THE COURT OF LOUIS XIII

CHAPTER I •./::': V.

LOUIS XIII. AS DAUPHIN *. /*,:.::"•,••

^^ TW T OUS n'aurions connu ni Marie de M^dicis, ni [^ Louis XIII., ni les pitoes favoris de la.m^re et du fils. La f^odalit^ n'eut pas 6t6 domptfe par Richelieu. . . ."^

These are the words used by M. Desclozeaux in considering that projected marriage between Henri IV. of France and his mistress, Gabrielle d'Estr^s, which was hindered by death, and with them we may also head our introductory chapter for they bring before us the chief performers in the court history of Louis XIII.: the queen-mother and the king her son, wound in the tangle of intrigue; the great territorial aristocrats of France and their brigandage, and that cardinal figure which, with the strength and polish of a hand of steel, was to consolidate the ruling function in the sovereign.

The projected marriage with Gabrielle had stirred society to the depths. The king's divorced wife. Marguerite de Valois, the Bourbon princes and the ministers of state had combined against a plan so revolutionary. Gabrielle died suddenly, poisoned, said many, regardless of the complication of premature maternity which provided a solution. We of to-day, when the appendix has become the most important portion of the human document, know also how to supplant that verdict of poisoning, hurriedly dealt out in earlier ages. With Gabrielle's death vanished the chief obstacle which had confronted those who desired the king's union with the Princess Marie of Tuscany, and on April 25, 1600, the marriage was solemnized, by procuration, at Florence, the

> GabrielU d^EsMts^ A. DescloieAuz.

bride's uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, standing as proxy for the bridegroom.

" We have arranged the marriage for you, Sire," said the king's minister. Sully, to him in the royal closet, and Henri IV. appears to have submitted as to a matter of state convenience and personal indifference. He arranged, however, to\ taint''^, {Private view of this bride of half his age as she s^t at sup'p^r.at Lyons on her journey towards Paris, but : fplliog. fo/^^reserve his incognito he sought her after the interrupted meal and pleading the absence of his own couch, assumed the new relationship on that same evening, December 9, 1600.

With the new queen's arrival in Paris a restoration of court life took place. Ceremony had suffered an eclipse during preceding years which had been filled with the con-ftision consequent on the civil wars. The splendour of the early sixteenth century—the pageantry of the Field of Cloth-of-Gold—had faded into the tales of a grandmother, while, amid the laxity of the king's irr^^lar domesticities, court revels had been transferred to the houses of Henri's boon companions.

The new queen was confronted by the irregular m^ages installed around her at the Louvre. The Venddme children ; —^two sons and a daughter,—^the offspring of dead Gabrielle, had their recognised status and received on the whole tolerant treatment at the hands of their father's consort Then there was Henriette, Marquise de Vemeuil, the reigning favourite, who, later on, was to embitter the queen's life by her all^^tions of a pre-contract of marriage between herself and the king which would have rendered void the marriage with Marie de M^icis. A document relative to a prospective marriage does appear to have existed, but the event was to have been contingent upon the birth, within a given time, of a son, and this condition Madame de Ver-neuil had not succeeded in fulfilling. All the same, she made herself a blister upon the subject for many a long day, raising factions in the court Madame Moret and other mistresses were yet to come. Henri IV. was not diverted by his marriage from the company of the mattresse-

en-titre for more than a few days, for, within the year 1601, which saw the birth of the Dauphin Louis, Henri de Vemeuil also appeared to testify to the royal amour.

In such surroundings Louis XIII. started in life, being the first royal offspring bom as Dauphin for more than eighty years. The court was at Fontainebleau, prepared for the event State beds of crimson and gold were set up in the great oval chamber assigned to the queen, while canopies overshadowed the expectant mother and the royal witnesses of the event. The sage^femme^ wife of a Paris surgeon, slept at hand, hoaxed by false alarms from mischievous waiting-maids. When the genuine summons came, at midnight on September 26, 1601, she was sound asleep and ready with disbelief, but this time Pierrot, a valet of the bedchamber, was relentless. " He did not give me time to lace my stays I"—complains the dame in her narrative. The king, fussing round like any bourgeois, hastily led her to the queen. Marie de M6dicis was struggling with womanly reluctance to reconcile herself to the presence of the necessary state ivitnesses. Henri reasoned tenderly with his wife, trying to soften the prospect by assurances of the dominant sentiments of kindliness which would fill the minds of the necessary male contingent At i a.m. he insisted that the three princes of the blood, present in the palace, should be summoned. It may be inferred that Messieurs de Conti, de Soissons and de Montpensier were not too well pleased at being routed finom their beds for an event, which, as the dame soon persuaded every one, could not as yet take place. At half-past two, they retired and the dame, with the court physicians, remained in possession. Henri IV. was most earnest in his attention, leaving his suffering wife only for short intervals, in order to take a little food, and sending constantly for reports while absent Things dragged on all day. Amateur remedies were proposed. The queen's Itsdian ladies-in-waiting were urgent in recommending the methods of their native land and in consoling their royal mistress in her trial. Among them was that Leonora— Marie's foster-sister of lowly birth, who as wife of the

Marquis d'Ancre, was, in after years, to be implicated in the amp cCitat of the regency in 1617.

Remedies they proffered, but the king forbade any but professional interference. The sage-femme bristles ivith honest self-importance. The physicians inquired what she would do in the case of a less august patient:—

'' I suggested remedies which they instantly ordered from the apothecary," says the bustling Lucina. In an adjoining room, monks from the convent of St Germain-des-Pr^s offered prayer before the relics of St Margaret, which by custom were venerated as of special efficacy upon such occasions. An instance of kindly feeling on the part of Marie de M^dicis must not pass unnoticed, for, as we hear, she had given orders that the little Due de Vend6me, the eldest son of Gabrielle d'Estr^es, should be cared for, so that he might not miss her usual attentions to him, and also that, on account of his tender age, he should be kept away from her room. In the long hours of that day, however, little C^ar found his way in and appealed in childish fashion to the midwife :—

" Will it be a boy or a girl ? "

" I told him," says the dame, " that it would be whichever I chose to make it"

" Then," said the little boy, quite seriously, " be sure you make it into a boy."

" And if I do, monsieur, what will you give me ? "

The child offered her her heart's desire, more than all his earthly possessions.

^' I ask no more than your goodwill," rejoined the friendly dame.

The bustle of preparation increased. Chairs were placed for the ladies invited by the queen, among whom were the king's sister, Cath^ne, Duchesse de Bar, the Duchesse de Nemours and some ladies of the noblesse. At last, in the late evening, the Dauphin was bom at ten hours, thirty-seven minutes and five seconds after noon, as his physician, already appointed, records, giving an immortal advertisement to his watchmaker, one Plantard of Abbeville.

A moment of suspense as the dame wrapped the babe

in swaddling bands. Then a whisper from her in the ear of a court lady, and then the king, pale with s^tation, bent towards her—" Is it a son ? *'

"I told him, Yes 1"

At once the scene became one of joyous excitement, in which the common feeling of humanity over-rode the colder satisfaction of the State. The child had shown a momentary faintness, and the dame had asked for wine and a spoon from an attendant The king held the bottle.

" Now if this were an ordinary child," said the dame, " I should take wine in my mouth and give it to him thus."

Then the king held the bottle to her lips, saying, " Do as you would to any other." She filled her mouth and blew the spray of wine down the throat of the new-bom, who instantly revived under this treatment of a mother-bird, and smacked Ihis lips. The scene waxes into melodrama; the king, *' with tears as big as peas " rolling down his cheeks, comforted his wife for her trials by the happy news of a lovely boy. Then he commanded that the Dauphin should be handed to Madame de Montglat, who, for years to come, was to be gouvertuinte to the royal children and to their irregular half-brothers and sisters alike.

Leaving his queen in the background, Henri embraced the princes of the blood, and then, unaware that his wife was half fainting from the reaction of those long hours, he opened the door into the ante-chamber and gave entrance to the waiting throng of peers and officers of state, much to the vexation of the midwife, who avers that there was not room to turn in the queen's chamber. The king patted her on the shoulder. '' Make yourself easy, never mind I" he exclaimed,'' this child belongs to all."

Next we have the less emotional account of the Dauphin's medical attendant, who gave him un peu de mithridate in wine and caused him to be washed with wine and attar of roses. And so, under the zodiacal sign of the Balance, from which he derived his title of " Le Juste," and on the feast of SS. Cosmo and Damian, September 27, 1601, was bom Louis XIII. of France and of Navarre.

Immediately after the birth, mounted messengers, who

had been waiting in boot and spur, set hotly off to cany the great news to Paris, Florence and Mantua:—^'•for a daughter," says a cynic of the day, " they would have shown less energy."

The baby Dauphin proved to be tongue-tied, and a few days after his birth this defect was remedied by a slight sui^cal operation. When a week old his father nearly let him fall, but a nurse caught him unharmed. On October 27 the heir-apparent entered Paris, slumbering on the knees of Madame de Montglat, and was received at the Porte St Antoine by a band of wind instruments, and conducted to the house of Sebastian Zamet, the great financier and boon-companion of the king, who had already come off the winner in two bets upon the sex and day of birth against his sovereign and the queen.

In the summer of the next year ceremony already attended the child at his toilet, and little Henriette de Vend6me had the honour of handing his shirt, always a

^distinction at the morning and evening dressing of royalty.

T There are many glimpses of happy simplicity in the child-life of Louis. The king would have him at his table and give him mouthfuls of the royal meals, a little jelly or wine, for which he early had a taste, or a slice of bread spread with butter by the king's own hand. Playfulness would follow, the king tossing him an orange which he threw back. Early in 1603 came the day when he ate meat for the first time, duck and capon too, enjoying both. He played the common tricks of infancy, snatching a cake of marchpane from the plate of one of the Venddme children at the king's supper-table, and fidgetting, like other sitters of his age, when painted by court artists. For amusement he had picture bookd, Bible scenes shown to him by his nurse, and birds and beasts in the natural-history books of the time. He played with toys, a tiny silver dinner-set, or figures of silver, ivory and glass, and carried on miniature warfare with his leaden soldiers. A taste for arms was early cultivated, and when four years old he received a present of a musket and bandolier richly ornamented with gold and silver work and with golden ammunition.

More serious matters were in the hands of various officials. P^ Coton, of the Society of Jesus, taught the child to say his prayers when three years old. The assiduous physician, anticipating Froebel, attempted education with designs of cherry stones upon a plate. Thus, a windmill which the little boy had outlined in these same cherry stones gave an opening for a lesson on the four winds. Darker episodes occurred at intervals, for the rod was not spared, and '' Mamanga," which was the baby nickname for the gouver^ nante, laid it on for rudeness, careless habits, and refusal to take physic The children of a day which surrounds its pills with so much jam may spare a heartache for the little prince, resisting the dreaded midtcine noire which was not always mitigated by un Icdt (tamandes. Thrashings were reserved for the hour of the nursery Uver,

Henri IV. had a high respect for Madame de Montglat, and on the death of her husband, in 1607, he wrote her a letter in touching terms :—

" Mon fyls sera dor^navant votre mary, et moi vostre bon roy et maistre."

" Mamanga " must have needed both power and tact to deal with her charges, the regular and irregular offspring, brought up in companionship. One of the king's letters commends her discretion in isolating " ma iille de Ver-neuil" when suffering from smallpox. As a matter of interest, it may be mentioned that she was related by marriage to that De Sancy who gave his name to one of the finest of the crown diamonds of France.

In June 1606, the king and queen had a dangerous carriage accident while crossing the river at Neuilly, which place had already been the scene of two previous mishaps. They were upset into the river, owing, so one narrator says, to the horses becoming restive while in transit on the floating pontoon, and the queen was nearly drowned, being barely rescued by one of the suite, who pulled her from under the wreckage by the hair.

Brothers and sisters, five in all, were bom to the young Dauphin between 1601 and 1610. Following custom, the royal children received the essential rite of baptism when a

few days old^ a solemn public ceremony being reserved for a later occasion. On September 14, 1606, Louis and his two sisters received the public rites in the keep at Fontaine-bleau, which was chosen because neither the chapel nor the great hall could contain the thousands who attended from all parts of the country.

Pope Paul V. was godfather to the Dauphin, being represented by the special l^ate, Cardinal Joyeuse. A space was enclosed for the ceremony and draped with rich tapestry, and here an altar was erected, while on a raised platform, decked with cloth of silver, stood the baptismal font Tiers of seats on either side of the altar were occupied respectively by choirs of music and by the great ecclesiastics and officers of state. Before the altar were the seats of Cardinal Gondi and the court chaplains, while the Swiss body-guards encircled the enclosure, each bearing in his hand a flaming torch. The day, clear and shining as it was, was thrown into the shade by the lustre of attire and the sparkle of the gems set in the swords of prince and peer: thirty thousand crowns' worth blazed in the hilt alone of that borne by the Due d'Epernon. Queen Marie outshone all others in robes decked with thirty-two thousand pearls and three thousand diamonds.

The dressing of the royal children was carried out with great state that morning. Five princesses of the blood lifted the Dauphin from his bed and shared the honour of removing his night garments and dressing him for the ceremony. A procession was then formed, many taking part in it carrying lighted waxen tapers. There was a band of drums and wind instruments, nine heralds, the great officers of the household, and the knights of the Holy Ghost; and then came groups of nobles carrying the appurtenances of baptism for each child separately. Thus were carried the basin, the salt-cellar, the vessel for the holy oil, and the taper before la petite Madame, who, being an infant, was carried in the arms of the Mar^chal de Bois-Dauphin ; also, before her elder sister; and, thirdly, before the Dauphin. Princes of the blood and the irregular brothers of Venddme were the bearers of his baptismal

requisites. Cond6, the premier prince of the blood, led him by the hand, while the Due de Guise carried the train of his ermine mantle. Behind came twenty noble torch-bearers, then followed the papal legate as sponsor, and the Duchess of Mantua, the Dauphin's maternal aunt, as godmother, and behind her came the princesses of the blood who had assisted at the lever. The Dauphin was lifted on to a taUe, and, being of an age to answer for himself, was now questioned by Cardinal Gondi, and made the responses according to previous instructions from one of the court chaplains. Asked if he had already been baptized, he replied—

" Yes, thanks be to God."

When the salt of exorcism was put into his mouth he said on his own account,

" I've swallowed it, and it was quite nice."

" I renounce them:—I believe," he responded to successive questions, and then he repeated the Lord's Prayer, the Hail-Mary, and the Creed so^sweetly that tears stood in the eyes of all. He was [named Louis, after the saintly ruler of France in bygone days. The little girls then underwent the ceremonies, being named Elizabeth and Christine, and then followed a state banquet, where the august foreign guests sat near their hosts, the king and queen, who were at separate tables. Princes bore the dishes and nobles waited on the company, and among these may be named the Baron de Bassompierre, a personage of the period, and the author, in his later years, of well-known memoirs. A ball followed, opened, at the king's command, by the Due de Lorraine, who had stood godfather to the little princesses. The next day was filled with military sports, for which the Due de Sully had erected a sham fortress, in order to give greater vraisemblance to the display. ^, ,

After this great day the boy's life returned to the round of / small events. He petted his dogs and fed the swans or visited the ostriches when at Fontainebleau. Study he never loved. At times he would retort with that childish aptitude which takes the wind out of the arguments of older navigators. His nurse one day pulled his hair, and he cried, as

10 THE COURT OF LOUIS XIII.

some other children do, and was reproved by his phjrsician's wife.

''What would you say if you were run through by a sword?"

" I shouldn't mind that"

"What! not mind it?"

" No, for I should be dead I"

Already he could help to make his bed, and often did so, even in later life. At Fontainebleau he tried his hand at gardening. We find him digging there on the Good Friday of 1607, having earlier sown peas and beans. He dabbled, too, in cookery, and before he was six had made a stew of / meat and vegetables in a little cooking-pot in his mother's l^^rpom. Already there were initiations in the surrounding laxity. Tongues were swift with news of the birth of another royal bastard. A little "fi-fi" or "soeu-soeu" would be announced to him; news received at first with blank incomprehension, and very little later with furious repudiation (since his mother had no agency in the event), uttered in a dreadful vernacular which smites painfully on mother ears of our more careful age.

The first enlightenment seems to have come to him when he was five and a half, on the birth of a son to the Comtesse de Moret We may imagine how Marie de M6dicis, with tongue embittered by the heckling of La Vemeuil, might whisper her exasperation into the child's ear, and how the courtiers would amuse themselves by firing off these items in their own fashion.

Now and again the boy would show some antipathy to the coarseness of manners displayed before him, and, in some instances, his attendants also appear to have deplored the same, although, on the other hand, he was allowed to indulge in speech and action which cannot be here recorded. Henri IV. himself occasionally displayed a grossness of deportment towards his own children which provoked comment, even in an s^e which knew no artificial attitude towards the cardinal points of human existence. It was suggested one day that an ill^timate son of the Due d'Epemon should wait on Louis at meals.

^ Do you suppose I would be served by a bastard I" cried the angry child.

Towards the Venddme children, however, Louis and his mother displayed friendly feeling, on the whole, even after the death of Henri IV. ^. . . Dear to maidens are their rivals dead,'' says a modem poet,^ and the mistress Gabrielle was dead, while the Marquise de Vemeuil, Madame Moret, and Charlotte des Essarts lived before the eyes of the queen and her children. Such conditions, however, as all know, were not unmatched; but now we come to the strangest touch of all in this mixed court—^the interchange of courtesies with Henri's divorced wife. Marguerite, who had, in an early year of the century, returned to Paris, and established herself in a house on the left bank of the river, at the comer of the Rue de Seine, and facing the Louvre, and from the palace, in 1614, the boy-king, Louis XHL, watched the fire which burned down her stables. Three centuries have passed—^a long time, we say, yet unthinkingly, for a hundred years, though great as the lifetime of an individual, shrink into little span when measured by the greatness of the change they witness in the history of a world. We find it hard enough to throw ourselves backward into the feelings of another epoch, and the tale of this ex-queen, were she removed into an even darker age, would stun our contemplation, for Henri IV., in his appeal for the annulment of his first marriage, had alleged against Marguerite misconduct which horribly associated her nearest in blood in her youthful gallantries, and which made into a mere interjection of frivolity that further indictment of spreading her bed with sheets of black silk to serve as a foil for her beauty, and lighting up the same by the flames of a thousand wax-lights. Within six years of her divorce, this very Marguerite was visiting the court and receiving visits at her hdtel in Paris or her country-house at Issy from the little Dauphin. Besides this, there were civilities between herself and Marie de Mddicis; indeed, the two women seem to have had the link of a common feud against the Vemeuil mistress. The ageing woman gratified

* AmeUa^ C. Patmoie.

a vicarious maternity in ^er dealings with the child Dauphin. She gave him fairings from the jewellers' stalls at the annual Foire St Germain, and an order on her goldsmith for anything he pleased. Nor was this mere perfunctory plan of giving all, for she had presents specially designed, adorned with gems which bore, engraved upon them, the dolphin cognizance, while at her death Louis became her principal legatee.

In 1607, 01^ ^^ alarm of plague, the Court fled hurriedly to Noisy, and here, on August 24, Louis attended his first hunt On October 25, at i a.m., a fire broke out in the room next to his own at Noisy, and the child was removed for safety to the room of his brother, the infant Due d'Orldans.

Varieties of weather, for which we are apt to blame the English climate alone, were experienced in Louis' childhood. One summer was so cold that fires were needed ; and there were winters of such severity that wolves invaded the palace gardens at St Germain. Two eclipses of the sun were witnessed by the Dauphin, who watched their course by the reflection in a bowl of water.

The different habits of that day are brought before us by the notice of the first bath which was taken by Louis when nearly seven years old. He and "Madame" (his sister Elisabeth) shared it Baths are chronicled at intervals during his early years ; rose-leaves were infused in the water, and while taking them the little prince played with his silver toys and boats. Washing he objected to, resenting it, indeed, on one occasion as an effeminacy;—" je ne suis pas damotseauJ' At a later period he bathed in the river, and received a swimming lesson.

Here and there allusions to his simple pursuits continue ; the writing of a laundry-list or the making of butter in "Madame's" dairy at St Germain-en-Laye. On New Year's Day, 1610, a deputation of the Paris tradesmen attended at the Louvre and presented him with a dozen cases of jam, and with wine and hippocras. It was a time when rumours and threats were circulating vaguely round the king. Henri IV. feared secretly an attack upon his life, though he would laugh off* the alarms of others.

Marie de Mddicis was pressing for her own coronation, which had not yet taken place; and urgently, because it promised to strengthen her position against the pretensions of the Marquis de Vemeuil. She prevailed, and her coronation took place on the day before the ending of the reign. The Court must have been overcrowded at St Denis if we accept the Dauphin's account of his own lodging, for he had, he says, in his quarters, a well, a cellar, and a drinking-fountain for poultry, while beneath his room was a stable; it was indeed " le logis d'un chanoine, le plus mauvais de St Denis."

Bassompierre, writing in old age, tells the tale of those last days ; let us hear his own account:—

''We entered on that hapless month of May, fatal for France by the loss which we sustained of our good king. I will mention some instances of the king's presentiment of death. . . . Several times he said to me and to others as well,' I believe that I am soon to die.' And on the first of May, returning from the Tuileries (he always leaned on some one), he was then holding on to M. de Guise on one side and to me on the other, and he did not leave go until just as he was about to enter the queen's room. Then he said to us : ' Do not go away; I will go and hurry my wife in her dressing so that she does not keep me waiting for dinner'—for, generally, he took his meals with her. We waited, leaning on the iron balustrades which run round the courtyard of the Louvre; when, without warning and without being shaken by wind or any visible cause, the may-tree, planted in the middle, fell and lay in the direction of the short flight of steps which leads to the king's chamber. (Another account makes this incident more intelligible by stating that the tree was in process of being planted.) I said to M. de Guise: ' I would have given anything for that not to have happened. What an evil omen 1 may God preserve the king, who is the may-tree of the Louvre.' He replied : ' It is foolish of you to think of such a thing.' I answered: ' In Italy and Germany they would make much more of such an omen than we do here. God preserve the king and all his concerns.'

'* The king, who had only gone into the queen's nx>m and out again, came quite softly to hear what we were saying, thinking that we were discussing some woman, and overheard what I had said. He broke into our talk. 'Silly fellows that you are, to occupy yourselves with these forebodings. For thirty years all the astrologers and quacks have foretold yearly that I was in danger of death, and when the hour of my death does come, all the omens of that year will be noted and made of much account, but no one will allude to those of previous years.'"

On the afternoon of May 14, during a temporary block in the narrow streets, as he drove to visit the Due de Sully, Henri IV. was murdered by Ravaillac

CHAPTER II THE king's minority

LOUIS XIII. was now a reigning sovereign. The death of his father, concealed for a night from taut Paris, was known to the eight-year*old boy. Only by the stem insistence of the Due d'Epemon, who was in attendance upon the late king, had Ravaillac been spared from instant death.

*' If I had only been there with my sword," cried the child, weeping, " I would have killed him 1"

Bassompierre, hurrying to the Louvre upon the news of the attack, found the dead body, surrounded by physicians and by a few of the great nobles, who prostrated themselves, kissing the hands and feet of their dead master, and weeping bitterly until Cfth^rine, the queen's dresser, came from her newly-widowed mistress to desire their presence.

Marie de M^dicis lay on her couch, abandoned to the first shock of grief and horror. But the officers of state recalled to her mind that a king still reigned, and that her powers must be reserved for the new claims upon them.

" Madame," urged one of them," you must stay your tears and cryings and postpone them till you have assured the safety of your sons and of yourself. Let Bassompierre get together all the light horse now under his command in Paris and proceed through the city to still disturbance. M. le Grand (this was the title of the Master of the Horse) will remain in charge of the body of the king, and will, should need arise, be near to protect Monseigneur le Dauphin."

At this point, the Due d'Epemon^ having given the necessary commands to the palace-guard, entered to kiss the hands of the young king and of his mother, and was then despatched by the latter to announce to Parliament

«5

that she held letters of regency from the late king which, in anticipation of a proposed visit to Germany, he had granted to her, and also that, during a past illness, he had announced his purpose of appointing her regent in the event of his death. Upon receipt of this message. Parliament at once entered into debate and assented to the regency of Marie de M^icis during her son's minority.

On the following morning, the princes, peers and Cabinet Ministers assembled at the Louvre to do homage, and, about ten o'clock, the new king, dressed in violet mourning, and riding a small white hackney, left the palace to attend Parliament, accompanied by a great crowd of royal and noble personages on foot The queen-mother, shrouded in the deepest sables of widowhood, drove in her coach, followed by the princesses and peeresses ; the royal approach being announced by the drummers of the body-guard. At the entrance of the monastery of the Austin Canons, where the sitting was to be held, the chief officials of Parliament received the mourning monarch. The king took his seat, with his mother at his right hand, in presence of the crowd of les notables, which included the papal legate and other great churchmen.

Then Marie de M^icis began her speech, broken at first with sighing and tears. Controlling herself, she appealed to the assembly for their best aid and counsel in the direction of affairs. The young king followed with a set speech of similar import, spoken with une royale graviti, and long addresses were then delivered by various members of Parliament to the king and to the queen-mother. The king then held his first lit-de-justice and appointed his mother as regent by the advice and concurrence of the princes, spiritual and temporal, and of the general assembly there present

As had been foretold by the dead king, Paris throbbed with tales of omen. It was told how on the morning of the fatal Friday, the boy Due de Venddme had warned his royal father that the day was a dangerous one, and that an attempt would be made on his life.

" And who told you this ? " inquired the king.

"DrlaBrosse."

** Ah !" said die king, who knew La Brosse's astrological pretensions, " he's an old rascal trying to get 3rour money, and you are a young fool to listen to him 1 "

'Then the dead king's horoscope and a recent dreadful nightmare of the queen's were cited. Nuns too had received warning visions in their cloister, while convent bells, untouched by human hand, had tolled at the fell hour on May 14. Amid all this, with public mourning and continual masses of requiem, the murdered king was buried.

The absence from Paris of the somewhat turbulent

princes of the blood had allowed Marie de M^icis a more

undisturbed entry into authority than would have been

possible had they been upon the scene. There had been

quite an exodus of late of these princes from the capital

Henri, Prince de Condd, had left the year before in order to

remove his beautiful young wife, Charlotte de Montmorenci,

fixxn the importunities of a too amorous sovereign. The

attentions of ^' le grand Alcandre " (such was the romantic

name of Henri IV. in the annals oif Court gallantry) were

undoubtedly tris suspectes. Dark rumour tinted them even

more horridly, for was not Cond6—ostensibly nephew ^ to

the king—accredited with the filial relation itself. Was it

not utter shamelessness that suffered Henri IV. to look

unlawfully upon his own son's wife ? queried a great lady

between her teeth. Cond^ with his wife, had exiled himself

to Brussels, and among the rumours with which Paris made

herself hoarse after the assassination, was the hint that

Ravaillac had been in that city shortly before. What

connivance, hissed the tongue of Paris, might there not

have been between the princely exile and the r^icide?

ThiSy however, was but one among a swarm of heated

suggestions. As appeared in evidence at the trial, Ravaillac

had been rejected in youth from the novitiate of a religious

order on account of being mentally unsound. Destitute,

save for a paltry coin or two, and the murderous knife which

he had stolen from a tavern, he was probably quite single in

his crime and its devising. He, a typical anarchist, crazed

by starvation and spurred by the suggestions of a diseased

^ Neren k la mode de Bietagiie^ u€, fiist oouin onca nmoved.

a

^f

mentality, struck, as his kind strike in our own day, at the most prominent member of human society; that was all. The complexity of examination under torture brought out no more than this. Tongues rushed from one indictment to another. The Jesuits, always a convenient ecclesiastical Aunt Sally, were aimed at Then even wilder talk turned to the regent and the Due d'Epemon, as acting in connivance. Epemon, we remember, had been with the king at the moment of the attack and had stayed the bystanders* impulse towards lynch law.

" Ah I Madame," cried a woman of the people to Marie de Mddicis, as, returning from a country excursion, she rode into Paris with her armed escort, " had our good king been guarded as well as you are, he might yet have been among us."

The regent probably grasped nothing of this dark insinuation. She was the last, we may believe, to hear the current rumours, and she seems to have depended mainly for news of what went on outside the palace on Queen Mai^aret, who, owing to her less restricted social condition, was able to keep the queen-mother posted, to some extent, in the gossip of the town.

Another who had left the Court was the Comte de Soissons, Condi's uncle. His was a much more trivial grievance. On the day before Henri's death, when Marie de M6dicis was crowned at St Denis, the king had inhibited the Comtesse de Soissons from wearing the royal fleur-<le-lys upon her garments at the ceremony. In a fit of ill-temper at the slight to his wife, Soissons had withdrawn from Paris. Two days after the assassination he reappeared at Court Cond6 also returned in July firom the Low Countries, being met on the frontier by assurances of a friendly reception from the regent Marie de M^icis was, however, somewhat perturbed, when the exile entered Paris, to learn that no less than fifteen hundred followers were in his train. Times of turmoil ensued ; unending were the dissensions at the Court The feuds of the great nobles, arising often out of trivialities, flared up in succes-sioui and were in turn patched up by royal intervention.

Sometimes the 3^ung king would be present at these adjustments. The head swims at the number and the changefulness of the disputants. At the same time Us grandSy indulging as they might in discord among themselves, were yet united by a bond of common enmity against the regent's Italian favourites, Concini and his wife, Leonora Gai or Dosi, the queen's foster-sister,^ who had gained complete ascendency over her, had accompanied her from Florence. When Henri IV. visited his bride's chamber at their first meeting, he found a dwarfish figure on guard at the door. This was Leonora, who had adopted the finer sounding surname of Galigai. The king was early moved with a desire to send Leonora home again to Italy, but nothing would induce Marie de M^dicis to part from her life-long favourite. The little woman with the peaked features and vivid ^es had set her affections on the young secretary, who had also come from the Florentine Court to France with the retinue of the new queen. Worn by debauchery, Concini appeared far less eligible as a bridegroom to the onlooker than to Leonora. The queen whispered hints out of her new matronhood to the foster-sister, but, seized with the intensity of passion which seems to visit women whose emotions have not been thinned by promiscuous admiration, Leonora would not relax her urgency. For Concini, there was little of physical attraction in this woman, older than himself moreover, but then she was easily first favourite with the queen, and he was not blind to the material ends to be attained by such a union. So the queen's consent was gained, and after the birth of Louis, the pair were united, and tc^ether attained a complete ascendency over their royal mistress. Concini, in the earliest days of the regency, was advancing to honours. In September 1610, we find him taking the oath of allegiance as first gentleman of the bed-chamber to the boy-king, in place of the Due de Bouillon who had been dismissed from the post So clearly had Sully, the Chancellor of the

^ One eoDtempontfy, not an Italian howerer, nor acquainted with the qaeen in childhood, says that Catherine Selvaggio, the dresser, was Marie's foster-sister, and that Leonora was a playmate.

20 THE COURT OF LOUIS XIII.

Exchequer, foreseen the ascendency of the foreign fiavottrite, that, after the murder of Henri IV., he had retired to his ch&teau at Rosny to await events. On the Arsenal, his deserted Paris residence, a w^ had posted an affiche — ** To Let, at Easter quarter. Apply to the Marquis d'Ancre." Marquis^ for by purchase and toy^ grant Concini had secured a property and its adherent patent of nobility, though he would seem to have been of obscure origin. He described himself, it is true, as ni getitilhamme et de bans parenSy but, when he sought a confirmation of the patent of nobility, strange tales were whispered about the Court Such as the following:—

*' The queen's emissary, who had been sent to Florence to inquire into the matter of the favourite's genealc^^, returned to Paris and to the Court (February 1611), and many and conflicting were the statements concerning his report on tiie descent and the noble standing of the Concini stock. But everything was kept very dark, and nothing has been published or printed. What seems best authenticated widi regard to the paternal condition (for of the grandfother and great-grand&ther not a single record was found at Florence or elsewhere) is, that the said Concini is the son of a secretary of the Duke at Florence,^ and that this father of his has been seen in Paris, begging a meal, and having not the means wherewith to buy shoes. Regarding any other distinction, all is silence, and I fear it may be much like that of [a certain hero] whose sole exploit as a warrior was the killing of a foot-soldier already at the point of death*

'^As for his wife, it has been found that she was the daughter of a cabinetmaker, whose son, now abbot of Marmoustier, has been seen in Florence acting as a grave-dijKer."

Such is the relation of a contemporary, who does not seem unduly biassed, with reference to Condni, his wife Leonora, and her brother, known as Etienne GaligaL It was difficult for anyone to be dispassionate where the hated Florentines were concerned. Probably, in truth it was to the middle-^ This was Cosmo de MWds, Grand Duke of Tnseafiy.

class that'Concini belonged, the intelligent son of a minor official at the Tuscan Court

To return to the boy-king. ^ ^

Louis, after the first outbreak of childish sorn>w, seems I to have resumed his previous existence. For a time, he j shared his mother's sleeping room until the king's apartments were prepared for him after the funeral Personal discipline remained the same. He was whipped on May 29 for rudeness to one of his gentlemen-in-waiting. Furtively and in haste, lest the deed should be discovered by his g&uvemeur^ would the boy stuff into his pockets a handful of dried cherries. He ordered ^ M. le Grand " to draw up a list of his dogs, Ouel, Griffon, Gayan, and the rest He went boar-hunting in the environs of Paris, and tried his skill at line-fishing at the country house of the ex-Queen Margaret, at Issy. Renard, his hairdresser, taxed his patience and he struck him with a mirror and with his fists, and was forced to afiologize by threats of the whip. He attended many of the Paris Churches in state, and complained of the lengthiness both of the services and of the great preachers of the day. For study he retained a strong aversion, making large offers for a respite.

^ If you will let me off my lessons, I will make you a bishop," he told M. de Fleuranges. /

But the tutor was incorruptible. J

Possibly a rumour of this aversion had reached his schoolboy subjects, for we find, in the first summer of his re^, the scholars of the College de Navarre making a petition for a month's holiday and receiving three days. Adult interference, and not a want of fellow-feeling, was, perhaps, responsible for this deep inadequacy.

Preparatbns were going on for the coronation. The Chancellor attended at the Louvre to instruct Louis in the speech which he was to address to Parliament, when assembled at Rheims for the occasion. On October 14 the king made his entry into that city to which the r^alia had already been brought frcMn St Denis. Halting at the gate, he listened "patiently," says one, to the addresses of welcome and loyalty. A nymph in a chariot drawn by white

horses, presented him with the keys of the city, the maiden who played the part receiving afterwards from the king a golden chain worth two hundred and fifty crowns. The city was full of troops: the life-guards lined the route to the Church of Ndtre-Dame, while mounted men, armed to the teeth, and the Swiss guards in their uniforms, tawny, crimson, white, and blue, preceded the king and the great personages, behind whom came the archer-guards. At the church door the king dismounted and was conducted by the clergy to the Sanctuary, where, after private prayer, it had been arranged for him to present a costly reliquary for the high-altar, but, as the work could not be completed in time,. the offering was postponed.

On October i6 the king received the sacrament of confirmation at the hands of Cardinal Joyeuse, making a confession to F&re Coton, S.J., who also preached at the ceremony, while the ex-Queen Margaret and the Prince de Cond6, as sponsors, presented Louis to the celebrant

On Sunday, October 17, the coronation took place. The proceedings began about 9.30 a.m., but long before that hour four of the nobility, attended by gentlemen bearing the respective banners of their blazon, left the house of the Archbishop of Rheims for the Abbey of St Rdmy, taking with them a white horse as a mount for the prior, who was to bear the sacred ampulla, the vessel of anointing oil.

Then there arrived at Ndtre-Dame processions of ecclesiastics in their vestments, of princes in cloth-of-silver tunics reaching to the knee and coats of purple, with collars and lapels of miniver: dukes, covered with golden headgear, and the lesser nobles with golden circlets. Then, with much ceremony, young Louis was fetched from his lodging at the archbishop's. Thrice did the Bishop of Laon strike upon the door, and at each knock did the Lord Chamberlain demand:—

** Que voulez-vous ? "

To which the bishop answered :—

'' Louis XIII., fils de Henri le Grand," and die Chamberlain rejoined :—

" II dort"

A second time the phrases were repeated. Then to the third challenge came the answer:—

" We seek Louis XIIL, whom God has given us as king."

Then they entered and found the king upon a splendid bed, wearing a shirt of Dutch linen, especially designed to open in front and behind for the application of the holy unction ; an upper garment of crimson satin and a long-sleeved robe of doth-of-silver, made to open similarly. The bishops raised him from the couch with every mark of homage and escorted him in procession, chanting as they went, to the royal entrance of the church. Then were seen . the troops and heard the drums and hautbois, then came heralds and a crowd of noblesse ; the knights of the Holy Ghost, wearing their orders; the Scots Guards, the gentleman-ushers in white satin with their maces, and last, before the king. Marshal de la Ch&tre, acting as deputy for the Constable of France,^ and carrying a naked sword. Behind the king came Silleiy, the Chancellor, in his gown and hood of scarlet, adorned with ermine and gold lace and with a " mortar-bowxi" of cloth-of-gold upon his head. And other great officers of state were there, and so they all came to the church door. Then the Bishop of Beauvais said a prayer, after which the king entered the church, the canons preceding him and chanting ''i faux-bourdon," Psalm XX. The king shall rejoice in thy judgment^ O Lord.

Then the king proceeded up the nave. The rite was solemn and elaborate,' and was succeeded by a state banquet at the king's lodgings. Here, the sovereign, who had fasted from the previous night, sat in splendid state, surrounded by all the great personages. Grace was said, water and a towel were handed for washing the fingers, and then, to the sound of drums and trumpets, the dishes were brought in, accompanied by the officers of the household. Throughout the banquet, the Marshal de la Ch&tre stood, holding the naked sword upturned.

^ Henri (I.), Due de Montmorend, Constable of Fimnce,'j595-16141 who was absent. ' * Some foither aoeoont of the coronation is appended to chap. zix.

/ These great ceremonies accomplished, Louis returned to

' his boyish pursuits. He continued to busy himself with minor crafts, making cowls for toy monks, and sewing them himself quite skilfully. Cooking experiments pr<^ressed, as indeed they did throughout the reign. Pet animals were still a great absorption. His dogs, a yellow parrot, and other animals are mentioned as his playmates. The ostrich-£au-m at Fontainebleau was still kept up, and the king pre-

/ sented two of his ministers with an egg apiece in the first

/ year of his reign.

" The queen-regent, not shaken in her attachment for the Concini pair by the tales brought back from Florence, was involving herself daily more and more in unpopularity on their account We find her son, a few days after the granting of the peerage to Concini, visiting the new Marquis d'Ancre at his house in the Fauboui^ St Germain. Meanwhile, the hatred of both orders for the favourite steadily increased. Aristocratic disdain for the upstart peer was great, but it came far short of the vehement hatred of the populace. The lower orders have always resented any overstepping of the bounds of friendship, the limitation of which is one of the inherent penalties of royalty. The hatred for Gaveston comes as an example from Planti^ent times, and of more modem instances we do not need reminding. The popular aversion took local colour from the stratum of its origin, obscene couplets, detailing the alleged amour of the regent and the foreign "bounder" were heard upon the Paris streets. The finer-pointed slander of the courtier was aired in mots^ which circulated amid the lai^hter of the listeners, and even the bridge which shortened the distance between the queen-mother's apartments and the town house of the marquis in the precincts of the Louvre, was dubbed " le pont d'amour."

It was hinted now, and, at a later date, spoken loudly, that the favourite combined with Marie de M^icis to keep Louis from any participation in affairs. At times the boy would resent the liberties taken by the couple, and one day he showed his feelings pretty plainly when, as he was playing in a room above her own, the marquise sent word to him

that she had a headache and that he was making too much noise. He replied that if her room was too much exposed to noise, Paris was big enough to provide her with another.

The boy was already quick to resent a want of ceremony in others. He complained angrily of the insolence of the Prince de Cond6, who had sat down covered in his presence. During a journey from Fountainbleau to Paris in June i6i i the Baron de Vitry and Louis' half-brother of Venddme gave great offence, as travelling companions, by eating cherries and apricots in his presence.

** Do you want to make a pot-house of my coach I" cried the king, resentfully. ^

Again the troubles over physic recur, and again the beatings, discipline excessive for a boy in his teens when the object of it was liable to be embittered by the ridiculous position which it entailed on him before the eyes of derisive courtiers. The defects of his education and his natural distaste for intellectual pursuits became more prominent as manhood af^roached. The careful training of princes at our own day, and the specializing in military and political departments, which are to fit the heir-apparent for the rule to come, are so familiar to ourselves that we can scarcely realize a system which suffered a reigning sovereign to lemain immersed in trivialities. Unhappily Marie de M^dids lacked wisdom, both as mother and as regent In our own day the friendly eyes of the great powers have watched the minority of another Bourbon, bom a king, and trained by maternal wisdom in preparation for the ruling of i, but the mother of Louis XIH. seems throughout to

ve sought the subjection of her son, and to have maintained in a state of pupilage most detrimental to his career, as man or monarch. Henri IV., in the hour of his birth, had laid the sword of government upon the infant form and recognised him as the property of the State, Cet enfant est it tous, but Marie, her perception blocked, we may allow, by the spectacle of her husband's discursive amours and the laxity of the Court in general, resolved perhaps that her son should be driven with a tight rein, lest he also follow

in the same groove. Marie de M^dicis has been the victim of much obloquy, but the difficulties of her position are often overlooked. They might have staggered a wiser regent. Unhappily she had no stroi^ man among her advisers, and it is doubtful whether she would have welcomed one had he appeared, for hers was the narrow vanity which cannot lay aside its self-will for the latter public weal.

{ As years went on the young king displayed more and

' more those aptitudes for handicrafts which nearly two centuries later were seen again in his descendant, Louis XVI. If he went to lay a foundation-stone, he must also amuse himself with the work of a mason. He shod horses and helped in the removal of furniture. A house-moving had been among his childish games. '* He had," remarks one historian, '* all the points admirable in a valet, but none belonging to a master." To his brothers and sisters in these early years Louis seems to have shown affection, mixed with a patronage akin to that of an English schoolboy. Episodes of quasi-paternal dealing stand forth at intervals. He would send meat from his own dishes to Gaston, the youngest brother, and would restrain *' Madame" from drinking wine.

, '*I am a year older than you," said the monarch,

/ autocratically.

"On November i6, i6ii,the little Due d'Orl^ans,^ aged four years, died at St Germain. Pretty tales of the usual kind were heard around the little death-bed. He had seen a vision—^"bon papa" wanted to see him. "I will kiss him ever so much!" said the dying child, joyously. He died at midnight, and next morning the news was brought to the young king, on waking, by the Marquis d'Ancre. r Nightmare and a terror of ghosts were frequent, indicating, ti^ether with graver symptoms, the neurotic taint which, later, gives a key to some of the puzzles of the reign.

^ The author has failed to find any contemporary authority for the statement, made by some modem genealogists, that this, the second son of Henri IV., was named Nicolas. The sage-fsmme and many others unite in saying that he died

Louis would often have two valets to stand beside his bed till he dropped off to sleep. For some of these disturbances, prosaic clues may be found in indigestion. His suppers, at times, were heavy. On St Cecilia's Day, 1611, when he was ten years old, he ate of two kinds of soup, a dish of cockscombs, boiled fowl and veal, the marrow from a bone, followed by a chicken roasted brown, of which he had a goodly helping; after which came sweet dishes and dessert, with, as the recorder tersely adds—"/aiVi pmr After all this came a little digestive dose to keep all steady. So it is not surprising that he woke one night in terror because he had heard that a lady of the Court, who had died the week before, had been seen, a ghostly visitant, in the queen-mother^s apartments.

On Christmas Eve of this same year Louis first attended the three masses ^ of the feast at midnight, and was r^aled at I a.m. with a slice or two of sausage, perhaps the classic baudin of reveiUon. "^'

On September 27, 1614, the king attained his majority, upon completing his thirteenth year, according to an Act of Charles V., and on October 2 he went in state with the r^ent, the royal family, princes and peers to Parliament In garments sparkling with diamonds, Louis rode with a mounted company of about eight hundred gentlemen, all adorned with aigrettes and chains of gems and with diamond badges. The royal ladies followed, and a brilliant throng was formed in the great gilded hall of the Palais Bourbon, close to the Louvre. The king, sitting in his liP^e-justux^ had on his right the r^ent, while in a chair of state sat Gaston, Due d'Anjou, the king's surviving brother and heir-presumptive. Here, too, among the highest in the land, we find the Marquis d'Ancre, now for a year past a Marshal of France, while with Mesdames, the royal sisters, and their gouvemanU^ who is still Madame de Montglat, is the little woman with weird eyes and vivacious mannerisms, Leonora, Mar^chale d'Ancre. In the same group are included the half-sisters of Venddme and Vemeuil, while in a loge upon the

1 On the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord the prieatt of the Catholic Ghnvch aie privileged to lay three manet ia laooenioii.

left hand is that stiange presence, the ex-queen MargiKirtte de Valois, now so near to death.

In the height of a scene, where all should have been joyous loyalty, the feelings of Us grands were rasped once more to the uttermost The Italian, insufferably presumptuous, was seen to seat himself on a chair just behind the )^ung monarch and his mother. Blood came near to boiling-point Was the favourite made too fatuous by crowding honours to divine what his act would mean, stored up against a day of reckoning by the spectators, already banded by a common intolerance of his pretensions ?

The regent made a short speech, surrendering her rule into the king's hands, and Louis then offered her his thanks, and concluded with a declaration, desiring her to continue in office; and this ended, the queen-mother rose and did obeisance to her son. We may safely conclude that the scene had been rehearsed at the instance of Marie de M^dicis and her advisers, and, indeed, there would scarcely be opposition from a king whose only care was to have time for gambols with his dogs, or for falconry, and the shooting of little birds with the cross-bow in the palace gardens.

** Tell him," he directed, in sending two cooked sparrows to his tutor's table, *'that they are the ortolans of the TuiUrusr

Poor Louis I he was very young, and there was no strong man at hand. For who was his intimate 7 Why, that De Luynes, great in training of the falcon and the magpie, who, together with his brothers of indistinct pedigree, was becoming prominent among Court personages. De Luynes, introduced as a safe tool by the Mardchal d'Ancre, who did not foresee how the viper he had warmed would retaliate on him. De Lu)nnes, twenty years older than the boy, and who sat alone by his bedside at nighttime talking interminably in whispers, and impressing his personality so intimately upon the susceptible temperament of the young king that, even in his sleep, he would cry out for ** Luynes I" and the ever-watchful body-physician, stealing to his side in the night watches^ would p(»ider over

THE MAJORITY OF LOUIS XIII

PROM THB PICTURE BY RUBENS IN THE LOUVRE

• • •

• • ••

• • •,.

this obsession. Over the youthful head proceeded Court dissension and intrigue. The day was yet to come when a hand and brain of tempered steel were to command the ship of state, and wield a sway, relentless and imperturbable over the unkingly sovereign.

CHAPTER III

THE DAWNING OF RICHELIEU

ON March i8, 1612, as we are told, King Louis went to the church of St Andr^des-Arcs to hear the sermon of " M. de Richelieu, ^vfique de Lu9on/' a prelate then in the twenty-seventh year of his age and the fifth of his episcopate. Although he and his family had already become objects of royal favour, it is noticeable how little the capabilities of the future statesman and cardinal were observed or even suspected by the world at large. One there was, indeed, a member of the noble family of Le Clerc du Tremblay, who, a year earlier, had first become acquainted with the young bishop, and had divined that here was a coming power. This Capuchin monk, who had renounced arms and a brilliant future to retire, against the wishes of his family, into the cloister as le pire Joseph^ uttered with no uncertain sound the praises of this object of his admiration. He had made his views known in a powerful quarter, and had enlisted the private offices of the Marquise d'Ancre in bringing the Bishop of Lu9on to the particular notice of the queen-regent

Let us refresh our memory with a little retrospect r^ard-ing Richelieu and his family history.

Armand Jean du Plessis came of a cadet branch of a noble family long settled in Poitou. The name of Du Plessis recurs in episodes of kingly patrone^e and friendship. It was to one of the clan, a member of the Du Momay contingent, that Henri IV., burning with a friend's indignant sympathy, wrote, after an attack had been made upon him at Angers, where he was upon the kii^s business, and where he had been beaten witih a stick par un GentUhomme son Enfumy.

THE DAWNING OF RICHELIEU 31

" I share the outrage as your sovereign and as your friend. . . • Towards you I will carry out the office of the king, the ruler and the friend."

The branch to which the great cardinal belonged had acquired from one of its possessions the territorial surname of De Richelieu. Before the days of Henri IV. poverty had settled upon the seigneurs of Richelieu. But their pride of lineage was well sustained. Richelieu himself would retrace his genealogy through the female line to early kings of France, and why should he not, for those sovereigns of old often took to wife the daughters of the great lords of ancient France.

'* To-day," says the Ahh6 Lacroix,^ " such considerations leave us somewhat cold," but in the time of Richelieu they were of magnitude, and he was tenacious of his claim to royal descent Marie Louise de Montpensier,'' la Grande Mademoiselle," niece to Louis XIIL, says that, at the Chateau de Richelieu, on the fireplace of one of the living-rooms, were the family arms originally placed there during the lifetime of the Cardinal's father, and which Richelieu caused to be left as they were, on account of the collar of the Holy Ghost which was displayed in them, " in order to convince those who are in the habit of decrying the origin of royal favourites that he was born a gentleman and of good family. His paternal grandfather had married Fran-9oise, a daughter of the noble house of De Rochechouart Their son, Franfois du Plessis, Marquis de Richelieu, had taken for his wife Suzanne de la Porte, from a family which was a neighbour in Poitou. The bride's father was a member of the legal profession and of the parliament of Paris, and was a man of wide ability. We may find it interesting to consider Richelieu as derived from these two of his ancestors with their characteristics—the grandmother, an imperious aristocrat, importing haughtily her Rochechouart blood into the less glorious era of Du Plessis, and the politician De la Porte, of bourgeois extraction, handing down his mental equipment to the Cardinal, third son of his daughter and the Marquis, who was bom on September 9» 1585.

^ Richelieu d Lufon.

Discussion has concerned itself with Richelieu's birthplace. It seems fairly well established that he was bom in Paris. True, that a room in the family Chateau of Richelieu was pointed out as the scene of honour. La Grande Mademoiselle again says that the inconsistence of the interior of the Chateau de Richelieu, as rebuilt by the Cardinal, with the magnificent exterior, was partly due to his desire to preserve the chamber in which he was born.

Still, the greater weight is on the side of the Paris claim. Richelieu, whetlier in earnest or to please his supporters, spoke of himself as by birth a Parisian; the consideration, in any case, is one of sentiment alone. The baptism of Armand Jean appears, on good authority, to have taken place in May 1586, in the half-finished parish church of St Eustache, the registers of which were destroyed in the Commune of 1871. Grandmother de Rochediouart was the godmother. The infant was among the last who had, according to the ancient church custom, two godfisithers and a godmother. The Catholic Council of Trent, desiring to do away with complications of spiritual affinity, had arranged to restrict the number of sponsors to twa

Armamd Jean was only four years old at the time of his father's death, an event which brought urgent calamity to the widow and her children, for Franfois du Plessis left heavy financial embarrassment behind him;—a very moderate country-house;—predecessor of the mansion built in after years by the cardinal-statesman;—attenuated revenues and debts. To pay for the funeral the widow was obliged to sell the costly collar of the Order of the Holy Ghost, of which her lord had been a knight Nor could she relieve the tension by any adjustment with the heir, for the cutting of an entail was an impossibility under the French law of inheritance. The Marquise de Richelieu, however, was no common woman. With a love and veneration for her husband's memory whidi she never outwore, she united a keen attention to the interests of her young family. When the king, Henri IV., proffered a post at Court to the widow, she decided to refuse the honour, reflecting on the difficulty of guarding and educating her offspring while occupying

THE DAWNING OF RICHELIEU 33

such a position. Then she humbly recommended her eldest son, Henri, to the royal notice. The king was touched by the maternal zeal and gave the youth an entry at the Court. His career was allotted by fate and primogeniture. For Alphonse, the second son, the family bishopric of Lu^on was kept warm, according to the lax custom of the day, while Armand Jean, in course of time, assumed, as became a gentleman of France, the profession of arms.

Fate, however, was to shuffle the cards. Alphonse had been, for a short time only, bishop-designate of Lu9on when an irresistible vocation to the ranks of the regular clergy impelled him to the cloister of the Carthusian order. Here was a fresh complication for the family exchequer. The revenues of the see, though not dazzling, came in usefully in meeting claims on the estates. We may listen to the story of the mother's interview with her soldier-son, as told by M. Bonneau-Avenant.^ The Marquise gently pointed out to him the difficulties in which the latest move of his brother Alphonse had placed her. How were the revenues of the see of Lu^on to be retained in the family ?

" Ma mire," cried the young Marquis de Chillou (a title derived from a minor fee of the Richelieu family), springing into her arms, " I will myself enter the Church in the emergency." The episode, if without formal basis, is picturesque, says the Abb^ Lacroix.

It was about 1605 that young Du Plessis thus relinquished the profession of arms and petitioned Henri IV. for a grant of the bishopric of Lugon, which was still being kept warm by a former cur^ of the parish of Richelieu—the " warming pan " bearing the incongruous name of " Hiver." Henri IV. gave the patent, and the young soldier plunged into the study of theology, first at the Sorbonne, and later, under private instruction, in the provinces. Indications are afforded that Richelieu's mental capacity soon displayed itself in the new arena. After the course of studies came the question of obtaining the papal licence to hold the see of Lu^on in person, without which the royal grant would be inoperative. Here the candidate's extreme youth was an

^ La DuchesH cPAigtaUon, 3

obstacle. Henri IV., through Cardinals Perron and Joyeuse, advocated the claim of his prot^6, and furthered his petition for a dispensation for consecration under the canonical age. Paul V. was, in 1607, harassed by the internal affairs of Italy, so that this matter of a minor French see was shelved for the time being. The way to do a thing well is to do it oneself. Richelieu set out for Rome and presented himself before the Papal Curia to press his point home. And here comes in the tale which has roused such thick debate on either hand, though it in truth lacks even the distinction of being well-invented. Young Armand, so it runs, presented as his own the baptism certificate of his elder brother, Alphonse, in order, by a fictitious advance in years, to further his own claim. The trick, however, was detected.

''Ha! ha!" remarked the Pontiff, "this youngster has cunning enough to carry him a long way ; he ought to come to the front"

The saying is fathered on the Pope; it has a strong flavour of its more likely birthplace in the mouth of Gallic cynicism.

Such is the story told by Richelieu's contemporaries, who, however, as we must bear in mind, were often more in the dark about the early years of the great minister of Louis XIII. than they might have been about the dead of previous centuries. Richelieu, too, was a man well hated, the public ear and tongue turned with the conviction of desire to any voicing of its animosity. On the other hand, critics less involved in the bitterness of that period have pointed out that as the aspirant for consecration had already entered into treaty for a dispensation, it would have been indeed a superfluity of naughtiness to introduce the substituted baptism certificate into the pleas. The trick, some say, was remembered against Richelieu in later years, when the matter of his Cardinalate was in process. We shall see for ourselves, when we reach that point, what forces, working underground, really conduced to the delay in sending the hat Reports concur with regard to the favourable impression produced at Rome by the young theologian's preaching. Paul V. consented to be gracious and Richelieu received

THE DAWNING OF RICHELIEU 35

episcopal consecration. The orders of sacerdotalism were presumably conferred previously by a grace which dispensed the candidate from the usual regulations. Examples of such administration en bloc were not rare in those days of elastic discipline. No record, states the Abb^ Lacroix, has been found of the priestly ordination. Richelieu was under twenty-two at his consecration on April 17, 1607. Within a short time he returned to Paris, receiving a gracious welcome from his sovereign. " My bishop/' said Henri IV., genially, and the young prelate may well have seen great possibilities before him in such an atmosphere of royal favour. On the public, as we have already noticed, the Bishop of Lu9on had made no particular impression. It takes brain-power to appraise the dower in others, and none could have looked ahead to the developments of this diocesan of an obscure provincial see. The assassination of Henri IV. doubtless rendered Richelieu's aspirations tremulous, but he fell into the ranks of the Italian favourites, and the patronage of the queen-regent was in turn bestowed on him.

Marie de M^dicis had, in earlier days, rejected the proposal that the young Marquise de Richelieu, sister-in-law to the Bishop of Lu9on, should be appointed as mistress of the robes. Henri IV. urged her to receive the lady, but the queen wished that the favoured Leonora should hold the ofSce, and in the end the king had given way to her petulant desires.

The bishop's first political opportunity came when, after an interval of many years, the Estates-General of the realm were convened in the autumn of 1614. Sens had first been indicated as the destined place of meeting, but when the disturbances of the Court malcontents spread into the provinces, it had seemed safer to bring the meeting within the capital, where military restraint could be efficiently enforced. The Bishop of Lu^on, by the help of some partizan tactics, was appointed as deputy for the clergy. The deputies reached Paris, '' not," says M. Hanotaux, ''without some grumbling at the coldness of the autumn and the lateness of the season." Those who had arrived by

October 2 attended at the declaration of the king's majority. On October 26 the formal opening of the Etats took place with long and elaborate ceremonies. Assembling at the Convent of the Austin Canons at eight in the morning, the three estates accompanied the king, the queen-mother and the royal family in procession to the church of Ndtre Dame.

M. Hanotaux gives a full and graphic description of this procession,* telling of the crowd of beggars, halt and maimed, who, according to custom, headed it Three cardinals preceded the Archbishop of Paris, who, surrounded by his clergy, bore the Sacred Host under a canopy, the four comers of which were supported by princely persons.

Under a second canopy walked Louis, morose et vttu de blanc. After him came his mother, in her widow's garments, and her ladies and maids, and also cette delicate et fragile Elisabeth fiancie au roi dEspagne^ lumineuse dans sa robe de toile dargent

Here, too, as in other scenes, appeared incongruously the ex-queen Marguerite. Then, on foot and bearing lighted candles, came great ladies of the Court and men of the noblesse, all indeed who were privileged by custom to attend upon their majesties. A high mass was celebrated at the Cathedral, and next day the deputies met for business in the great Salle Bourbon, opposite the Louvre. Here, surrounded by his Court, the young king, clad in white, rose from the throne and, standing beneath the canopy of violet velvet patterned with the royal flower, opened the sitting. The proceedings lasted all day; endless were the orations poured out by one and another. Louis may well have wished in secret that he could have brought his bed with him as he used openly to desire for the long sermons of the Court preachers. We need not follow the official account through its long-drawn platitudes.* Party obstructiveness added to the harassment A section, civil and Gallican, had pitted

1 Richelieu^ G. Hanotaux, II. Pt. i. p. 5.

' M. Hanotaux has redaced the record of the proceedings to lucid reading in bis Richiliiu,

THE DAWNING OF RICHELIEU 37

itself against the Ultramontanists. " Les hommes de robe en France n'ont jamais aim6 Rome/' alleges M. Hanotaux.

The Tiers Etat showed itself throughout recalcitrant; the commons would be dealt with neither by intermediaries from the noblesse nor from the ecclesiastical order. As a last resource, the clergy turned to Pierre Fenouillet, Bishop of Montpellier, who directed against the inflexibility of the Third Estate a string of his most dazzling metaphors. But in vain did he deploy the "Spartan metal, the temple of Solomon, the firmament, the equinox, the furies and the flames "; all was unavailing, the stubborn Tiers was not even singed by all this fire of rhetoric: the clerics " were at a loss to know which saint they should call to their assistance."

Turning from these vast affairs, we surprise the king, one November day, slipping for a rest into the HAtel Bourgogne, whence he despatched his favourite De Luynes to fetch cream buns from the neighbouring pastry cook.

CHAPTER IV

THE KING'S MARRIAGE

FROM the earliest days of Louis' childhood the project of a Spanish marriage had been familiar both to him and to the royal entourage. On September 28, 1601, the day after his birth, news of the birth of the Infanta of Spain, on September 22, had reached the French Court The vision of a marriage between the baby pair was already in the air before the year had rounded to the first anniversary of the Dauphin's birth. The year-old heir-apparent, giving audience to the bearers of birthday homage, received, among the rest, cong^tulations from an ancient Spaniard who, tearful with emotion, gave his blessing to the child as he entered and quitted the reception chamber, uttering hopes for a marriage with the eldest child of Spain. With the ungamished grossness of the age, the question was discussed before and with the child, with detail and suggestion of so intimate a nature that they can here only receive the notice of remote allusion. After the death of Henri IV. the project, always dear to Marie de M^icis and her Florentine relatives, assumed still more distinct form. Yet there was not wanting opposition from those who argued that an alliance between France and Spain could not work, since their political interests ran counter to one another. A Court faction had early instilled this antagonism into the child's mind.

" You must forgive your enemies," said a Court ecclesiastic, instructing the boy.

" Except the Spaniards," urged the child, " for they are the enemies oipapar

All the same, the Dauphin placed Spain before England as a field for marriage alliance, Spain having plus de grandeur.

Spain was then indeed in the front rank of the great powers, and it may sting our insular pride a little to recall that an alliance with her royal house ranked before one with the Prince of Wales, son of James I., for " Madame " of France.

On her side, too, Spain offered some protest in modification of a scheme which would debar from the succession a princess who, since the Salic law of feminine exclusion did not operate in Spain, was a potential sovereign in her own right Her younger sister, Dofta Maria, was proposed, but France declined the cadet offspring in alliance.

In 1611 treaties for the marriage were in form. They included an alliance, second only in interest, between Elisabeth, the eldest princess of France, bom in 1602, and Philip Victor, heir to the crown of Spain, who was two years younger than his betrothed. In 1612 the solemn betrothal of King Louis took place, and was celebrated with splendid fi§tes in Paris on March 6, 7, and 8. Addresses of congratulation were offered to the regent

" The queen, as most devoted mother and most prudent and upright regent, rightly estimating that no other alliance could be so suitable and so advantageous to the realm of France as one with Spain, has arranged the marriage of the King, her son, with the Infanta. And the King of Spain, being well able to realize that even Solomon in all his glory cannot compare with the splendour of the ileur-de-lys, recognizes that if such a match was in former days considered worthy of the greatest princes of the earth, it is more than ever so in a day of such prosperity for France."

This opening is followed by a lengthy harangue, crowded with classic and historic allusions, served up in the most florid terms.

For three days pageants were presented in the Place Royale to celebrate the betrothal. Princes and nobles filed upon the scene in processional detachments, with trumpeters and steeds clothed alike in cloth of silver, or in velvet, gorgeous with bullion. At intervals came triumphal cars with set scenes, such as may be seen in our London Lord Mayor's Show. A few may be described.

^^Une Machine" made of imitation rock-work, with a miniature forest in which played a band of hautbois, drawn by six horses abreast, draped in cloth of silver, red and white.

Two Elephants.

Another " Machine," representing a forest in which was Orpheus accompanied by a band of lutes and voices, all young children, qui aUait (Telle mesme. The hidden motive power of the self-moving car is not revealed, but no doubt it depended on the limbs of sturdy Frenchmen.

Children dressed as Cupids bore up two monster crowns, and on foot followed a band of wood-wind instruments, playing ballet music in time to which the chargers of the jroung Due de Venddme and of five great seigneurs of France moved in figures of the dance.

Captive monarchs, chained about the neck, were a less cheerful feature of the scene from the humanitarian view of our twentieth century. However, they were evidently mere ''supers," travelling in company with goddesses in graven bronze and with a man dressed as a bishop who scattered cartels to the crowd.

Two Giants—^''faithfully represented" — appeared in one group.

Another item was a ship floating on water and surrounded by bandsmen, naked to the waist, and blowing upon conches.

The knights of Diana appeared in the sixth detachment, with another band playing in a thicket in which un rossignol chantait incessament

In the seventh company young Henri de Montmorenci, son of the Constable, figured as Perseus with the three Fates, seated triangular-wise, and accompanied by the inevitable band.

The excellente musique and the agreeable strains are impressed on the reader in every paragraph of the account, but it must be surmised that their combination in even so large an area may have been of rather doubtful and confused effect.

But away with carping I

A Great Rock from which flowed streams of wine, and which was followed by a flying dragon " all going of itself,"

was probably from the view of the populace, the piice de ri-sistance of the splendid show, which was witnessed, says a contemporary, by ten thousand spectators.

Sports and military display went on all day, and on Saturday night the climax was attained when, amidst the firing of artillery, the sham fortress burst into flames, two thousand rockets rose into the air, and there appeared, as a set pieee, the letters M. and L. and a f§te, each surmounted with a royal crown, which burned for a quarter of an hour, while one hundred pieces of ordnance thundered on the boulevard of the Porte of St Antoine.

The king and the queen-r^ent then retired amid the firing of salutes.

" Such were the illuminations that all Paris seemed ablaze. Such were the rejoicings to which all were moved by this happy alliance."

Little weighted by their matrimonial prospects, the King and Madame continued their youthful pursuits ; they joined in cookery experiments as in their nursery days, the prospective bridegroom displaying indeed an insouciance greater even than that of his eleven years. On April 12 he had been taken ill with small-pox, a simple case evidently, for in two days' time he was sitting up in bed, in the best of spirits, making clothes for Robert, his monkey. On August 18 in the same year, 1612, the Spanish ambassador presoited to him twenty-four of the sweet-scented peaux dEspagne and fifty pairs of gloves. These, as the Master of the Wardrobe told him, should be kept as gifts for illustrious foreign guests.

" Oh ! no," protested the boy. " They will make collars for my dogs and harness for my ponies."

Nor did Madame's aflairs awake awe in his intelligence, for, like any schoolboy, he jogged her elbow as she signed the marriage-contract with Prince Philip, on August 25.

The king's marriage did not take place for three years, by which time the bridal pair had reached the age of fourteen.

On April 15, 1615, a special envoy from Spain returned to Madrid, bearing the king's portrait and a diamond

bracelet as gifts for the Infanta. In August the king and his mother left Paris with an escort of light horse, to journey to the south of France in order to effect the exchange of the princesses of France and Spain, which was to be carried out upon the frontier river of the Bidassoa. The Due de Guise was commissioned to direct this undertaking. The journey was not without hindrance, for Madame and the queen-regent having both been attacked by small-pox, the Court was detained at Poitiers from September 14 to 28 ; the king, although he had already had the disease, being isolated in a separate dwelling.

On October 17, at Bordeaux, the solemn contract of Madame to Philip, prince of the Asturias, was carried out by procuration, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Due de Guise standing for the most Catholic king, Philip III., and the brid^room, and on the following day the marriages were carried out, Madame's in Bordeaux, and that of Louis at Bui^os in Spain, where the Due d'Usseda stood as his majesty's proxy. Then on October 20 the young Elisabeth had to say good-bye to her mother. Hurriedly did Marie de M^dicis take leave of her eldest daughter, dreading the failure of her own fortitude.

The parting between Louis and his sister on October 21 was full of sorrow; perhaps in all his life he showed no instance of more true and natural affection than he then displayed. At eleven that morning the king and the princess drove in a coach with their half-sister of Vend6me and other royal ladies through the streets of Bordeaux, choking back their sobs and tears. Half a league beyond the Porte St Julien came the final moment Then nature broke forth, and the young pair embraced and wept till the surrounders were moved to tears, all except don In^o de Cardenas, ambassador and n^otiator of the marriage. To the grandee of Spain the exhibition was undignified. He looked on dry-eyed, and at length intervened to end these farewells, exclaiming in loud and penetrating tones : " Come, come I Princess of Spain! ** The coach proceeded, and Louis returned, weeping, to his mother, and suffered next day from a headache as a resultant of his emotion.

On November 9 the exchange of princesses took place. The new queen of France had halted at Fontarabia, the Princess of Spain at St Jean de Luz, and on the river Bidassoa, at a spot between those places, the ceremony was to be carried out.

On each bank of the river had been erected a wooden pavilion, surmounted by a crown. So rigorous was etiquette regarding equality of display, that when the Spaniards added a globe and crown to their decorations they had to remove them in order that the French might not be outdone. The bank on the French side was so steep that it was necessary to cleave away some of the rock from the lower slope of the mountain in order to erect the temporary building. Staging was erected to seat the ladies of the suites and many other spectators. In mid-stream, upon four boats, were erected two more pavilions. On the great day the young brides left St Jean de Luz and Fontarabia respectively, and dined and attired themselves near to the place appointed; the Infanta's halt was made at Irun. A royal Spanish marriage of to-day has made these names familiar as halting-places in the bridal progress of an English princess.

The official acts of the marriages having been read in the pavilions in mid-stream, the processions of the brides approached down the mountain sides to gain the river bank. The Spanish bride first appeared, which threw the assembled Spaniards into such an excitement of expectation for the appearance of the French bride, that ''had their country been lost to them for ever, they could not have made more uproar over it" The people from both banks crowded in boats upon the stream. The brides, after a short halt in the shore pavilions, now embarked in their respective boats with the entourage of the great nobles. The reine--infante would not enter her boat until the moment that her new sister-in-law embarked on the French side, and so exact was the " punctilio " that the French boat was carefully retarded by the Due de Guise lest it should arrive too early at the pavilions in mid-stream. The duke led young Elisabeth into the pavilion, where Spaniards came to kiss her hand, while the French did similar homage to Anne,

who was led by the Due d'Usseda. At last came the moment when the two young girls advanced in courtly state to kiss one another. Long they talked together, while their principal ladies also exchanged polite compliments. Chairs had been placed, but the brides stood all the time together. Then they bade farewell, but here were seen no tears ; " all were delighted to behold the dignity of their departure; if any thought to weep, their tears were laughed away."

Elisabeth passed over to the Spanish shore and the infanta-queen to France, amid the sound of string and wind instruments and the beating of drums. The Swiss guard preceded Anne in her litter to St Jean, torch-bearprs surrounded her, and the royal cavalry followed. It was one in the morning before the bride reached her destination, and at once a courier was despatched to Bordeaux to carry to Louis and his mother the news of the due accomplishment of the exchange. On November 11 the bride moved on to Bayonne, where she received letters from the king and the queen-mother, sent by De Luynes—" Tun de mes plus confidents serviteurs"—as the young king described him in writing, who was to assure the bride of the king's impatience to offer her in person his love and service. The letter of Marie de M^icis gave even greater assurance of the warmth of expectation. It needs no great imaginative power to feel how the girlish heart would swell at these words; purely formal as they may have been on the writer's side, they would be expanded into a volume of longing love and be laid up as the premium of her own romantic ecstasy in the youthful heart The messenger was to return that same day, so only a hasty note could be sent in answer. Resting the paper on her knee the girl queen wrote her little message, mixed of formality and feeling, ending with, '' May God guard you. I kiss your majesty's hands.

Ana"

She wrote in the tongue of her nativity.

From November 12 to 21 Anne journeyed by stages to Bordeaux, receiving another letter from the king on the way. With the last stage the king broke out^into an episode of boyish adventure. He journeyed out to the final halting-

place and took a peep through a window at his unknown bride as she entered her coach. She set off for Bordeaux, followed shortly after by the king. A short distance from the town he overtook her in a wide part of the road, and gave orders that he should be driven slowly by her side. Looking out of his coach at her he laughed merrily, calling to her lo son incognito I Then he cried, " Whip up " to the coachman, and presently, mounting his horse, galloped on to Bordeaux, which he reached an hour before the bride.

This little incident would give the queen more assurance for her state reception, where all was to be formal. Louis, seated on a high platform, approached by steps, waited with his mother for the bride. The Princesse de Conti received Anne at the stairway and Marie de M^dicis advanced into the salle to meet her, leading her to the king, who came down two steps of the platform to receive her. Then he seated himself with the queen-mother on his right and the queen-consort on his left In a quarter of an hour the interview was at an end and they went to their respective apartments.

Next day was Sunday, and then occurred a charming little meeting which seemed of happy augury for the future intercourse of the young pair, and encouraged the Court in hopes that the somewhat loutish boy would enter into the relations of a bridegroom with aplomb. He went to visit his queen at her dressing and found her seeking a crimson feather to go with a white one.

" Take what you want from this," said Louis, handing her his hat in which were two crimson plumes. Anne took one of the feathers, and then said Louis,

•* Now you must give me one of those bows you are wearing,"

Smiling, she handed him the crimson bow, which he fastened in his hat.

Altogether, we may believe that Anne looked forward with the loving confidence of her young being to November 25, St Catherine's Day, which had been fixed for the nuptial benediction and the completion of the marriage. The people, too, were full of ardour for the event, and were not damped by the long waiting on the wedding-day, when

the church ceremony took place in the church of St Andr6, between four and five in the afternoon. The procession of the queen-mother arrived in advance, Marie de M^icis still wearing the full sables of her widowhood, though her ladies were gorgeous in gold brocade and gems. The young queen's ladies next arrived, all splendidly attired in Spanish dress, and, shortly after, the bridal pair entered and advanced to chairs of violet velvet, sprigged with fleur-de-lys, which were set for them on a platform before the high altar. The king, wearing a mantle of silver brocade embroidered with gold, and laden with costly badges, mounted the platform first, then turning, gave his hand to the queen, who was in state robes of violet velvet, patterned with fleur-de-lys, and with a Court mantle of the same material trimmed with ermine. On her head she wore a golden crown. Princes and nobles followed, while burning tapers developed the radiance of the scene.

All remarked on the likeness between the young couple, says the report—" no brothers could have more resembled one another."

Mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Xaintes, while a Spanish divine gave the address, dwelling on the marriage of Adam and Eve, but, says the chronicler, forgetting to compare the physical likeness of the royal spouses which had also existed between that earlier pair. The archbishop of Bordeaux, being in disgrace, did not officiate.^ The king's eyes, smiling, sought his bride's, and she responded joyously, though overburdened by the heat of her robes, and the weight of the crown, to which she frequently raised her hands. When the mass was ended, a veil was spread over the king and queen while the nuptial blessing was given, and then the royal band burst forth, while to the sound of trumpets largesse was scattered, in the form of gold medals struck with the heads of the king and queen and with united crowns upon the obverse. The queen-

^ Archbishop Sourdis htd on November 17 broken into the gaol at Bordeanz and released a prisoner awaiting execution. In the scuffle the gaoler had been killed, and the archbishop, placing the released convict on a boat, had provided for his escape by water.

mother then returned hastily to the king's lodging in the archbishop's house to arrange for the customary blessing of the marriage couch, which was privately performed by one of the Court chaplains.

On their return from church, Louis and his bride retired to their separate apartments, and, as was often the king's custom when fatigued, he went to bed and there had supper, surrounded by young courtiers who, we are told, indulged in the customary ribaldry of the age pour Fassurer, At 8 o'clock, in a dressing-gown and slippers, he visited the bridal chamber, escorted, as one account relates, by his mother. Here the solemn installation in the state-couch took place. Stress was laid upon the ceremony by Marie de M6dicis, who would seem to have sought by every means at her command to justify the zeal with which she had urged on the marriage of her adolescent son. It was, says a contemporary, "merely for the form."^ At lo o'clock the king returned to his own room, and the young queen left the state-bed and sought again the little couch in which she had slept since her arrival at Bordeaux. Such points, otherwise negligeable, have their bearing on the subsequent complications to which the peculiar relations of the king and queen gave rise in coming years.

On the following Sunday the king and queen made a public appearance in Bordeaux on a platform erected at the corner of their dwelling. On the Monday the king inspected in the courtyard the horses sent as a present from the King of Spain, all caparisoned with cloth of gold. There were nineteen of them, the twentieth having, it was all^;ed, been drowned on the journey.

On December i a ballet in the Spanish style was danced in the young queen's rooms by her ladies-in-waiting, but the invitation of the Jesuits to a comedy with the ponderous title "The Marriage of Solomon" was declined by the king.

^ Certain circumstantial details given by H^roard, the king's physician, would seem to have been either the result of a careful "inspiration" from higher quarters or of trickery played on an elderly and ingenuous witness. Later entries in his journal suggest that H^roard himself suspected an imposition.

Municipal hospitality took the form of a banquet of confectionery at the Town Hall, where the king ate but little, and on December 8 the ffites terminated with a display of fireworks from boats on the river outside the town.

On December lo the king held a /// de justice in the local parliament; on the I2th he gave audience to the Russian ambassador, and on the 14th he indemnified himself for the cares of state by making a quince pasty in the gobeUt On the 17th the Court lefl Bordeaux. As with most journeys in those days, this was not without adventure, the king's coach being upset, though none was hurt except the gouvemeur^ De Souvr6, who hit his nose against a stone. The more alarming adventures of the queen-mother and of Bassompierre will be noted in a later chapter. Louis was in his element once more when the occasion arose for shoeing a horse and setting up his little camp-bedstead.

Those early months of marriage must have been a time of dreary disillusionment for Anne of Austria. No happy domesticity followed on the promise of the first day at Bordeaux. It was not until April 18 that the young pair took even a meal together. Formal visits were paid by Louis to the queen, and sometimes she would return them in his rooms, where he even rose on one occasion to the preparation of a little feast of sweetmeats for her, but was obliged to stretch hiipself, exhausted, on a couch before she arrived to accept the hospitality. A monarch and a husband lolling on his couch and playing with his silver soldiers during his queen's visit, within a few months of marriage, must have damped enthusiasm. However, he did sometimes exert himself enough to dance a ballet before the queen, and the rehearsals of his performance are frequently noted.

Troubles soon arose between the Spanish women-of-the-bedchamber and the French attendants. A number of the young queen's retinue had been dismissed by the king and his mother at Bordeaux and sent back to Spain, and in the squabbles of the remainder the king seems to have sided zealously with his own countrywomen. The influence of an old nurse is often potent, and one day in June, when the Spanish women had taken away the keys of the queen's

wardrobe from the keeping of his nurse," Maman Doudun's," daughter, the king, in a fit of childish anger, imprisoned the offenders under lock and key. Another time he was roused to a fury of grief, less poetic than that of Catullus, by the conviction that some of them had stolen sa linotte extrtme" tnent brune. His dogs still absorbed a larger share of his attention than he accorded to poor Anne.

Marie de M6dicis continued to pursue the tactics of the apron-string. We behold this youth of fifteen years, this reigning sovereign, this married man, consenting after four days' importunity from his mother to take a dismal black draught, provided that, as in his baby years, it was tempered by milk of almonds. Even then, the power that was to take France, her sovereign and her Court in the relentless grip of its genius, was but on the horizon, giving no intimation to the common eye of its future immensity.

NcU, — Gohiieiy p. 48,1. 9. This word is the equTalent of '^pftstiy'* as used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Jnliet, ue, one of the domestic offices. " They call for dates and quinces in the pastry," Act iv., Scene 4.

CHAPTER V

THE COUP D'ETAT OF 1617

« npHE King has no politics!"

I Such is the reminder which the English sovereign

of to-day gives to a subject

Well would it have been for France and for her king in the young reign of Louis XIII. if the r^ent could with equaJ truth have disclaimed party action. A few there were, among the advisers of Marie de M^dicis, who had tried in vain to impress on her the error of involving herself in the factions of the princes; she persisted in her scheme of purchasing their all^iance by extravagant gifts. Thousands of livres were granted to Cond6, and to the Dues de Longueville and Mayenne. Bouillon, another noble, now returned to Court, was treated with a like cajolery. The treasury, which, by Sully's pains, had been replenished during the former reign, had, since the retirement of the minister, served chiefly to furnish funds for the r^ent's squandering. Swiftly came the day of scarceness. At the time of the Estates-General in 1614, the Court purveyor was lamenting his loss in having provided a large stock of meat just before a general abstinence was decreed by the Church, in preparation for the occasion.

" Don't be uneasy—I will make it up to you," said the young king airily; and turning to his tnattre dhdtel he commanded him to reimburse the tradesman. To which that officer rejoined that he had no cash in hand.

This disgrace was a household one, but a more public scandal came later on when the Swiss guards clamoured to the regent for long arrears of pay. .%

Meanwhile the shifting of factions was kaleidoscopic. Ancre hoped by pitting one set of the noblesse against

another to gain cover for his own designs. But even the ancient grudge of the Dues de Mayenne and Bouillon against those of Epemon and Bellegarde was less remorseless than their common animosity against the Italian. Underhand intrigue seemed to circulate as in some shady game ; each, with ignoble individualism, striving to hide his hand from his partizans, and to play it for his own sordid benefit alone. *'Alas!" explains one chronicler, "there was no public spirit and no zeal to enhance the common-weal of France." The women of the several families ^ged on the male dissentients, forming inner circles of grievance and intrigue among themselves.

^* The Comtesse de Soissons and the Duchesse de Nevers, jealous to extremity of the high estimation in which the Duchesse de Guise and the Frincesse de Conti were held by the queen-mother, joined the faction of the court malcontents and entangled in it their husbands and their lovers."

Cond^, seeking his own supremacy, stirred up the surround* ing broils with energy, while Bouillon was the match which kindled the conflagration. He induced the prince and several of the great nobles to leave the Court—he stirred up young Vend6me to raise the Bretons, of whom he was the governor. Like small fires, here and there over a large area, civil revolt broke out in the provinces. The r^ent was aghast and sought to deal a counter-stroke. From the dungeons of the Bastille she brought forth an almost foi^otten figure, the Comte d'Auvergne, the bastard son of Charles IX., who, for conspiracy with Biron* in 1602, had suflered the penalty of imprisonment His mother was the mother too, by a lawful father, of the hated Marquise de Vemeuil. And now he was drawn forth to be pitted against the princes, his blood-kin, in the rebellion.

On June 26, 1616, Louis received the Comte in audience in his own apartments at the Louvre. Kneeling on one knee, the released conspirator craved for pardon ; the king sought to raise him up, the Comte resisted. He petitioned

^ Muifchal Biron had formed a treaioiuible leagae with Spain, and had been convicted and beheaded.

for the return of his sword, whkh the king granted to him.

Cond6 was now secretly contriving his own recall to Court, unknown even to Bouillon, who had raised the provinces for him. He sent assurances to the queen-mother of his purpose to uphold her favourite, the Mardchal d'Ancre, if he himself were gfranted the ministry of the Exchequer. His advances were accepted, and he entered Paris that July, more as a conqueror than a rebel. On the 28th Louis was present in his mother's apartments to receive the prince.

The heat was great, and the king, feeling ill, went oflF to the young queen's room, where she had refreshments prepared for him. He ate nothing, but rested on a couch, and by 4.30 he had recovered sufficiently to leave poor Anne and to go coursing in the Tuileries gardens. " Bread eaten in secret is pleasant,"—three days after this we find the king taming into the house of one of the Court tradesmen and sending a gentleman-in-waiting to fetch some preserved ruit, of which he ate lai^ely.

The factions were not alone in their perplexing variations. Ministries were shuffled off-hand, while the representatives of foreign powers looked on bewildered by tactics so detrimental to the State. The old ministers of Henri IV.— Villeroy, Sillery, Jeannin and the rest—were all shunted in 1616. ** Les Barbons," as they were nicknamed, were replaced by "Les Jeunes,"—Barbin, Mangot and Lu^on, for the bishop now held office as a Secretary-of-State among these adherents of the hated Ancre.

Paris rankled with fresh sores at the hands of the Mar^chal, the detested object of the regent's allied amour. He now drew down disaster on his head in a fresh episode.

Passport regulations had been stringently enforced during the rebellion. About Easter 1616 the Mardchal d'Ancre arrived one day in his coach at the Porte Bussy, leading to the Fauboui^ St Germain, then outside the walls. Now the sergent-de-vilU in charge of this gate was a certain shoemaker, a native of Picardy,^ and when the Mar^chal failed to

^ (Tr^ "a man named Picard.*' The readings vaiy.

produce the necessary pass, the gate-keeper stoutly declined to let him through.

" Dog I don't you know who I am ? " shouted the angry marquis.

" I know you well enough," retorted the gate-keeper," and I know my orders too."

Richelieu himself, alluding to the incident, remarks that a gentleman of France, n^ en un cUmat plus binin^ would have overlooked the affair. But not so the Florentine. He gave orders to his equerry to contrive a punishment for the obdurate janitor, when he could lay hands on him quietly outside the city, and one day in June, coming upon the man in the Fauboui^ St Germain, two of the marquis's footmen set on him and beat him so terribly that he was left for dead on the spot. He revived, however, to tell the tale, and so tremendous was the popular fury that place and power could not prevail against it The instigator, it is true, was passed over, but the two servants were tried for the attempt and were executed in the Place de la Gr&ve.

Ancre was thus a man between two fires when the Prince de Condd returned to Paris in July. A third was smouldering secretly towards an end of utter destruction. It was the young king's growing hatred and distrust of his mother's favourites. With secret dexterity Luynes was piling on the fuel. Little had Concini recked, when he placed his creature Luynes about the young king, of the traitor's r61e he was to play.

The history of the brothers Charles, L^on and Honor6 d'Albert is, like that of other courtiers of their time, obscured by current gossip. Descended, according to one account, from a grandfather, a cleric of loose character, their only patrimony was a little country house, a vineyard and a small island almost eaten by the Rhdne, which properties bore respectively the names of Luynes, Brant^s and Cadenet, by which titles the brothers were known in their earlier days at the Court of Louis XHL Others accord to them a more respectable if not illustrious descent. The father of the trio yi2A persona grata-^i^ Henri IV., who stood godfather to Charles at a time when he was still a Protestant Cardinal de

Bourbon, and other Catholics acted as proxies for the royal sponsor. The mother was well-bom. All three possessed the qualities and presence of the courtier, and swiftly did they rise to eminence. Upon the door of their sleeping-chamber in the Louvre a wag inscribed the sign, Aux Trois Rois.

Louis clung, with the ardent devotion of boyhood for maturity and experience, to De Luynes. With him he passed the hours in which poor youthful Anne was eating her heart out, deprived of the company of a husband or even a playfellow. Drop by drop De Luynes poured into the boy king's ears the venom of distrust The favourites, he pointed out, were influencing his mother to keep him out of the offices proper to a sovereign. Louis should stand up for himself. So on and so on, insidiously in those secret hours when Luynes sat by the king's bedside, holding his hand till sleep should have shorn the darkness of its terrors.

Cond^ we have seen returning, crest held high, to Court, but his solemn undertakings were easily foi^otten. Then Marie de M^dicis took a fateful and decisive step. On September i the prince came to the Louvre to attend a council of the exchequer. Suddenly, around him, the corridors were filled with armed men, the great gates were closed and the Marquis de Thymines, who for this service was afterwards made a Mar^chal of France, laying a hand upon his arm, announced :—

" Monsieur le Prince, I arrest you by the King's orders."

Trapped and helpless, Cond6 was locked into the small library and guarded there while another room was turned into a more serious prison by having iron bars fitted to the windows.

The Dues de Venddme and De Mayenne were in the neighourhood of the Louvre when news of the arrest reached them. Inspired with fear of a similar fate, they turned their horses and rode at full speed from the capital to join the Due de Bouillon in the provinces.

The news sped throughout Paris. The Comte de Brienne was sent from the Louvre to search the Hotel

Cond^ and impound all documents. But an undiscovered hand had been before him, and everything had been already burned.

In every mother Rizpah arises to wail over her sons. When the tidings were brought to the dowager-princess, who was living at her son's house, she ordered out her coach and drove to the Pont-Neuf, then newly built Half crazed by the shock, she cried aloud to the passers-by :—

'' The Mardchal d'Ancre has killed my son I "

For the moment her hearers were unresponsive, a few, fearing pillage in an expected tumult, took the precaution of closing their shops. But it happened that one was present in the crowd on whose ears this outcry of desperate maternity did not fall sterile. This was the sergeant who had been so nearly done to death by the favourite's orders. His wounds still smarted, and, hurrying to the Hotel Cond^, he led the onrush of the prince's servants upon the house of Ancre, in the Faubourg St Grermain, distant but a stone's throw. Here they drew into the attacking force the masons who were employed in building the new Palace of the Luxembourg for the queen-mother. With building tools and great baulks of timber they stormed the dwelling, hurling great stones through the windows and battering in the doors. Within, they wrecked everything, throwing the splendid furniture from the windows and wreaking the maniac hatred of a mob on the inanimate objects of the curio collection amassed by the Florentine couple. The house was gutted, even the roof receiving damage, while the ne^hbouring abode of the Mar^chal's secretary was similarly dealt with.

Within the palace the Court party heard of the onslaught with consternation. Greatly relieved were they, says the naive chronicle, to find that the popular fury had been satisfied to expend itself upon the furniture. Blood, at least, had not flowed in this mimic " Terror."

As soon as the housebreaking frenzy had died down stringent orders were issued by the queen-mother. None might leave the city, any attempting it would be arrested. Guards were sent out to keep order in the streets, and

a message was sent off to the royal stand-by, the Comte d'Auvei^e, to lead troops into Paris, which he proceeded to do.

Tardily upon the Mar^chal's inflated egoism had been borne in the sense of total disaster. It remained for a domestic calamity to completely unnerve the arrogant alien. To the mismatched pair had been bom a son and a daughter, and for the latter a marriage with a prince of the blood had already been discussed. In January 1617 the girl died, and Bassompierre tells how on the day of her death the bereaved father sent to ask him to come to him in the house on the quai du Louvre which he had been allowed to build for himself close to the palace. Bassompierre found him weeping uncontrollably, and tried to reason with him. "Come: pull yourself t<^ether," he adjured him, "you must remember what is due to the dignity of a marshal of France. Lamentations such as these are all very well for your wife, but not for you. True that you have lost a charming daughter who might have forwarded your fortunes to a yet higher pitch, but you still have nieces of whom you can dispose in marriage to influential families."

On the outside this may seem to have been a breaking of the bruised reed, but Bassompierre knew his man and knew the age to which they both belonged.

" I might bear this with fortitude," rejoined the Mar^chal, *' but it is the prospect of the ruin of myself, of my wife and of my son which I see right ahead, and which my wife's incurable obstinacy renders inevitable—this breaks me down. Vainly have I, when I saw misfortune threatening, implored my wife to leave the country and return with me to our far-off native land, where, with the fortune derived from the queen's liberality and our own efforts, we might have lived and married our children into honourable families. I had provided for a place of retirement by my offer to the Pope of the sum of six hundred thousand crowns for a grant of the duchy of Ferrara, where we might have spent the remainder of our days in peace and have bequeathed two millions in gold to our children."

He recounted the extent of his estate, adding, '* besides

what we have lost in the pillage of our house, in furniture, gems, silver plate, and ready cash."—He bewailed his deprivation of the governorship of Amiens and other posts:— " and then the disasters which have come on me through a disreputable shoemaker who had insulted me, a marshal of France! Under our very nose they hanged two of our servants for having, at our orders, given a thrashing to that scoundrel of a shoemaker. Now comes the death of my daughter as the culmination of our ruin. Were it not that it would be cowardly and ung^rateful towards the queen and also to my wife, to whom I owe so much, I would leave the Mar^chale and retire to a country where neither the nobility nor the people of France would seek me out."

The gods were crazing Ancre to lead him to his doom. Not at the hand of the noble or the mob was to come the final blow. The Mar^chal forgot to reckon with the ignored boy, kept at play with trifles in the palace ; the nobles were indeed irate when he stared into the shop windows and failed to salute them as they passed, but the king's resentment was unthought of.

One November day of 1616 the Marshal had entered the great gallery of the Louvre looking out upon the river. Near one of the windows stood the king. Without uncovering, without a sign to mark recognition of his sovereign's presence, Ancre went into the embrasure of another window and received obeisance from a hundred persons who had accompanied him and who doffed their headgear in his honour. Broiling with resentment, Louis left the Louvre for an afternoon visit to the Tuileries.

We left the Prince de Cond^ in his grated chamber at the Louvre. Perhaps in fear of poison, the prisoner would not eat until his own servants were allowed to wait upon him. This privilege was afterwards withdrawn, because a letter from outside was found in a pie that was being served at his table, and the palace servants then took charge. Then he was removed for greater safety to the Bastille, and finally to the fortress of Vincennes, where he spent two years, and where his wife obtained leave (" for the look of the thing," sneered a cynic) to share his captivity.

Louis had now reached the point when he was determined to rid himself of the Marshal. Few were in his secret. " You are to confer with De Luynes," were the king's commands to Vitry, the captain of the body-guard, ** and do as he tells you."

On the morning of April 24, 1617, the Mar^chal, reading a letter, came leisurely across the bridge, the subject of so many ribald tales, into the courtyard of the Louvre. Suddenly Vitry tapped him on the arm, saying, ** I arrest you in the King's name/' and before the Mar^chal could turn round, three pistol shots were fired by one of the guard and his body fell lifeless to the ground. The stray bullets left their mark on a beam in the courtyard. The corpse was dragged away by the few attendants present. The posy of flowers fell from the dead hand, one of the clogs, worn to protect the shoes, was dragged off the foot, and no time was lost by the underlings in rifling the dead. The silken scarf was torn from the body, and a famous diamond which, for safety, the Mar^chal always carried with him was abstracted. The body, wrapped in a dirty table-cloth, tied at the head and feet with red ribbons, lay that afternoon in the small tennis-court of the palace, and when night fell it was taken silently, without funereal rite or chant, to the church of St Germain T Auxerrois and buried beneath the organ—a priest, his server and the sexton alone being present The spot was plastered up that it might seem untouched.

The report of the pistol which killed Ancre had alarmed the palace and the doors had been closed. In the apartments of the . queen-mother the dresser Catherine leaned from a window, and, seeing Vitry, called to him and asked what was the matter.

" The Mar^chal d'Ancre is dead," was the curt reply.

Breathless, Catherine repeated the news to Marie de M^dicis.

" God help me!" cried the queen-mother; " I have reigned for seven years; now the only crown to which I can look forward will be a heavenly one."

The general emotion was one of joy unalloyed.

CONCINI, MARQUIS DANCRE

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY B. MONTOKNET

** I was compelled to kill him, Sire, for he resisted/' was the word of Vitry as he entered the presence. Enthroned upon a billiard table, Louis tasted the early moments of supremacy.

To the ministry of " Les Jeunes" the shock of the favourite's downfall was overwhelming. Dependent as they were upon the favour of the dead Mar^chal and of the queen-mother, where were they now? It is said that in their bewilderment they hid themselves in the royal stables. It is difficult to believe that the Bishop of Lu^on, though his nervous faculties were highly developed, would long skulk in so undignified a shelter. At any rate he soon resolved to appear before the king, where he at once learned that his political career was to be suspended. Cold was the young king's aspect Already he had summoned the former ministers, and the seals were handed over to De Vain

Marie de M^icis was being kept virtually a prisoner in her own apartments. Armed guards were at the doors, and the baleful bridge over which the Italian favourite had passed to his doom, that Pont dAmour of the lampoonist, was broken down by the king's orders.

The fate of Ancre did not move the queen-mother to any huge regret She had outgrown her infatuation for the man and for Leonora too. Her attendants suggested that she alone could suitably break the dreadful news to the widowed Mar^hale, but she would not visit her. Perhaps it was a family trait; at all events both Louis and his mother seem to have forgotten, as soon as their favourites' power of personal diversion or ministration had vanished, all feeling of attachment to them.

Within a day the Paris crowd had learned of the death, and had discovered the burial place of the abhorred Italian. They tore the wretched body from its stone hiding-place beneath the organ, and cutting down the bell-ropes of the church, they tied them to the corpse and dragged it through the streets, then hanged it, head downwards, from a gallows on the Pont Neuf, which the murdered man had himself set up to strike terror into the insubordinate. Then, with hideous rancour, they obliterated the features, and again

dragged the trunk through the streets, past the Bastille, to the house of the deceased in the Faubourg St Germain. Here a fire was made in the street and the corpse set on to bum. A bystander stretched forth his hand and from the knife-slashed body tore forth the heart and made his teeth meet in the half-charred flesh.

" Ah! that tastes good," he snarled, with blood-stained lips.

We need survey this scene of Polynesian savagery no further, nor linger with the Bishop of Lu^on, who, in the midst of all, drove past in his coach with his flesh creeping.

" Cry ' Long live the King!'" he called to his attendants, and so, covered by this loyal demonstration, drove on unharmed by the maddened crowd.

What of Leonora, widowed by so dire a stroke ? Grief for her husband does not seem to have formed a notable part of her distress. The passion for the Florentine rou^ had burned itself out long before. She was now chiefly possessed by terror for herself. She collected all valuables of a portable kind, chiefly gems, and hid them in the mattress of her bed, on which she then lay down. Her sanctuary was not long left inviolate; the soldiers burst into her room and soon rifled the hoard, which included some of the crown jewels. They carried away her clothing even, and the wretched woman had to borrow stockings (or money for them) from her young son to clothe herself for her departure from the Louvre. She was taken to the Bastille, where the news of her arrival rejoiced the imprisoned Condd His enemies at length were in the dust Yet his own release was long deferred.

Merciless was the cross-examination inflicted on the Mar^chdle. Her dealings with Jews and necromancers were brought up against her. Alleged midnight incantations over cocks and pigeons in a Paris church pointed to a Satanic alliance. The witch-woman must suffer for Use-majesti against the divine and human powers. She rose to the occasion and faced the accusers in a final burst of valour. Then in a collapse of reaction she cried for respite for the cause of coming maternity—though in an earlier stage she

had avowed her dissociation for years past from her husband. The plea was threadbare, and on July 8, 1617, Leonora, foster-sister of a queen of France, risen from a humble rank to arrogant enjoyment of riches and nobility, pointed the moral of Court favour when her head rolled on the Place de la Grfeve and her body was consumed upon the pyre o! shame. " The deed," said one, " was unworthy of the august assembly that decreed it"

The Concini were at an end; orphaned, dispossessed and outlawed, their son obtained a temporary refuge in the Louvre at the intercession of the young queen, Anne, herself lonely and without a part in the movements of her world.

CHAPTER VI

PALACE DOMESTICITIES

LOUIS had resolved to make a clean sweep. " I will be king myself in future," he announced from the billiard-table on which he received the homage of the courtiers on the day of the Concini downfall; and very drastic was the re-arrangement of affairs. The " Barbons " were already reinstated, and the next step, one even more significant, was the banishment from Court of the queen-mother. She was to leave behind her favourite son, Gaston Due d'Anjou, and her young daughters, Christine and Henriette-Marie. Blois was to be her place of exile. The king consented to take a formal leave of her, but upon the condition that she made no allusion to the recent events. She was to leave Paris on May 4. All the morning of that day preparations were going on—^the loading up of baggage, the arrangements for the journey. Louis held a council at which the speech to be made by the king and the answer of the queen-mother were prescribed and put in writing.

Marie de M^dicis received her son in her ante-chamber, the door of which was guarded by Capitaine Vitry. The three Luynes brothers walked with the king, who held Charles, the favourite, by the hand, and Bassompierre and another gentleman followed. The queen maintained her composure until her eyes fell upon her son, then she burst into violent weeping, but hid her face behind her handkerchief and fan. She led the king up to a window which looked over the garden, and then, uncovering her face, she spoke in humble tones words of regret for not having governed the realm according to his satisfaction. In stiff phrases the king replied.

Then said the queen :—

" Monsieur, I beg that you will grant me one favour, let me retain the services of Barbin as comptroller of my household."

The king, taken by surprise, stared at her and remained speechless. She spoke once more, and then, quelled by his stony silence, she curtseyed and then kissed him. (The absence of a motherly embrace had long been one of the young king's grievances against her.) Louis responded with a bow and then turned his back on her. She turned to Lu3me5, and was speaking with him in an undertone, when suddenly the king called three times in hurried tones the favourite's name, and Luynes, with an explanatory gesture, turned to follow his sovereign.

Then the queen gave way, and leaning against the wall between the windows, she wept most bitterly. The courtiers kissed her dress, their eyes streaming with compassion, but she could neither speak nor see them through her blinding tears. Then she left the great gateway in her coach, and in a coach behind her drove the Bishop of Lu^on, who was to share her exile, while from the balcony of his wife's room Louis watched them out of sight, and then hurried to the gallery overlooking the Seine to see the banished queen pass over the Pont Neuf. To " save the face" was not his habitude; his mother, it is true, had set him no example on this head—the whip—the m/dedne noire —the subordination to her parasites—all the injuries of the long years of boyhood,—now he had scored off the administrator.

The hopes of the king's entourage and of the public for improved conditions now that the hated Mar^chal was removed were soon streaked with disappointment and distrust King Log might be dethroned but King Stork reigned. Luynes speedily became as greedy as the dead Florentine, the obsession of his influence grew fixed. Louis heaped him with gifts and favours. The property of the Marquis d'Ancre, taken into the hands of the crown, was granted to the favourite, and Louis was ready to encourage his marriage with the half-sister, Henriette de Venddme, but De Luynes had set his heart and his aspirations on a more enthialling person. Marie de Rohan, Uie seventeen-

year-old dai^hter of Hercule, Due de Montbazon, was the bride whom De Luynes had chosen, and who, as the Duchesse de Chevreuse (by a second marriage), was destined to become a historic personage.

On September 13, 1617, at five o'clock in the afternoon, De Luynes married his lovely bride in the royal chapel in the tower of the Louvre. In her corbeille were the jewels of the dead Marquise d'Ancre. At night the bridegroom gave a wedding supper. De kuynes was great in suppers and festivities, which the king attended with much enjoyment. The fun was a little coarse, the romping rather unkingly.

^ Un peu de confusion 1" notes the guardian physician in his diary, and into this annotation some modem commentators have read a meaning of orgies of the most sinister description. We may easily picture, it is true, a certain rowdiness. A sovereign who in the midst of his pastry-making labours in the gobelet^ delighted to fling handfuls of flour upon the passers-by, and who, at one provincial inn, pelted his subjects with apples from the windows, might easily indulge in tricks compatible with such a primitive sense of humour. In the tenth year of his reign did he not tickle his sleeping attendants with a straw and daub their hands with ink ? To-day, the undignified quality of such horse-play would be portrayed in the blank faces of the royal entourage—^not to speak of the drastic cataplasm of the press. The worse than wickedness of such vulgarisms would not halt in home-coming. The commentators have quite wantonly pitchforked this their reading of monstrous debauchery between the lines without troubling to set against the blackness of their sordid dye even one illuminant which is supplied by Cardinal Bentivoglio, who was present at some of these noisy gatherings. This prince of the Church, a very dignified Italian, remarks :—

"The court is crowded . . . they seem here to delight in a splendour of tumult and noise ... all have access, there intrude on His Majesty not only the nobility but those of humble rank, and except at close quarters and when speaking in a loud voice, it is impossible to make the king hear what one has to say.'*

At such assemblages where a mixed company, representative of Paris, of which the population was then over half a million, might be found, all hungry for novelty, all brimming with the French vivacity of speech and of demeanour, doubtless there did arise un pen de confusion.

An ambassador to the Court of St James, in 1626, speaks of an entertainment given by the Duke of Buckingham at York House, and says that the ballroom was entered by a turnstile sans aucune confusion. These scrambling parties of De Luynes were very likely in his mind as one of the things they did not " do better in France." To come to a later day. In a letter from Queen Victoria to the King of the Belgians, August 23, 1855, referring to a visit to Napoleon III., the queen says "Everything is beautifully monti at Court, very quiet and in excellent order. I must say we are both much struck with the difference between this and the poor king's time, when the noise, confusion, and bustle were great"

Again, September i (To Stockmar) the queen says: "The Court and whole house infinitely more regal and better managed than in poor Louis Philippe's time when all was in great noise and confusion, and there was no Court"

Louis Philippe, as we know, was a descendant of Louis XIII., and the Court "confusion" still existed, harmless if undignified.

So the commentators have tortured the marginal note of three centuries ago, and so, by the light of other observers, we may prick their flimsy bubble.

From the marriage of De Luynes let us turn to the affairs of Louis and his queen. The king was still afflicted with the awkward stammering manners of his boyhood. Smooth-faced (for he did not need to shave till he was twenty-three) with the heaviness of feature and expression of the Medici, and without robust health, a defect which some attribute to over fatigue in hunting, he lacked impres-siveness, even of a superficial kind. The description of him by an English visitor is, we may hope, unkind.

"His words were never many, as being so extreme a 5

f stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak so much as one word: he had besides a double row of teeth, . . . He was noted to have two qualities incident to all who were ignorantly brought up—^suspicion and dissimulation."

Anne, at this time, was in the bloom of young womanhood, with her Austrian fairness, her blue-green eyes and her bright red lips. Those early years of married life must have held much of dreariness for her. The augury of happiness, which those first interviews with the boy bridegroom had seemed to hold, had died unfulfilled. The young king grumbled when a visit to the salon of his wife was suggested. Reluctantly he spent an evening with her and her ladies. After four years of marriage there was still no promise of an heir, though Anne herself seemed well qualified to play the part of motherhood.

Then it b^an to be rumoured that nuptial relations had not taken place.

It would need a long and difficult discussion to deal with the matter of the alleged neglect of consummation of the marriage, and we can only sum up the matter as far as necessary to understanding of the domestic and foreign complications involved.

Louis certainly did not bestow his attention in other feminine directions. The amorous propensities of Henri le Grand, like other of his qualities, seem to have skipped a generation, to re-appear in his grandsons, le grand Monarque^ and Charles H., of England. *

" I kissed the king, your father. Sire," said mine hostess of the " Ecu de Bretagne," at Dieppe, " but you, I think, I shall not kiss. But may you live long and may God bless Your Majesty."

It was on De Luynes that the young king poured out his affection and his confidence; with him he spent the hours while Anne remained among her ladies. Loyal were these women to their neglected mistress; we need not wait for Madame de Motteville and her admiring chronicle later in the reign, for, in the midst of her sorrows, Anne had the power of gaining love and respect from the ladies of the

court Even the woman whom it has been the custom of historians to dismiss with curt epithet as the " infamous'' Duchesse de Chevreuse, tried to cheer the young queen in her dreary existence. Poor Anne! one of those women designed by temperament for

" The joys of silent marriage hours,"

and the culmination of maternity, her portion was to look on while her sovereign-consort tinkered at the forge or romped in the apartments of De Luynes.

The queen, as all agree, behaved with gentle dignity in her sad and trying position, and was quick to respond to any advances of the sluggish king. Like many other women, Anne craved the affection of her husband, and was not naturally inclined to wander in other directions for the satisfaction of her emotions. So it was in the earlier years at any rate. How far she was alienated and perverted by the strain of life with such a churlish partner must be always closed to exact calculations.

It does not seem possible, in considering the situation, to assign to Louis any ethereal refinement as a cause of his hesitation. His outbursts of prudery seem often to have been prompted by a merely spiteful streak. He could go beyond the customary crudities of the day upon occasion, and from two grave authorities we hear of his almost impish indelicacy at the marriage of his half-sister, Henriette de Vend6me, to the Due d'Elboeuf.

"Yes, Sire," retorted the*bride, "it would be well for you if you would pay the attentions of a husband to the queen."

Here, now, was France, impatient for the appearance of an heir-apparent which would have furthered political stability, for the Cond^ faction would smoulder as long as the vision of the Prince's possibilities with regard to the succession was not blocked out by issue of the blood royal. The sovereigfn was childless, while " Monsieur" (Gaston) was eleven only, and unmarried.

Spain, again, was kindling with resentment; here was a princess of her royal house neglected in public and avoided

in the marital capacity. Humanity did not act thus in general. It was a grave implication of lack of merit and attraction. The question was one in need of delicate handling.

The Pope was apprised of the impasse^ and Cardinal Bentivoglio was delegated to take this intimate matter in hand with all the resources of his tactfulness.

Pourparlers between the representatives of the Most Catholic Sovereign and those of the French court ensued/ and negotiations went forward with due form and solemnity, but without effectiveness.

That which the august personages and diplomacies had sttfmbled over was eventually accomplished vi et armis by De Luynes. On a night of January, 1619, he came to the king's room, took him from his bed, and dragged his royal master, who showed reluctance even to the verge of tears, along the corridor and landed him, scuffling, within the queen's apartments.

The news of the honeymoon, thus forcibly induced, spread next day through Paris, and many a pious vow was paid to heaven in anticipation of coming motherhood to the young queen. The news, too, allayed the irritation of Spain, and relieved the tension at Rome.

Unhappily, children did not come in the train of the event to consolidate the succession and to bring to Anne maternal pride and joy. Twenty long years had yet to pass, with an occasional hope ended by disappointment We hear, for instance, how the queen was returning from a visit to the apartments of the Princesse de Cond6, at the Louvre, at midnight one day in Lent, 1622. Mme. de Luynes and Henriette, Duchesse d'Elboeuf, held her by the arms and, " romping like any schoolgirls," they urged her to run through the long galleries. Anne slipped and fell violently to the floor, and the early hope of offspring perished. Tardily the matter was reported to the king, who became very angry and threatened the two ladies-in-waiting with exile from the Court. However, by the end of that year he had recovered from this extreme recrimination, ^ Foreign Archiycs cited in i> Roi chet la Riint, A. Buchet.

for we find him and the Duchesse de Chevreuse, as she had then become, standing as joint sponsors for a godson.

The presence of the Princesse de Cond^ at the Louvre is explained by the fact that in October, 1619, the imprisoned Cond^ and his wife had been released from Vincennes and conducted by De Luynes to the king's presence at Chantilly. On his knees, the Prince sued for pardon ; the king raised him to his feet, " All this must be forgotten," he said; then, relieved to escape formality, he took his cousin off to visit his aviaries.

At this point we must engage in retrospect, for with Marie de M^dicis and Richelieu are happenings of greater significance than those of the Court under the r^ime of «le Roi Luynes."

Let us turn aside into their exile.

CHAPTER VII

THE EXILES

WHEN on May 4th, 1617, the little company of exiles—the queen-dowager, with the officers of her household, Madame de Guercheville, her lady-in-waiting, and Catherine, her dresser, accompanied by Richelieu, the deposed Secretary of State—passed over the Pont Neuf on their journey to Blois, the weight of calamity lay heavy upon them, the iron had entered into their souls. For Marie de Mddicis there was abasement from the dominance of her seven years regency, there was stupefaction at the sudden upheaval of that inert personality, her son, there was the separation from her young children. There was again the weight of her public humiliation, her comprehension of what had hitherto been a vague wave of rumour flowing in from the city to the inner chambers of the palace, namely the construction put by the mob of Paris on her favouritism for the alien Ancre.

For Richelieu, a man entering on the prime of his manhood, with the consciousness of his own powers strong within him, the blow was a terrible backhander from the arm of Fate. He left behind him mediocrity installed in office, while he was himself thrust out on to a future—formless at the moment—in which his genius might die sterile. On the heels of the bleak gloom, which had stunned his intellect for the moment, pressed a sense of the need for wary walking. Within him lay that diplomatic flair which impelled him by his own adroitness to reeve the broken strands of circumstance.

The miniature court of the exiled queen established itself at Blois. In the crash of doom Marie de M^dicis turned for the stilling of her shaken being to the cold magnetism of her fellow-exile. She must from the very

beginning have seethed with the bitter foam of outcast impotence—the atmosphere was electric with revolt Letters sped to and fro, De Luynes reserving to himself the safeguard of a visa. At the Court it leaped to the perception that they had sent forth into the wilderness, with the banished queen, a personality who formed a dangerous piece in the Court game. The bishop must be taken from the board. All this in one short month. The Marquis de Richelieu got wind of the hostile impulse. He wrote to his brother at Blois. The prelate, still dwelling on the recent cataclysm and with nerves racked by the hideous savagery with which a mob had vented its black bile on that other favourite of the queen-mother, resolved to give no colour to any new-bom calumny. There must have been a stormy quarter of an hour for Richelieu on that June evening when the household waited for their royal mistress to come to supper. At last came a message—the queen would not appear that evening. Then it was announced that Monsieur de Lu9on was leaving the chateau on the following morning. The bishop went first to his native place in Poitou, and then to Coussay, of which he held the priory. His course of action was justified by a letter from the king, expressing approval of his departure from Blois and ordering him to reside in his diocese at Lu9on. The party at the Louvre was warm with satisfaction at the news. The step on which they now rested themselves in peace was in reality one on the descent to insecurity. Their reading of Richelieu was a mistaken one. The mental tactics of the diplomat were unlikely to impel him to any course of action or even to any attitude which could constitute a technical treason. Belief in any strong sex attraction as regards the queen-mother would mean too great credulity. The age, it is true, reading by the light displayed from many standards, accredited to every man a series of amours —Richelieu, as we know, was taxed with various liaisons. The thing is piled so high that we must handle it with suspicion. Richelieu, we may believe, was no Chastelard to imperil all for one wild possibility, and again Marie de M^icis had not the nameless thrall of Mary of Scotland.

The man of marble doubtless brought influence to bear on some women, and sometimes made weapons of that sex impulse which he believed to be unfailing. Sometimes he erred in his prognosis, the subject did not prove responsive to the treatment—women of the kind, we shall come upon later. Richelieu, for his own credit, would have kept the brake upon the insui^ent leanings of Marie de Mddicis, later this became clear to the powers who now hailed with joy his departure to his diocese.

In this manner, after a short draught of place and power, the statesman had returned to the restricted field of prelacy. The Bishop of Lu9on was not, however, the man to gnsLW his thumbs efTetely. Polemics and theology claimed his energies. P^re Amoux, a Jesuit, lately appointed as the king's confessor, had preached before the court a sermon condemning the Huguenots, and decrying in particular their ignorance of the sacred Scriptures. Fierce of tongue and pen, they of the religion pritendue rrformie burst into protest; a memorial was drawn up by four of their chief pastors and presented to the king. With a want of tact most astonishing it hurled invective against the national Catholic Church. The royal response was shocked and condemnatory of such outrage on " our Holy Church." Here was a field for Richelieu I In six weeks he had completed a treatise combatting the Protestant heresies, in spite of the fact that from her solitude at Blois Marie de M6dicis rained on him letters urging him with passionate entreaty to return to her. Richelieu was still too near at hand to please the watchers in Paris—Luynes and his spies. Within a year there fell a heavier blow than before.

" There is," said a royal missive, " too much coming and going in every place in which you are."

It is a common indictment against his kind, says M. Hanotaux, " they accused Richelieu of being an artisan of intrigues." He was ordered to withdraw to Avignon, a city half Italian, into a banishment more extreme by far than that of Lu9on. Here, as before, the bishop avoided giving occasion to the enemy. On the Wednesday in Holy Week the royal mandate reached him. He was preparing to

THE EXILES TS

celebrate the chief festival of the year pontifically in his Cathedral, but he accepted marching orders with the promptitude of his soldier days. "The day after to-morrow, I will leave," he wrote back, and on Gkxxl Friday he went forth on that further progress into oblivion as he may well have believed it to be. The Marquis de Richelieu and his brother-in-law Pontcourlay received sentence of banishment at the same time. It was also debated whether Marie de Mddicis should not be confined in a fortress or a convent Here the king's advisers made one more blunder adverse to their cause, for it is always a serious mistake to give the adversary any opening to pose in martyrdom. The indignities offered to the queen-mother, her sufferings, her isolation and her separation from her youthful daughters— all these combined to move the heart of Paris which had been calmed by the death of Ancre. Tout passe \ at the Louvre, the broken " Pont d'Amour " even had been rebuilt Marie de M6dicis herself, deprived of the calming influence of the astute churchman, was ready for any outburst

There had been, among the household of the queen-mother, an Italian secular priest, one Ruccelai, who was bound to the Concini couple by ties of birthplace, since he also hailed from Florence. Moving about the country, this man stirred up the cauldron of intrigue with more energy than acumen. The agents of De Luynes were primed, and they were on the watch to intercept the correspondence between Blois and the outer world. To Barbin— the imprisoned ex-minister—letters of violent ui^ency were addressed by the exiled queen ; poor man ! on their account he received a yet more rigorous guard in the Bastille. There was, however, working in favour of the Queen, one more of those thousand broils between the noblesse and the self-assertive members of the Cabinet On that very Easter day, which saw Lu9on so suddenly deprived of its bishop, the Court was attending the Easter Mass in state at St Germain TAuxerrois. As was his custom, one much resented by the nobles, the Chancellor, Du Vair, took his seat above the peers of the realm. This time it proved too much for them to bear, and the Due d'Epemon strode up

and dragging the Chancellor from his place compelled him to retire. Foaming with rage, Du Vair quitted the church and, as soon as the mass was over, he sought out De Luynes, and poured into his ears the tale of the assault, investing it with all the magnitude of a secret rebellion of the peers. This was more than Epemon had bargained for; he did not wish to share the prison of Cond6 at Vincennes, and he hurriedly left Paris and shut himself up in Metz, a frontier town, the garrison of which was faithful to his interests. Epemon was getting an old man. We have seen him as companion to the dead Henri IV. at the time of his assassination, and as the first to swear fealty to the widowed queen and her son. He was still, as ever, a valiant warrior, and the idol of the army. Marie de M^icis was reaching out, first to one, then to another in her fierce resentment. She sent to the Due de Bouillon in Sedan. He cautiously demurred. His own skin, as we know, was very dear to Bouillon. He hinted to the queen that Epemon was her man, and to Epemon she turned. Ruccelai was entrepreneur; Vincentio Ludovici, a former secretary of the Marshal d'Ancre, recently released from prison, undertook to carry correspondence. Luynes* hawks were on the alert Vincentio, travelling between Blois and Metz, was arrested at Tours—and searched. His coat was taken from him and ripped in several places in quest of the expected documents. Vincentio proved his mettle, for in so supreme a moment he did not turn a hair. The Sherlock Holmes of the occasion was thrown off the scent by so much sangfroid. The coat, with the undiscovered letters safe within its lining, was returned to the suspect and he proceeded on his way. The intrigue grew to a head, and Epernon plotted with the queen to effect her escape from Blois. The plan was carried out on the night of February 22nd. A valet raised ladders to a window of the queen's rooms, and climbing them, tapped upon the pane. Only a few were already in the secret; the rest were filled with constemation when the plan was laid before them. The danger and the uncertainty of the result scared the little band. However, when they heard that Epernon was back-

ing the venture, the aspect changed. Jewels and pbrtable treasures were packed in a chest Then came the moment of descent A gentleman-in-waiting went down the ladder first, then came the queen, and after her another of her gentlemen, and the rest of the little band of fugitives. The queen had put on a short skirt, but the descent of the first ladder to the terrace proved an overwhelming feat Marie was now aged forty-six and was of portly dimensions, and the dress and customs of the day did not lend themselves to feminine athleticism. " I can go no farther," gasped the queen, as she landed on the terrace. Here was a facer for the plotters. All was not lost, however, for part of the wall had fallen away, and from the terrace to the ground was a declivity. A cloak was spread and, seated on this improvised toboggan, the queen slid to the ground. Then, with her gentlemen supporting her on either side, she set out for the neighbouring bridge where a coach was to await her. As they went forward in the darkness, they were met by some of the inmates of the castle. These, seeing a woman with male escort but without a linkman, drew their casual inference. In such a way as this no person of quality, nor decent bui^ess matron, went abroad. They bandied flippancies fitting the supposed occasion.

" See,*' whispered the queen, with smothered laughter, " they take me for a gay woman ! "

This flamboyant jest, however, could not relieve the situation when upon coming to the bridge there was no sign of the expected coach. A pause of dreadful suspense ensued while the gentlemen went in search of it A few minutes later one of the queen's footmen ran breathless to the spot and explained that the coach had been drawn up in a back lane to which he guided the little party. Marie de M^icis with the dresser Catherine, who was the witness of so many episodes of the Court history, mounted into the coach, followed by the two gentlemen, and drove away to Loches where Epemon had deputed his son, the Archbishop of Toulouse, to receive the queen. Epernon had decided to retire from Metz, leaving, as he knew, a faithful garrison, and to make for Angoul6me. With an escort of

two hundred cavalry he accompanied Marie de M6dicis on her journey from Loches to Angoulfime. Meanwhile the city-fathers of Blois had hurried to Paris with the news of the escape and Marie herself had written to inform Luynes of her adventure. The ebullition of the little court at Blois shook the kingdom. The king was absent at St Germain-en-Laye, and the Comte de Brienne was despatched to break the news. He, like Bassompierre, was a man of the great world, but of a very different calibre from that of the sportive warrior.

Louis, hurrying back to Paris, summoned advisers of every condition to confer upon the situation. The looker-on may speculate on the contingencies of a military rebellion. Epemon, the god of battles, might well have blinded the eyes of the troops and led them en masse for the outraged dowager. And he will not lose sight of the logical position as a rebel which the queen had now assumed. Stung to resentment, wounded in her maternity, she may well have been. Had not her young daughter, Christine, been married on February lo, to Victor Amad6e, Prince of Piedmont, without a word of reference to her mother ? Louis had not spared her the wound of ignoring her existence. To some extent he had tried to fill the breach, had shown for a moment a quasi-paternal solicitude for the un-mothered girl, to which the looker-on will hang as to a hint of his increased humanity.

" Be gentle with my sister, for she is but a child," he had adjured the prince when after the marriage ceremony and supper, he left him with the girl bride. Yet, taking all her grievances into review, we must still see clearly that Marie de M^icis was sailing perilously close to the wind of treason. Louis was her son, but he was also de jure, her sovereign, and the ruler Of the realm. Now he was calling upon all and sundry to counsel him in this crisis.