did. The abbé was a Jesuit priest, and the scandal of insult to

him was doubled by the sin of eating meat in Lent. Monseigneur and his companions finished the evening by adjourning to the house of Monsieur la Navarre, a neighbour of Ninon’s, and breaking up the furniture. Then the prince himself sent for the magistrate, and the functionary arriving, demanded to be informed which was the culprit. The unfortunate neighbour, who did not know who Gaston was, pointed him out, and forthwith six archers were sent for, who laid hands on the prince, and he was threatened with handcuffing if he did not immediately go quietly to prison. Upon this the gentlemen in attendance, hearing the uproar, entered, and with profoundest respect proceeded to inquire what had happened, addressing Monseigneur by name. Terrified out of his senses at what he had done, the magistrate besought pardon, which the prince gravely granted, not without commanding him to make _amende honorable_ by holding a lighted wax taper in his hand, and, on bended knees, confessing his crime before all and individually of the women of the household, who were summoned to attend for the purpose.

So much for Monseigneur’s little amusement: it was Ninon who was the sufferer. The insulted abbé complained to his Superior, who complained to the magistrate of the district, and from mouth to mouth the story flew. Not one man in black, but constant contingents of the black-soutaned fraternity haunted the rue des Tournelles, and invaded Ninon’s apartments, subjecting her to such severe inquisition about her affairs generally, that it became unendurable, and she wrote to the prince in severe reproach for allowing the blame of his folly to burden and annoy her. Whereupon Gaston sent two of his friends to mollify the wrath of the magistrate, who tore up the Jesuit Superior’s letter of complaint. But the scandal only aggravated the soreness and complications of the opposing parties of the Court, and it made an additional grievance for Richelieu against Gaston; though, on the other hand, it was Boisrobert, his own secretary, who was also his own jester-in-chief, who had been at the bottom of the offence, so that the affair cut both ways, and the cardinal may have preferred to see it hushed up.

It was about this time that Richelieu lost by death the man he called his right hand—Père Joseph, the Capucin friar—in other words, “The Grey Cardinal,” as he was nicknamed; but in fact and deed the poor man never even received the bishopric long promised, never bestowed. Richelieu himself was already in failing health, worn by stress and anxiety for the care of the vast structure of kingly power he had built up and sustained, as it were, by his own hand, that was against so many, and Louis himself was almost as much a nonentity as any of the _rois fainéants_ of old days. It is almost impossible to realise that he and his false-hearted, selfish brother should have been the sons of the dauntless Henry of Navarre.

Louis was not vicious; it was his valetudinarian melancholy temperament which appears to have rendered him indifferent to ordinary human interests. He made less than no pretence of affection for his Spanish wife, for whose bright glances other men would have staked existence. For her, Buckingham forgot honour and duty to his own royal master, and did not spare compromising her repute. That is a page of history that remains sealed. How far it affected Louis’s feelings towards her through the rest of his life, remains an open question, or whether from the beginning, love and mutual inclination were at fault. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” and the beauty and attractions of Anne of Austria may never have struck a responsive chord in the king’s heart. He was not destitute of sentiment. More than once he strove to fill the dreary void with the sympathy of other women of repute about the Court, and, in one instance at all events, not unsuccessfully; but he was not one to win love and friendship generally; and the consciousness of this chilled his manner still more, and threw him back upon himself. Gaston d’Orléans, with all his grave faults, had at least quicker outward intelligence and sufficient animation to win some extensive suffrages of the gentler sex, notably of Anne herself, who tolerated his attentions and coquetted with him up to a certain point; though how far this was policy, or from real sentiment, Court intrigues veil too entirely to attempt to determine, and the jealousy of Richelieu, himself enamoured of the queen, had soon put an end to all the aspirations of the two dukes. “There is no such word as fail,” Richelieu was often heard to say, and he did not fail to put his foot down very decisively when a league was formed, which the queen herself was said to favour, whose end and aim was to depose Louis the Just, crown Gaston, and give him Anne of Austria to wife.

“I should not have sufficiently gained by the change,” was, however, Anne’s reply, when the accusation of her desire for this was made against her in the course of the rigorous inquiry and treatment to which she and her friends were subjected. If on account alone of that time, years back now, when Gaston, to save himself, permitted one of his noblest adherents, Chalais, to perish on the scaffold at Richelieu’s command, Monsieur was not likely to be very favourably regarded by her. Nearly half a score of years had passed since the brave man had died in the flower of his life, tortured and hacked by countless bungling strokes of a creature found at last, among the dregs of the prison, to do the hideous task which the professional headsman managed to evade by absenting himself and remaining _perdu_. In the interval, the queen’s mother had been effectually, and for ever, banished from France. “The Day of Dupes” had come and gone, leaving Richelieu all-triumphant; but still the contest raged, and the virulence of the minister against the queen broke furiously on the pretext he found at last, of discovering that she was keeping up a private correspondence with the King of Spain, and the cardinal infant, her two brothers, and also with persons in Madrid and Brussels, whose friendship she valued—the more, doubtless, for the isolation and lack of affection and harshness surrounding her. It was a boast of Richelieu’s, that with only two lines of an innocent man’s writing he could ruin him. Naturally, therefore, however innocent the correspondence, Anne was anxious to hold her letters uninspected by the cardinal, and she kept them in her own private oratory chamber in the Benedictine convent of the Val de Grâce, in the rue St Jacques, which she had founded. The letters, on their arrival, were received by one of the nuns, who placed them away in a closet to await the queen’s coming, and her replies to them were forwarded from thence. But Richelieu’s spies were at work; they swarmed of course in Paris; and before long they scented out the secret correspondence, and Richelieu informed the king of it, holding up before His Majesty’s dreary imagination all the terrors of national peril it signified. The alarmed king hurried the queen out of Paris to the Château of Chantilly, where she was confined to her own rooms and compelled to listen to a string of rigid interrogation from the chancellor. She was in a cruelly forlorn situation; for, in fear of Richelieu’s anger and the activity of his spies, the courtiers and following of the royal pair did not venture so much as to lift their eyes to her window as they passed. For her own servants, they had been at once disposed of in various prisons; while the chancellor proceeded to ransack the convent of Val de Grâce for more papers and letters. But it was labour lost, which possibly was no more than he expected; since it is believed that the queen had warning from him of his intended visit, and the documents, for all they might be worth, were safe in the care of Madame de Sourdis. The alarm and suspicion intensified, when there was found upon the person of la Porte, the queen’s confidential servant, a letter from her to the Duchess of Chevreuse, long exiled. La Porte was thereupon, as a man of strict honesty and fidelity to his royal mistress, locked away in one of the towers of the Bastille, and all the efforts to draw from him anything incriminating the queen, were absolutely abortive; though Richelieu employed every art to shake him, from promises and emoluments, to threats of torture, which were rendered more real to his imagination, by his being taken to the torture-chamber for a sight of its equipments.

Fortunately for him, a great event was at hand, which marvellously changed the aspect of political affairs. The queen, after twenty-two years of childlessness, was in a situation of promise to give an heir to the throne. Then Richelieu relaxed la Porte’s durance so far as to permit his retiring to Saumur, where he remained till the queen recalled him, on the death of the cardinal, now shadowing in, bringing with it the terrible tragedy which was the last act and deed of his hand.