Cardinal de Richelieu

Front matter

Qass.

Book.

y'sZ-z-^

Part I

The birth of Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu — The position of his family — His great-uncles — His grandfather and grandmother — His father, Francois de Richelieu, Grand Provost of Henry HI. — His mother and her family — His godfathers — The death of his father . . . Pages 1-9

Friends and relations — The household at Richelieu — Country life in Poitou Pages 10-15

The University of Paris — The College of Navarre — The Marquis du Chillou — A change of prospect — A student of theology — The Abbe de Richelieu at Rome — His consecration .... Pages 16-25

Part II

A Bishop at the Sorbonne — State of France under Henry IV. — Henry IV., his Queen and his Court — The Nobles and Princes — The unhealthiness of Paris — The Bishop's departure . . . Pages 26-37

Richelieu arrives at Lugon — His palace and household — His work in the diocese — His friends and neighbours .... Pages 38-47 viii CARDINAL DE RICHELIEU

"Instructions et Maximes" — The death of Henry IV. — The difficult road to favour— Pere Joseph and the Abbey of Fontevrault Pages 48-62

CHAPTER IV

Waiting for an opportunity— Political unrest— The States-General of 1614— The Bishop of Lugon speaks Pages 63-71

CHAPTER V

Richelieu appointed Chaplain to Queen Anne— Discontent of the Parliament and the Princes — The royal progress to the south — Treaty of Loudun — Return to Paris — Marie de Medicis and her favourites — The young King and Queen — The Due de Luynes — Richelieu as negotiator and adviser— The death of Madame de Richelieu . . Pages 72-87

CHAPTER VI

A contemporary view of the state of France— Barbin, Mangot, and Richelieu — A new rebellion — Richelieu as Foreign Secretary — The Abbe de Marolles — Concini in danger — The death of Concini — The fall of the Ministry — Horrible scenes in Paris — Richelieu follows the Queen-mother into exile Pages 88-100

CHAPTER VII

Richelieu at Blois— He is ordered back to his diocese — He writes a book in defence of the Faith — Marriage of Mademoiselle de Richelieu — The Bishop exiled to Avignon — Escape of the Queen-mother from Blois — Richelieu is recalled to her service Pages 101-115

CHAPTER VIII

The Treaty of Angouleme — The death of Henry de Richelieu — The meeting at Couzieres — The Queen-mother at Angers — Richelieu's influence for peace — The battle of the Ponts-de-Ce— Intrigues of the Due de Luynes — Marriage of Richelieu's niece— The campaigns in Beam and Languedoc — The death of Luynes — The Bishop of Lui^on becomes a Cardinal

CONTENTS ix

Part III

Cardinal de Richelieu— Personal descriptions— A patron of the arts — Court intrigues — Fancan and the pamphlets — The fall of the Ministers — Cardinal de Richelieu First Minister of France . . Pages 131-142

Richelieu's aims — The English alliance — The affair of the Valtelline — The Huguenot revolt — The marriage of Madame Henriette — The Duke of Buckingham Pages 143-157

Peace with Spain — The making of the army' and navy — The question of Monsieur's marriage — The first great conspiracy — Triumph of Richelieu and death of Chalais Pages 158-175

CHAPTER IV

Two famous edicts— The tragedy of Bouteville and Des Chapelles — The death of Madame and its consequences — War with England — The siege of La Rochelle Pages 176-192

CHAPTER V

The Due de Nevers and the war of the Mantuan succession— The rebellion in Languedoc — A new Italian campaign— Richelieu as Commander-in-Chief Pages 193-206

CHAPTER VI

Illness of Louis XIII.— "Le Grand Orage de la Cour."— The "Day of Dupes" Pages 207-216

CHAPTER VII

Flight from France of the Queen-mother and Monsieur — New honours for Cardinal de Richelieu— The fall of the Marillac brothers — The Due de Montmorency and Monsieur's ride to Languedoc— Castelnaudary— The death of Montmorency — Illness and recovery of the Cardinal

CHAPTER VIII

The Cardinal and his palaces — The chateau and town of RicheHeu — The Palais-Cardinal— Richelieu's household, daily life, and friends— The Hotel de Rambouillet — Mademoiselle de Gournay— Boisrobert and the first Academicians— Entertainments at the Palais-Cardinal— i'J/zr^w^

CHAPTER IX

Conquests in Lorraine— The return of Monsieur— The fate of Puylaurens — France involved in the Thirty Years' War — Last adventures of the Due de Rohan — Defeat, invasion, and panic— The turn of the tide — Narrow escape of the Cardinal— The flight of the Princes . Pages 249-262

CHAPTER X

Palace intrigues — Mademoiselle de Hautefort — Mademoiselle de la Fayette — The affair of the Val-de-Grace — The birth of the Dauphin — The death of Pere Joseph— Difficulties in the Church . Pages 263-275

CHAPTER XI

Victories abroad — The death of the Comte de Soissons — Social triumphs — Marriage of the Due d'Enghien — The revolt against the taxes — The conspiracy of Cinq- Mars— The Cardinal's dangerous illness — He makes his will — The ruin of his enemies — His return to Paris . Pages 276-290

CHAPTER XII

The Cardinal's last days— Renewed illness— His death and funeral — His legacies — The feeling in France— The Church of the Sorbonne

INDEX Pages 299-306

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cardinal de Richelieu. Triple Portrait by Philippe de Cham-

paigne (National Gallery) Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Henry IV. From an engraving after the picture by Frangois

Porbus 26

Cloister at Champigny 34

From a photo by A. Pascal, Thouars.

The Majority of Louis XIII. (Louis XIII. and Marie de Medicis).

From the picture by Rubens in the Louvre ..... 68

From a photo by Neurdein, Paris.

Cardinal de Richelieu. Portrait by Philippe de Champaigne

From a photo by A. Giraudon, Paris.

Gaston de France, Due d'Orleans. From a contemporary

portrait 162

From a photo by Neurdein, Paris.

Louis XIII. From a contemporary portrait

From a photo by Neurdein, Paris.

The Chateau de Richelieu. From an old print .

The Town of Richelieu. From an old print

Anne of Austria. From a miniature in the Victoria and Alber Museum

Porte de Chatellerault, Richelieu .

From a photo by Imprimerie Photo-Mecanique, Paris.

268 280

Tomb of Cardinal de Richelieu, by Girardon, in the Church of

the Sorbonne 294

From a photo by Neurdein, Paris.

xi

CHIEF AUTHORITIES

CONTEMPORARY

Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques et Papiers d'Etat du Cardinal de

Richelieu. Recueillis et publics par M. Avenel. Memoires du Cardinal de Richelieu. Edition Petitot et Monmerque. Memoires du Cardiftal de Richelieu. New Edition. With Notes, etc.

(Societe de I'Histoire de France.) Not completed. Memoires sur la Regence de Marie de Medicis, par Pontchartrain.

Edition Petitot et Monmerque.

Memoires de Bassompierre. Edition Petitot et Monmerque. Journal de Pierre de rEstoile, Edition Petitot et Monmerque. Memoires du Marquis de Montglat^ Edition Petitot et Monmerque. Memoires de Madame de Motteville. Edition Riaux. LHistoire du Cardinal- Due de Richelieu. L. Aubery. Testament Politique du Cardinal-Due de Richelieu. Journal de M. le Cardi?tal-Duc de Richelieu ^ 1630, 1631. Portraits des Hommes Illustres Francois. M. de Vulson, Sieur de la

Colombiere.

Le Veritable Pere Joseph, Capucin. 1704. Histoire du Roy Henry le Grand. Hardouin de Perefixe. Memoir e d'Armand du Plessis de Richelieu, Eveque de Lufon, 1607 ou

161 o. Edition Armand Baschet.

Description de la Ville de Paris. Germain Brice. Les Historiettes de Tallemani des Reaux.

Etc., etc.

xiv CARDINAL DE RICHELIEU

MODERN

Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu. G. Hanotaux.

Histoire de Fra7ice. H. Martin. Vol. xi.

Histoire de France. Michelet. Vols. xiii. and xiv.

Vie l7itiuie d'lme Reine de France^ Marie de Medicis. L. Batiffol.

Le Roi Louis XIII. a Vingt Ans. L. Batiffol.

Louis XIII. et Richelieu. Marius Topin.

Richelieu et les Ministres de Louis XIII. B. Zeller.

La Noblesse Franfaise sous Richelieu. Vicomte G. d'Avenel.

Pretres^ Soldats et Juges sous Richelieu. Vicomte G. d'Avenel.

Le Cardinal de Berulle et le Cardinal de Richelieu. M. I'Abbe M.

Houssaye.

Gentilshommes Campagnards de rAficienne France. Pierre de Vaissiere. Le Pere Joseph et Richelieu. G. Fagniez. Madame de Hautefort. Victor Cousin.

Madame de Chevreuse. Victor Cousin.

Le Regne de Richelieu. 6mile Roca.

Le Cardinal de Richelieu : Etude Biographique. L. Dussieux. Le Plaisant Abbe de Boisrobert. Emile Magne.

Etc., etc.

Part I 1585—1607

1585—1590

The birth of Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu — The position of his family — His great-uncles — His grandfather and grandmother — His father, Frangois de Richelieu, Grand Provost of Henry HI. — His mother and her family— His godfathers — The death of his father.

IN the year 1585, when EHzabeth of England was at the height of her power, when Mary of Scotland lay in prison within two years of her death, when Philip of Spain was beginning to dream of the Invincible Armada, when Henry of Guise and the League were triumphing in France, the future dominator of European politics was born.

Armand Jean du Plessis, third and youngest son of Francois du Plessis, Seigneur de Richelieu, was an infant of no great importance. Even his birthplace, for a long time, was not known with any certainty.

His family was noble, but not of the higher nobility which governed provinces, commanded armies, and glittered at Court. He belonged to that race of French country gentlemen which led a strenuous hfe in the sixteenth century, either for good or evil — perhaps mostly for evil. They were generally poor, proud, and greedy. If, by fair means or foul, they could capture a rich wife of their own station, so much the better; if not, they readily sacrificed birth for money, and bestowed an old name, coat and sword, rough manners and ruinous walls, on some heiress of the bourgeoisie. When the resource of marriage failed, such a gentleman would turn himself into a mercenary soldier, Catholic or Huguenot, or creep into Court employment in the shadow of some great noble of his province ; or failing such honest means, he might clap on a mask and take to highway robbery, rich travellers being better worth pillaging than the peasants who hid in their hovels as his horse's heavy hoofs clanked by. Sometimes Religion herself, or the false Duessa who personified her in those days, might help a needy gentleman to a livelihood. There was many an abbot who had never been a monk ; and there were lucky families — that of Du Plessis, for instance— who possessed a bishopric as provision for a younger son.

The Du Plessis were an old family of Poitou. In that ancient and famous province they had held several fiefs so far back as the early thirteenth century ; but they were a vvandering, fighting race, without strong attachment, it seems, to their native soil. One of them is said to have gone to England in the suite of Guy de Lusignan, and to have married a noble Enghsh wife. Another journeyed to Cyprus with the same distinguished patron. In the Hundred Years War, two Du Plessis brothers were found fighting on opposite sides, French and English. Pierre, the elder, head of the less distinguished branch of the family, was a robber of Church property as well as a traitor to the national cause ; but in the way of morals there was not much to choose between him and his brother Sauvage, the patriot, in favour of whom their father threatened to disinherit him.

Sauvage was a man of strong, acquisitive character, and everything prospered in his hands, though he began his career by carrying off a younger brother's wife. It was his son, Geoffroy, who laid the real foundation of future greatness by his marriage with Perrine Clerembault, of a good old family, whose brother was Seigneur of Richelieu. Louis de Clerembault, who held a post in the Court of Charles VII, left his fortune and estates to Frangois du Plessis, his sister's son. The young man not only succeeded to the fortified chateau of Richelieu and a good position in his native province, but also to a connexion with the Court which lasted into the reign of Louis XI, and which helped him to lift his family a step higher by marrying his own son, Frangois, to the daughter of Guyon Le Roy, of Chavigny, in the Forest of Fontevrault, a distinguished courtier, and Vice-Admiral of France under Francois I. This Frangois du Plessis de Richelieu was great-grandfather to the famous Cardinal.

An ecclesiastical turn — for the sake of gain rather than of godliness — was given to the family by its relationship with that "true prelate of the Renaissance," Jacques Le Roy, uncle of Madame de Richelieu. He was successively Abbot of Villeloing, Cluny, and St. Florent-de-Saumur, and Archbishop of Bourges, and in him the bad sixteenthcentury alliance between the Church and the world, the consequence of royal nomination to benefices, might be seen at its most flourishing point.

He chose three out of his five Richelieu great-nephews to follow in his footsteps. Two of them rose to be abbot and bishop ; the other, Antoine, took the vows as a monk at Saumur against his will, and after a short religious life varied by floggings and other punishments for rebellion, unfrocked himself and ran away to the wars. Known throughout his military life as '' the Monk," he was a cruel and ferocious soldier. With his brother Frangois, a man ^f very difl'erent type, he first saw service in the Italian ' campaigns under the Marechal de Montluc. Both brothers returned to Poitou towards 1560, and both took the Catholic side in the religious civil war which raged for years in the miserable western provinces of France, where Protestantism, from various causes, had taken a firm hold. Attached to the Guise faction, the brothers became special partisans of the Due de Montpensier, the King's lieutenant in Poitou and their own near neighbour at the Chateau de

Champigny. His army swept the province with fire and sword, and among his many fierce and adventurous followers Francois and Antoine du Plessis-Richelieu led the way.

The former, however, seems to have been an honest soldier rather than a bloodthirsty demon. He, nicknamed *' le Sage,'' and regretted as " un fort brave gentilhomme," lost his life in an expedition against the English, who had occupied Le Havre. Le Moine survived his brother some years, and his fame as a fighter became worth a post at Court and a knightly order. With an ever-growing reputation for vice and violence, he was killed in a street brawl in Paris — " mort symbolisante a sa vie," says the chronicler I'Estoile. His most characteristic exploit, and the most startling among many, was the single-handed massacre of a hundred Huguenots who had taken refuge in a church near Poitiers. Antoine de Richelieu "amused himself" by shooting down these poor defenceless creatures in cold blood.

So much for the Cardinal's great-uncles. His grandfather, Louis du Plessis, Seigneur de Richelieu, the eldest of the family, died a young man, but not before he had helped on its fortunes by a marriage profitable in dignity, if not in coin. The heir of Richelieu was of a quieter spirit than his brothers. He entered the household of a fine old noble — Antoine de Rochechouart, seneschal of Toulouse, distinguished for valour in the reigns of Louis XH and Francois I — as lieutenant of his bodyguard ; and very shortly married his master's daughter, thus distantly connecting his famous grandson with one of the noblest old ducal families in France, from which sprang Madame de Montespan and her brilliant brothers and sisters, the Due de Vivonne, Madame de Thianges, and the learned Abbess of Fontevrault. His Rochechouart grandmother was the one precious link between Cardinal de Richelieu and the higher nobility.

M. de Rochechouart was poor, probably extravagant, and his daughter Frangoise, whom tradition makes neither young, pretty, nor amiable, seems to have lived in a sort of dependence on the great Dame Anne de Polignac, dowager of La Rochefoucauld, at Verteuil, where Charles V was royally entertained in 1539. These circumstances may account for the mesalliance which Mademoiselle de Rochechouart certainly made in marrying Louis du Plessis. Her interest gained him the Court appointment of echanson^ or chief butler, to Henry II. But he was neither clever nor prudent, and his widow was left with five young children, very little money, a sharp, proud temper, and a deep discontent with her lot in life.

She settled herself at Richelieu, then only a small castle on an island in the river Mable, in the heart of a country terribly disturbed by civil war, and commanded, from the neighbouring hills, by the strongholds of unfriendly neighbours. Here she brought up her children, of whom the second son, Frangois, was the father of Cardinal de Richelieu.

The story goes that a tragic event made Frangois lord of Richelieu. There was a feud, centuries old, between the Du Plessis in their moated castle and the family of Mausson, perched upon the hill. The quarrel had been in abeyance during the peaceable, absentee life of Louis du Plessis, but when his proud widow, with her haughty, passionate boys, took up her abode at Richelieu, it broke out again furiously. Louis, the eldest son, was just growing into manhood, an officer in the Due de Montpensier's guards, when he fell out with the Sieur de Mausson over that ancient bone of contention, a seat in church.

Both families attended the village church of Braye, on the forest slope close by. In those days, and long afterwards, the chief gentleman in the parish had rights over the church quite as jealously guarded as any other of his feudal privileges. He sat with his family high up in the choir. He ordered the hour of mass, and the cure did not venture to begin before he arrived. The congregation followed his lead throughout. When he was absent, his servants sat in his place and insolently demanded the honours due to him. His coat of arms was hung up for all to see. If he died, the bells chimed unceasingly for forty days, and the church was hung with black velvet for a year and a day.

It appears that the Sieur de Mausson and the young Seigneur de Richelieu both demanded honours which could not be paid to both. The young man, pushed on by his mother, made an angry resistance to the Mausson claims. His neighbour, by way of settling the question, lay in wait for Louis and murdered him.

Madame de Richelieu thought of nothing but revenge. Her younger son, Frangois, was page to King Charles IX. : she sent for him, and he lived at Richelieu, mother and son with one object, one intention, till the watched-for time came. Then one day, when Mausson was fording the river, Frangois and his men rushed out from the shadow of the willows. They had set a cunning trap for the enemy, a cart-wheel hidden under water, and while his restive horse was plunging, they fell upon him and killed him. So ended the feud between Mausson and Richelieu, still a lingering tradition in the valley of the Mable.

There was not much justice in those days, but it appears that Francois was obliged to fly the country. He wandered as far as Poland, where Henry of Anjou was playing at being King, and shared in the adventures of that most worthless of the Valois when he ran away with the Polish crown jewels and travelled round by Austria and Venice to succeed Charles IX on the throne of France.

Francois de Richelieu became Henry's trusted servant. Certainly there was nothing of the mignon about him. Very tall, thin, solemn and dismal, his looks were suitable to his dreary but necessary office — first Provost of the King's house, then Grand Provost of France, charged with arresting malefactors and presiding over their punishment. He was known at Court as " Tristan I'Hermite," so that he must have struck his contemporaries as resembling, not in his office alone, the famous Provost of Louis XL

Francois de Richelieu was affianced in early youth, before the Mausson affair drove him abroad, to Suzanne de la Porte, who belonged by birth to the higher bourgeoisie of his native province. Circumstances brought about this marriage, to which one cannot imagine that the proud Frangoise de Rochechouart gave a very willing consent.

The family of La Porte, highly respectable, and clever with all the Poitevin shrewdness, possessed estates in Poitou and elsewhere. Frangois de la Porte, the Cardinal's maternal grandfather, was a brilliant scholar at the University of Poitiers, only second in fame to that of Paris, and first in Europe for the study of Roman law in the original spirit ; keen, solid, logical, practical.

Frangois de la Porte became a learned and distinguished advocate in the law-courts of Paris, but did not lose interest in his own province and his neighbours there. He appears to have been specially concerned with the affairs of Louis de Richelieu, who, according to Tallemant, was not only very poor, but ''embrouilla furieusement sa maison," and left his family in real distress. M. de la Porte made himself very useful to Dame Frangoise de Richelieu, no doubt partly as to the management of her more distant property, difficult enough in those desperate times, and satisfied the vanity with which his contemporaries credit him by marrying his daughter to her son. The exact date of the marriage does not seem to be known.

As Grand Provost, Francois de Richelieu had a house in Paris, in the Rue du Bouloy, and all probabilities point to the fact of his son Armand having been born there. He was certainly baptized in Paris, though not till eight months after his birth, the delay being caused partly by his extreme delicacy, partly by the long and dangerous journey from Poitou which had to be made by his grandmother, who was present at the church of Saint-Eustache as one of his sponsors.

The others were two Marshals of France, Armand de Gontaut-Biron and Jean d'Aumont ; each of whom gave the child a name. Both these gallant soldiers are celebrated by Voltaire in the Henriade :

" D'Aumont, qui sous cinq Rois avoit porte les armes ; Biron, dont le seul nom repandoit les alarmes. ..."

Both were intimate friends of the Grand Provost, and joined him later in placing their swords at the command of Henry IV.

The name of Frangois de Richelieu is frequently to be met with in the documents of Henry III.'s reign. He received the highest honour Royalty could bestow, the Order of the Holy Spirit. The King's personal safety depended largely on him, and allowing for the general corruption of the time, he seems to have performed his duties, often secret and mysterious, with honesty, loyalty, and courage. On that wild day in 1588, when the Due de Guise had been welcomed by Paris with mad enthusiasm, when the streets were chained and barricaded against the King's troops, and Henry was escaping from his *' ungrateful city," it was the Grand Provost who checked the pursuers at the Porte de la Conference. Old writers say that the gate took its name from that circumstance, and tell how " Frangois de Richelieu, Grand Prevot de France, pere du Cardinal de meme nom, arreta les Parisiens qui vouloient suivre le Roi, pour tacher de le surprendre."

Luckily for his own fame, this "wise officer" was not an active agent in the murder of the Due de Guise at Blois, a few months later. But he was sent to the Hotel de Ville to arrest those dignified citizens whom the King suspected of being concerned in the Guise conspiracy. And in the following summer he performed his last duty towards Henry III. by arresting the miserable monk, Jacques Clement, whom the Duchesse de Montpensier, sister of Guise, had persuaded to earn his salvation by murdering the King, " enemy of the Catholic religion."

In the confusion that followed Henry's death, the wise " Tristan " did not trust himself to the faction of the Guises. With other Catholic nobles, and in spite of family traditions, he turned to the one man in whose hands he saw safety for France and himself, the Protestant Henry of Navarre. That clever Prince received him cordially and confirmed him in his appointments. So it came to pass that the nephew of " the Monk " reddened his sword with Catholic blood at Arques and at Ivry, and followed his new King, still as Grand Provost of France, to the camp before Paris. There his career was cut short by a fever in the summer of 1590, at the age of forty-two.

1590—1595

Friends and relations — The household at Richelieu — Country hfe

in Poitou.

WHETHER the widow of Francois de Richelieu was in famine-stricken Paris during the siege — one of those afflicted ladies to whom the good-natured and politic Henry sent provisions first, passports later, that they might escape from the city — or whether she had already, her husband being so strongly in opposition to the ruling powers there, removed herself and her five children into the country it seems impossible to know.

She was not without influential friends in Paris ; the more useful, perhaps, because they were not in the fighting line. Her father lived in the Rue Hautefeuille, near the Church of St. Andre-des-Arcs, in the heart of the Latin quarter; the old turrets of his house still remain. He was divided from the Rue du Bouloy, on the north side of the river beyond the Louvre, by two bridges, the Island, and a labyrinth of dirty, narrow, dangerous streets. There may well have been a gulf fixed, during those horrible months of the siege, between the old advocate and his daughter.

But Amador de la Porte, his younger son, and Denys Bouthillier, his head clerk and future successor, were not likely to let Suzanne and her children suffer any unnecessary privation. Both were strong and brilliant men, worthy members of that bourgeoisie which was the pride and life of Paris. Amador, some years younger than his

EARLY YEARS ii

sister, was apparently too restless to settle down in his father's profession. But Frangois de la Porte had been very useful, as advocate, to the Order of Malta. They rewarded him by receiving Amador as a Knight of the Order, without a too close inquiry into his proofs of nobility. His foot once on the ladder, Amador rose to be Commander, then Grand Prior of France, and by his nephew's favour held several important governments.

These two men, Amador de la Porte and Denys Bouthillier, were constant friends and guardians of the Richelieu children. Bouthillier and his sons were devoted to the Cardinal throughout his career, to their very great advantage. Claude, the eldest, made an enormous fortune as surintendant des finances under Louis XIII., and his son Leon, Comte de Chavigny, was a minister under both Richelieu and Mazarin. Sebastien and Victor rose high in the Church. Denys became private secretary to Queen Marie de Medicis, and was created Baron de Ranee ; he was the father of Armand Jean de Ranee, the famous Abbot of La Trappe.

Through the Cardinal's other La Porte uncle, of whom, personally, not much is known, the old advocate's family stepped up into something like equality with the highest in the kingdom. His son, Charles, a bold, eccentric creature, attached himself from the first to the fortunes of his cousin, Armand de Richelieu, and by this means became a Marshal of France and Due de la Meilleraye. He was one of the Cardinal's most trusted aides-de-camp, and later on, a conspicuous figure in Paris during the troubles of the Fronde.

In the autumn of 1590, if not sooner, a family of women and children was established at the Chateau de Richeheu. There were Dame Frangoise de Rochechouart, widow of the Seigneur Louis, and her daughter, also a widow, Frangoise du Plessis, Madame de Marconnay. There were Suzanne de la Porte, widow of the Grand Provost, and her five children ; Frangoise, a girl of twelve — who married first the Seigneur de Beauvau, secondly, Rene de Vignerot, Seigneur du Pont-de-Courlay, and was the mother of the

Cardinal's favourite niece, Madame de Combalet, afterwards created Duchesse d' Aiguillon ; Henry, a well-known courtier of Louis XIII.'s young days; Alphonse, at this time intended for the Bishopric of Lugon ; Armand Jean, the political genius, now a delicate, feverish atom of five years old ; Nicole, who married the Marquis de Maille- Breze, and whose daughter, Claire Clemence, became the wife of the great Conde.

The head of this household, according to immemorial French custom, was the grandmother, Frangoise de Rochechouart. Her rule, no doubt, was severe, and there are evidences that her daughter-in-law, a woman of gentler type, suffered under it. The hard old aristocrat who had condescended in her marriage with Louis du Plessis was scornful of the bourgeoise mother of her grandchildren. She was soured too by the losses and troubles of her life. Probably Suzanne brought from Paris the habits of a civilisation that did not suit that rough old home, that " ancient house of stone, roofed with slates," strongly fortified with walls and moats as useful now as in the time of the English wars, when they were new. In 1590, the civil wars were by no means at an end. The province, devastated for years by Catholics and Huguenots flying at each other's throats, now suffered equally in the struggle between Henry IV. and the League. Poitiers took the latter side, and for three years, from 1591 to 1594, the King's army besieged it in vain. All the neighbouring country, including the valley of the Mable, was ruined and unsafe. A band of ruffian soldiers sacked the small town of Faye-la-Vineuse, on the hills overlooking Richelieu. No wonder if the gentle Suzanne, " loyal lady " and tender mother, was kept sleepless by burning horizons as often as by her little Armand, shivering with fever in the unwholesome mists of that river valley.