Saintes was a pious and worthy man, beloved by the poor and esteemed by everyone. During the troubles of the Fronde he laboured to maintain in their allegiance to the Crown, or to bring back to their duty, the population of Saintes, Brouage and the surrounding country, and it was he who negotiated the accommodation of the Comte, afterwards the Maréchal, du Daugnon with the Court. He died in Paris, whither he had come on business connected with his diocese, on July 1, 1676. “Hélas!” writes Madame de Sévigné, “à propos of sleeping, poor M. de Saintes has fallen asleep this night in the Lord in an eternal sleep. He had been ill for twenty-five days, bled thirteen times, and yesterday morning he was without fever. He talked for an hour with the Abbé Têtu (these kind of improvements are nearly always deceptive), and on a sudden he fell back in agony, and, in short, we have lost him. As he was extremely lovable, he is extremely regretted.”

“The worthy prelate,” says the Gazette de France, “has left his friends sensibly afflicted, the poor of his diocese in the extremity of grief, and all those who knew him edified by the exemplary actions of his life, and his Christian resignation at death.” By a will, made the year before his death, he left all his property to the poor and the churches of his diocese.

The marshal’s son by the Princesse de Conti was known as François de la Tour. He is described by Goulas as “one of the handsomest and bravest men of the Court”; and Tallemant des Réaux writes:

François de la Tour appears to have resembled his father in other respects besides courage and good looks, as, in September, 1639, we find Bassompierre complaining that “a person who was very nearly related to him, named La Tour, had been gambling and had expended in a prodigal fashion a great deal of money, which had occasioned him much vexation.”

François de la Tour was wounded on August 10, 1648, at the taking of Vietri, in the kingdom of Naples, and appears to have died of his wounds. “It is,” observes the Marquis de Chantérac, “without doubt of him that the Gazette de France speaks in announcing, under date January 27, 1648, that the Sieur de Bassompierre, naval captain, had distinguished himself in the engagement which had taken place between the King’s forces, commanded by the Duc de Richelieu, and those of Spain, under the orders of Don Juan of Austria, in the Gulf of Naples.”

Of the three nephews of the marshal, the eldest, Anne-François, Marquis de Bassompierre, was killed in a duel in May, 1646, without having married. The second, Charles, Baron de Dommartin, married Henriette d’Haraucourt; but his male posterity continued only to the second generation. The third, Gaston-Jean-Baptiste, Marquis de Baudricourt and de Bassompierre, left descendants who were attached successively to the service of Lorraine and of France. The last male representative of this branch was Charles-Jean-Stanislas-François, Marquis de Bassompierre, who died in 1837. The families which to-day bear the name of Bassompierre would not appear to be connected in any way with the House of Betstein.

THE END

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