La Grande Mademoiselle

"The King had ceased to love him," said a contemporary. The end came suddenly and without a note of warning. The King, awaking as from a dream, remembered all the services that Richelieu had rendered unto France. He was so grateful that he hastened to Tarascon and begged Richelieu's pardon for having wished "to lose him," in other words, for having wished to accomplish his fall. The King was ashamed, and despite his sickness he ordered his bearers to carry him into Richelieu's bed-chamber where the two gentlemen passed several hours together, each in his own bed, effecting a reconciliation.

But their hearts were not in their words; wrongs like those in question between the Cardinal and the King cannot be forgotten.85 The King had abetted a conspiracy against the Cardinal's life, and had the Cardinal been inclined to forget it, the King's weak self-reproach would have kept it in the mind of his contemplated victim. Louis could not refrain from harking back to his sin; he humiliated himself, he begged the Cardinal to forgive him; he gave up everything, including the amiable young criminal who, in Scriptural language, had lain in his bosom and been to him as a daughter. The judgment of the moralist is disarmed by the fact that Louis was, and always had been, a physical wreck, morally handicapped by the essence of his being. He had loved Cinq-Mars with unreasoning passion; he was forced by circumstances to sacrifice him; but we need not pity him; there was much of the monster in him, and before the head of Cinq-Mars fell, all the King's love for his victim had passed away.

Louis XIII. was of all the sovereigns of France the one most notably devoted to the public interest; in crises his self-sacrifice resembled the heroism of the martyr; but the defects of his qualities were of such a character that he would have been incomprehensible had he not been sick in body and in mind.

During the crisis which followed the exposure of Cinq-Mars's conspiracy Monsieur surpassed himself; he was alternately trembler, liar, sniveller, and informer; his behaviour was so abject that the echoes of his shame reverberated throughout France and, penetrating the walls of the Tuileries, reached the ears of his daughter. Monsieur shocked Mademoiselle's theological conception of Princes of the Blood; she could not understand how a creature partaking of the nature of the Deity could be so essentially contemptible; she was crushed by the enigma presented by her father.

The close of the reign resembled the dramatic tragedies in which the chief characters die in the fifth act; all the principal personages departed this life within a period of a few months. Marie de Médicis was the first to go. She died at Cologne 3d July, 1642, not, as was reported, in a garret, or in a hovel, but in a house in which Rubens had lived. If we may judge by the names of her legatees, she died surrounded by at least eighty servants. It is true that she owed debts to the tradesmen who furnished her household with the necessaries of life, and it is true that her people had advanced money when their living expenses required such advances; but the two facts prove no more than that royal households in which there is no order closely resemble the disorderly households of the ordinary classes. People of respectability in our own midst are now living regardless of system, devoid of economy, and indebted to their tradesmen, as the household of Marie de Médicis lived in the seventeenth century. To the day of her death the aged Queen retained possession of silver dishes of all kinds, and had her situation justified the rumours of extreme poverty which have been circulated since then she would have pawned them or sold them. We may be permitted to trust that Marie de Médicis did not end her days tormented by material necessities. She died just at the time when she had begun to resort to expedients. The old and corpulent sovereign had lived an agitated life; her chief foes were of her own temperament. She was the victim of paroxysmal wrath and it was generally known that she had made at least one determined though unfruitful attempt to whip her husband, the heroic Henry IV., Conqueror of Paris. Her life had not been of a character to inspire the love of the French people, and when she died no one regretted her. Had not the Court been forced by the prevailing etiquette to assume mourning according to the barbarous and complicated rites of the ancient monarchy, her death would have passed unperceived. The customs of the old regimen obliged Mademoiselle to remain in a darkened room, surrounded by such draperies as were considered essential to the manifestation of royal grief. The world mourned for the handsome boy who had been forced to enter the King's house, and to act as the King's favourite against his will, to die upon the scaffold. Monsieur was despised for his part in Cinq-Mars's death. Mademoiselle was shunned because she was her father's daughter and her obligatory mourning was a convenient veil. Her own record of the death of the Queen is a frankly sorrowful statement of her appreciation of the facts in the case, and of her knowledge of her father's guilt:

I observed the retreat which my mourning imposed upon me with all possible regularity and rigour. If any one had come to see me it would not have been difficult for me to refuse to receive them; however, my case was the case of all who are undergoing misfortune; no one called for me.

Three months after the conspiracy against de Richelieu was exposed, Cinq-Mars was beheaded (12th September), and the Lyonnais, who had assembled in the golden mists of the season of the vintage to see him die, cried out against his death and said that it was "a sin against the earth to take the light from his gentle eyes." De Thou, Cinq-Mars's friend, was beheaded also. The victims faced death like tried soldiers; their attitude as they halted upon the confines of eternity elicited the commendation of the people. The fact that the people called their manner of leaving the world "beautiful and admirable" proves that simplicity in man's conduct, as in literature and in horticultural architecture, was out of date.

When the condemned were passing out of the tribunal they met the judges who had but just pronounced their sentence. Both Cinq-Mars and de Thou "embraced the judges and offered them fine compliments."

The people of Lyons – civilians and soldiers – were massed around the Court House and in the neighbourhood. Cinq-Mars and de Thou bowed low to them all, then mounted into the tumbrel, with faces illumined by spiritual exaltation. In the tumbrel they joyfully embraced and crying "Au revoir," promised to meet in Paradise. They saluted the multitude like conquerors. De Thou clapped his hands when he saw the scaffold; Cinq-Mars ascended first; he turned, took one step forward, and stopped short; his eyes rested fondly upon the people; then with a bright smile he saluted them; after they covered his head he stood for an instant poised as if to spring from earth to heaven, one foot advanced, his hand upon his side. His wide, pathetic glance embraced the multitude, then calmly and without fear, again firmly pacing the scaffold, he went forward to the block.

At the present time it is the fashion to die with less ostentation, but revolutions in taste ought not to prevent our doing justice to the victims of the Cinq-Mars Conspiracy. They were heroically brave to the last, and the people could not forget them. Mademoiselle's grief was fostered by the general sympathy for the unfortunate boy who had paid so dearly for his familiarity with the King. As all her feelings were recorded by her own hand, we are in possession of her opinions on the subjects which were of interest in her day. Of the matter of Cinq-Mars and de Thou she said:

I regretted it deeply, because of my consideration for them, and because, unfortunately, Monsieur was involved in the affair through which they perished. He was so involved that it was even believed that the single deposition made by him was the thing which weighed most heavily upon them and caused their death. The memory of it renews my grief so that I cannot say any more.

Mademoiselle was artless enough to believe that her father would be sorrowful and embarrassed when he returned.

She did not know him.

In the winter after Cinq-Mars died, Gaston returned to the Luxembourg radiant with roguish smiles; he was delighted to be in Paris.

He came to my house, [reported Mademoiselle,] he supped at my house, where there were twenty-four violins. He was as gay as if Messieurs Cinq-Mars and de Thou had not been left by the roadside. I avow that I could not see him without thinking of them, and that through all my joy of seeing him again I felt that his joy gave me grief.

Not long after she thus recorded her impressions she found, to her cost, how little reliance she could place upon her father, and all her filial illusions vanished.

Richelieu was the next to disappear from the scene. He had long been sick; his body was paralysed and putrid with abscesses and with ulcers. Master and Man, Richelieu and Louis were intently watching to see which should be the first to die. Each one of them was forming projects for a time when, freed from the arbitration of the other, he should be in a position to act his independent will and to turn the remnant of his fleeting life to pleasurable profit. In that, his final state, the Cardinal offered the people of France a last and supreme spectacle, and of all the dramas that he had shown them, it was the most original and the most impressive. The day after the execution of Cinq-Mars, Richelieu, who had remained to the last hour in Lyons, entered his portable room and set out for Paris. His journey covered a period of six weeks, and the people who ran to the highway from all directions to see him pass were well regaled. In those last days when the Cardinal travelled he was carried in procession. First of all were heavy wains hauling the material of an inclined plane; at a short distance behind the wains followed a small army corps escorting the Cardinal's travelling room; the room was always transported by twenty-four men of the Cardinal's body-guard, who marched through sun and rain with heads uncovered. In the portable room were three pieces of furniture, a chair, a table, and a splendid bed – and on the bed lay a sick man! – better still for the sightseers, a sick Cardinal! The crowds pressed close to the roadside. They who were masters of the art of death looked on disease with curiosity; they knew that they could lop off the heads of the fine lords whose grandeur embittered the lives of the peasants and the workmen as easily as they could beat down nuts from trees; yet there lay the real King of France in his doll's house, and he could neither live nor die, – that was droll!

The chair in the little room stood ready for the visitors who paid their respects to the sick man when the travellers halted.

The table was carried for the convenience of the secretary, who wrote upon it, sorted his papers, dusted his ink with scented gold-powder, and pasted great wafers over the silken floss and the English ribands which tied his private correspondence.

Richelieu, as he travelled, dictated army orders and diplomatic despatches. When the little procession arrived at a halting-place, everything was ready for its reception; the house in which the Cardinal was to lodge had been prepared, the entire floor to be occupied by him had been gutted so that no inner partitions could interfere with his progress. The wains stopped, the inclined plane was set in position against the side of the house, and the heavy machine bearing the sick-room was rolled slowly into the breach and engulfed without a tremor.

When it was possible the room was drawn aboard a boat and the Cardinal was transported by water; in that case when he reached home he was disembarked opposite his palace near the Port au Foin, and borne through the crowd of people, who struggled and crushed each other so that they might know how a Cardinal-Minister looked, lying in his bed and entering Paris, dying, yet triumphant, after he had vanquished all his enemies.

Richelieu saw all that passed; his perceptions were as keen and his judgment was as just as in the days of his vigorous manhood. Entering Paris in his bed on his return from Lyons, he saw among the prostrate courtiers of his own party a man who had been compromised by the conspiracy, and then and there he summoned him from his knees and ordered him to present himself at the palace and give an account of his actions. Richelieu's word was law; no one questioned it. The weeks which followed the return from Lyons were tedious. After the exposure of the conspiracy the Cardinal suspected every one, the King included. His tired eyes searched the corners of the King's bed-chamber for assassins. He strove to force the King to dismiss some of the officers of his guard, but at that Louis revolted.

After violent discussions and long recriminative dialogues the Cardinal resorted to heroic means. He shut himself up in his palace, refused to receive the King's ambassadors, and threatened to send in his resignation. Then the King yielded, and peace was made.

The two moribunds were together when the precautions for the national safety were taken against Gaston d'Orléans. In his declaration Louis told the deputies that he had forgiven his brother five separate and distinct times, and that he should forgive him once more and once only. The declaration made it plain that the King was firm in his determination to protect himself against his brother. Gaston was to be stripped of all power and to be deprived of the government of Auvergne; his gendarmerie and his light cavalry were to be suppressed. The King made the declaration to Mathieu Molé, December 1, 1642. That same day the Cardinal passed a desperate crisis, and it was known that he must die.

He prepared for death with the firmness befitting a man of his calibre. When his confessor asked him if he had forgiven his enemies, he answered that he had "no enemies save the enemies of the state."86 There was some truth in the answer, and in that truth lay his title to glory. At home or abroad, in France or in foreign lands, Richelieu received the first force of every blow aimed at France. He was the Obstacle, and all hostility used him as a mark. He was the shield as well as the sword of the State. His policy was governed by two immutable ideas: 1. His own will by the will of the King; 2. France. His object was to subject all individual wills to the supreme royal will, and to develop French influence throughout Europe. We have seen the position which France had taken under his direction; he had accomplished work fully as important in the State. "The idea of monarchical power was akin to a religious dogma," said Ranke, "and he who rejected the idea expected to be pursued with the same rigour, and with nearly the same formalities, with which national justice pursued the heretic. The time for an absolute monarchy was ripe. Louis XIV. might come; he would find his bed ready.

Richelieu gave up the ghost December 4, 1642. The news was immediately carried to the King, who received it with the comment, "A great politician is dead."

In France the feeling of relief was general. No one doubted that the Cardinal's death would change everything. The exiles expected to be recalled; the prisoners expected to be set free; the Opposition looked forward to taking the reins of State, and the great, who in spite of their greatness were probably more or less badly fed, dreamed of an Abbey of Thélème. The mass of Frenchmen loved change for the sake of novelty.

The Parisians had hoped for the spectacle of a fine funeral, and they were not disappointed. Richelieu's body lay in state in its Cardinal's robes, and so many people visited him that the procession consumed one whole day and night passing his bier. The parade lasted nearly a week. The burial took place the thirteenth day of December. It was a public triumph. The funeral car, drawn by six horses, was considered remarkable. But the changes hoped for did not arrive. La Grande Mademoiselle was the first to recognise the fact that Louis XIII. had given the kingdom false hopes. It had been supposed that the Cardinal's demise would give the King power to make the people happy. The Cardinal was dead, and there had been no change. Despite all that Gaston had done, Mademoiselle loved him; she could not separate him from her idea of the glory of her house. She noted in her memoirs the visit made to the Louvre in his behalf:

As soon as I knew that Richelieu was dead I went to the King to beg him to show some kindness to Monsieur. I thought that I had taken a very favourable occasion for moving him to pity, but he refused to do what I asked him, and the next day he went to the palace to register the declaration against Monsieur (as the subject of it is known I need not mention it or explain it here). When he entered Parliament I wished to throw myself at his feet; I wished to beg of him not to go to that extremity against Monsieur; but some one had warned him of my intention and he sent word to me forbidding me to appear. Nothing could make him swerve from his injurious designs.

The 4th December, after Mademoiselle made her unsuccessful visit, Louis XIII. summoned Mazarin to finish the work that Richelieu had begun.

The 5th December Louis sent out a circular letter announcing the death of Richelieu; he cut short the rumours of a political crisis by stating that he was resolved to maintain all the establishments by him decreed in Council with the late Prime Minister, and he further stated that to advance the foreign affairs of France and also to advance the internal interests of the State, – as he had always advanced them, – he should maintain the existent national policy.

The riches amassed by the Cardinal passed into the hands of his heirs, and the King supplemented the legacies by the distribution of a few official appointments. Richelieu was gone from earth, but his spirit still governed France. "All the Cardinal's evils are right here!" cried Mademoiselle; "when he went, they remained."

Montglat said that they "found it difficult to announce the Cardinal's death. No one was willing to take the first step. They spoke in whispers. It was as if they were afraid that his soul would come back to punish them for saying that he could die." It was said that "even the King had so respected the Cardinal when he was alive, that he feared him when he was dead."

Under such conditions it was difficult to make a change of any kind; nevertheless, after weeks had passed – when the King had accustomed himself to independent action – a few changes came about gradually and stealthily, one by one.

The thirteenth day of January, 1643, Monsieur was given permission to call at Saint Germain and pay his respects to the King. The 19th, Bassompierre and two other lords emerged from the Bastille.

In February the Vendômes returned from exile. Old Mme. de Guise also took the road to Paris, and when she arrived her granddaughter, La Grande Mademoiselle, received her with open arms, and gave her a ball and a comedy, and collations composed of confitures, and fruits trimmed with English ribands; and when the ball was over and the guests were departing in the grey fog of early morning, old Madame and young Mademoiselle laid their light heads upon the same pillow and dreamed that Cardinals were always dying and exiles joyfully returning to their own.

As time went on the King's clemency increased and he issued pardons freely. The reason was too plain to every one; the end was at hand. Paris had acquired a taste for her kindly sovereign. Louis knew that he was nearing the tideless sea, – he spoke constantly of his past; he exhibited his skeleton limbs covered with great white scars to his family and his familiar friends; he told the story of his wrongs. He told how he had been brought to the state that he was in by his "executioners of doctors" and by "the tyranny of the Cardinal." He said that the Cardinal had never permitted him to do things as he had wished to do them, and that he had compelled him to do things which had been repugnant to him, so that at last even he "whom Heaven had endowed with all the endurances," had succumbed under the load that had been heaped upon him. His friends listened and were silent.

To the last Louis XIII. was faithful to the sacraments and to France. He performed all his secular duties. When he lay upon his death-bed he summoned his deputies so that they might hear him read the declaration bestowing the title of Regent upon Anne of Austria and delivering the actual power of the Crown into the hands of a prospective Council duly nominated.

Louis XIII. had put his house in order: he had nothing more to do on earth. His sickness was long and tedious, and attended by all that makes death desirable; by cruel pains, by distressful nausea, and by all the torments of a death by inches. The unhappy man was long in dying; now rallying, now sinking, with fluctuations which deranged the intrigues of the Court and agitated Saint Germain.

The King lay in the new château (the one built by his father); nothing remains of it but the "Pavillon Henri IV". Anne of Austria lived with the Court in the old château (the one familiar to all Parisians of the present day).

On "good days" the arrangement afforded the sufferer relative repose; but on "bad days," when he approached a crisis, the etiquette of the Court was torment. The courtiers hurried over to the new château to witness the death-agony. They crowded the sick-room and whispered with the celebrities who travelled daily from Paris to Saint Germain to visit the dying King. In the courtyard of the château the travellers' horses neighed and pawed the ground. Confused sounds and tormenting light entered by the windows; the air of the room was stifling and Louis begged his guests, in the name of mercy, to withdraw from his bed and let him breathe.

The crowds assembled in the courtyard hissed or applauded as the politicians entered or drove away. On the highway before the château the idle people stood waiting to receive the last sigh of the King, to be in at the death, or to make merry at the expense of celebrated men.

While the masters visited the dying King the coachmen, footmen, on-hangers, and other tributaries sat upon the carriage boxes, declared their politics, and issued their manifestos, and their voices rose above the neighing of the horses and ascended to the sick-room. When the tantalising periodically recurrent crises which kept the Court and country on foot were past, the celebrities and men of Parliament, with many of the courtiers, fled to Paris, where they forgot the sights and the sounds of the sick-room in the perfumed air of the Parisian salons.

Mademoiselle wrote of that time: "There never were as many balls as there were that year; and I went to them all."

The final crisis came the thirteenth day of May. Immediately after the King gave up the ghost, the Queen and all the Court retired from the death-chamber and made ready to depart from Saint Germain early in the morning. The moving was like breaking camp. At daybreak long files of baggage wagons laden with furniture and with luggage began to descend the hill of Saint Germain, and soon afterward crowded chariots, drawn by six horses, and groups of cavaliers, joined the lumbering wains. The suppressed droning of many voices accompanied the procession. At eleven o'clock silence fell upon the long, writhing line, and an army corps surrounding the royal mourners passed, escorted by the Marshals of France, dukes and peers, and the gentlemen of the Court, – all mounted.

The last of the battalions filed by the van of the procession, and the chariots and the wains moved on, mingling with the servitors and men of all trades, who in that day followed in the train of all the great.

Saint Germain was vacant. The last errand boy vanished, the murmur of the moving throng died in the distance; the shroud of silence wrapped the new château, and the curtain fell upon the fifth act of the reign of Louis XIII. There remained upon the stage only a corpse, light as a plume, watched by a lieutenant and his guard.

CHAPTER IV

I. The Regency – The Romance of Anne of Austria and Mazarin – Gaston's Second Wife. – II. Mademoiselle's New Marriage Projects. – III. Mademoiselle Would Be a Carmelite Nun – The Catholic Renaissance under Louis XIII. and the Regency. – IV. Women Enter Politics. The Rivalry of the Two Junior Branches of the House of France – Continuation of the Royal Romance.