H. Noel Williams

Peace is signed with the Emperor at Ratisbon—The Queen-Mother deprives Richelieu’s niece Madame de Combalet of her post of dame d’atours and demands of Louis XIII the instant dismissal of the Cardinal—The Luxembourg interview—“The Day of Dupes”—Triumph of Richelieu—Bassompierre’s explanation of his own part in this affair—His visit to Versailles—“He has arrived after the battle!”—He gives offence to Richelieu by refusing an invitation to dinner—He finds himself in semi-disgrace—Monsieur quarrels with the Cardinal and leaves the Court—The King again treats Bassompierre with cordiality—Departure of the Court for CompiÈgne—Bassompierre learns that the Queen-Mother has been placed under arrest and the Princesse de Conti exiled and that he himself is to be arrested—The marshal is advised by the Duc d’Épernon to leave France—He declines and announces his intention of going to the Court to meet his fate—He burns “more than six thousand love-letters”—His arrival at the Court—Singular conduct of the King towards him—The marshal is arrested by the Sieur de Launay, lieutenant of the Gardes du Corps, and conducted to the Bastille.

So soon as his health was re-established, the King is said to have warned Richelieu of the hostile intentions of his mother, and when, on October 19, the Court left Lyons, the Cardinal, with the object of regaining her friendship, travelled with her in the same boat from Roanne to Briare—“in complete privacy,” says Bassompierre, and appears to have spared no pains to conciliate her. Marie dissembled so well that he believed that all immediate danger was over; but scarcely had she arrived in Paris than she called upon the King to carry out the promise he had made her at Lyons.

Louis pleaded the interests of the State, and demanded time to settle the troubles. But it was necessary to find other arguments. PÈre Joseph and Brulart de LÉon, who had been sent to Ratisbon to settle with the Emperor the question of Casale and Mantua, had concluded with him a general peace (October 13). Schomberg was on the march towards Casale, which was in the utmost peril, for the Spaniards had already captured the town and were pressing the citadel closely, when he received news of the treaty. He paid no attention to it and continued to advance. On the 26th he came in sight of the place, and a cannonade between his forces and those of the besiegers had actually begun, when the young Papal agent Mazarini, at the risk of his life, rode in between the hostile armies, waving a paper and crying: “Peace!” The proposals he brought for the evacuation of the town by the Spaniards and of the citadel by the French pending the acceptance of the Ratisbon treaty by Spain were acceded to, and the great siege of Casale came suddenly to an end.

When this agreement was known in Paris, and the war regarded as over, the Queen-Mother, refusing to listen to any remonstrance from the King, promptly deprived Richelieu’s niece, Madame de Combalet, of her post as dame d’atours, in an interview in which she is said to have heaped the grossest abuse upon the unfortunate young woman, and demanded of her son the instant dismissal of the Cardinal. The King demurred and, to escape maternal importunities, withdrew to his hunting-lodge at Versailles; but Marie was resolved to give him no rest until she had gained his consent; and on the morning of November 10 Louis returned to Paris, and went to visit the Queen-Mother at the Luxembourg.

On his arrival at the Luxembourg, whither he was accompanied by Bassompierre, the King and his mother entered the latter’s cabinet, and gave strict orders that no one should be allowed to interrupt them. They then locked the door of the cabinet, and the Queen-Mother’s attendants those of the ante-chamber.

Hardly, however, had the conversation begun, when a little door leading from the chapel of the Luxembourg into the Queen’s cabinet, which their Majesties had not thought of securing, gently opened, and the tall, scarlet-robed figure and pale, thin face of the man whose fate they had met to decide appeared to their astonished eyes. Richelieu, informed of the King’s return to Paris and his arrival at the Luxembourg, had formed a shrewd suspicion of what was in the wind, and had determined to be present at the interview between mother and son. Finding the doors of the ante-chamber locked, he had made his way to the cabinet along the gallery of the palace, and, on discovering the door of the cabinet also secured, had bethought himself of that which communicated with the chapel.

“All is lost; here he is!” exclaimed the King, looking as guilty as a timid schoolboy detected by a stern master in some breach of discipline. The Cardinal advanced with a smiling face. “I will wager,” said he, “that their Majesties were speaking of me.” And then, turning to the Queen-Mother, he added: “Confess it, Madame.” “We were,” replied Marie. And then, beside herself with passion at the Minister’s audacity, she broke forth into a torrent of accusations and reproaches, charging him, amongst other things, with plotting to marry his niece to the Comte de Soissons and set him upon the throne in place of the King. The Cardinal appeared to quail before the tempest; he fell on his knees and protested his innocence; he wept; he was in despair. But this pretence of humility, instead of disarming the wrath of the Queen-Mother, served only to inflame it. “It is for you,” she cried, turning to the King, “to decide whether you intend to prefer a valet to your mother.” “It is more natural,” interposed Richelieu, “that it is I who should be sacrificed.” And he demanded pardon and permission to retire. The King remained silent; Marie overwhelmed him with a fresh storm of reproaches, and he quitted the room, convinced that his power was at an end.

Louis XIII, dumbfounded by the violent scene of which he had been a witness, informed his mother that he was quite unable to come to a decision that day, and quitted the Luxembourg.

On the following morning the King signed a despatch which his mother had extracted from him which gave the sole command of the army of Italy to Louis de Marillac and recalled Schomberg and La Force, who were adherents of the Cardinal. Then he departed for Versailles, without again seeing the Queen-Mother, but the Keeper of the Seals, Michel de Marillac, whom Marie had designated as Prime Minister in place of Richelieu, had orders to follow him.

This order appeared decisive; all the Court believed that the Cardinal had fallen. A crowd of courtiers invaded the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother paraded her triumph and received their felicitations, without deigning to inconvenience herself by following the King to Versailles, as some of the more prudent of her friends urged her to do. She flattered herself that she held the place of Catherine de’ Medici; but she had none of Catherine’s finesse and intelligence; Catherine, in similar circumstances, would not have allowed the King out of her sight for a moment.

Anne of Austria, Monsieur, the Spanish Ambassador, the grandees were transported with joy; and couriers started to carry the good news to Madrid, Vienna, Brussels, and Turin. It was reported that the hated Cardinal was busy making his preparations for departure; that he intended to retire to the government of Le Havre, and that his mules had been seen defiling along the Pontoise road.

It would appear, in fact, that Richelieu, believing himself ruined, had for a moment contemplated taking refuge at Le Havre, but that two of his friends who had remained faithful to his fortunes, ChÂteauneuf and the PrÉsident Le Jay, had strongly opposed this resolution and persuaded him to remain in Paris. Anyway, he did so, and in the course of the afternoon he received a message from the First Equerry, Saint-Simon, bidding him come with all speed to Versailles.

Saint-Simon and the Cardinal de la Valette, who had followed the King, had pleaded the cause of Richelieu; but it is probable that “reasons of State” had pleaded still more eloquently for him. For Louis, with all his faults, did not, as we know, lack intelligence; and now that the decision which for weeks he had postponed had to be made, he recognised that the Cardinal’s dismissal would mean his own reduction to impotence, disorder, corruption, and intrigue at home and the triumph of the enemies of France abroad. His hesitation was at an end, and he authorised Saint-Simon to send for Richelieu.

The Cardinal came; he threw himself at the feet of the King, who raised him up and praised the zeal and fidelity which he had shown in his service. He knelt again and offered to retire, so as not to be a subject of discord between mother and son. Louis declined to accept his resignation, and then gave orders that they should be left alone together, and proceeded to discuss with the Cardinal the measures to be adopted against the cabal. It was decided that Michel de Marillac should be deprived of the Seals and banished the Court, and that another despatch should be sent to the Army of Italy, cancelling the one which was already on its way and ordering Schomberg to have the MarÉchal de Marillac arrested and sent a prisoner to France. And so, while the Queen-Mother was triumphing at the Luxembourg, Richelieu triumphed at Versailles. That day—November 11, 1630—has remained famous in history as “The Day of Dupes.”

“The Day of Dupes”! This name has been attributed to Bassompierre, and no one was better able to appreciate its justice, since, whatever he may say to the contrary—and he would fain have us believe that he was only the innocent victim of circumstances—the marshal was undoubtedly one of these dupes. But let us listen to his explanations.

He begins by denying most solemnly that before November 10 he had any knowledge that the Queen-Mother and Richelieu were at variance, except what he had gathered from “scraps of information,” and that he had no idea until some time afterwards that Marie had actually demanded from the King the disgrace of the Cardinal. He accompanied Louis to the Luxembourg on the morning of the 10th, as we have mentioned, but he assures us neither the King nor the Cardinal—whom he saw that evening—said a word to him about the stormy scene in the Queen-Mother’s cabinet, and that the matter was kept a profound secret between all the parties concerned.

“This quarrel,” says he, “was kept so secret on all sides that no one knew anything about it or suspected it.”

He then goes on to relate how on the evening of the 10th he accompanied the King to the apartments of Monsieur, from whom Louis had extracted a promise to be reconciled to the Cardinal.

Now, Bassompierre is generally regarded as a singularly reliable chronicler, but we must remember that his MÉmoires were written, or rather arranged and revised, during his imprisonment in the Bastille, and that there was always a by no means remote possibility that they might be impounded and placed under the eyes of Louis XIII and Richelieu. It was therefore manifestly to his interest to make out as good a case for himself as he could, and to pose as the victim of unfounded suspicions. When he declares that on the evening of the 10th he had no suspicion of what had taken place at the Luxembourg, and that he was positive that the Princesse de Conti knew nothing about it, he is probably speaking the truth. For it was not until the following morning that Louis XIII signed the despatch appointing the MarÉchal de Marillac to the command of the army of Italy, and until the King had taken what appeared to her a decisive step against Richelieu, the Queen-Mother may well have refrained from speaking of the matter to anyone, even to so close a friend and confidante as the Princesse de Conti. But when he asks us to believe that until the afternoon of the 11th, by which time the affair must have been already known to half the Court, and, by his own admission, was known to Monsieur’s favourite Puylaurens and to the Duc de Longueville, both he and his wife were still in ignorance, and that when the Cardinal said to him: “You will no longer take any account of a disgraced man like myself,” he really believed that he was referring to

his differences with Monsieur, we must entirely decline to do so.

On the morning of the 14th, the Spanish merchant Alphonso Lopez,[136] who was one of Richelieu’s secret agents, came to visit Bassompierre and “told him that he would do well to go to Versailles to see the King and the Cardinal.” The marshal, however, learning that the new Keeper of the Seals, ChÂteauneuf, with whom he was on very friendly terms, was coming to Paris that day to pay his respects to the two Queens, thought it advisable to defer his visit to the morrow, and, meanwhile, to go and offer his compliments to ChÂteauneuf on his appointment and ascertain from him what reception he was likely to receive.

On the 18th Bassompierre went to Saint-Germain, where the King “gave him the worst reception in the world.” He returned two days later, and was again received in the most frigid manner. He decided to remain there, in the hope that his Majesty might relent, and stayed for three weeks, during which the King never spoke to him, except to give him the password. The two Queens were also in a sort of semi-disgrace, for though Louis treated them with every courtesy, in public it was only on very rare occasions that he entered their private apartments. Beringhen and Jaquinot, two of the King’s first valets de chambre, who had been mixed up in secret intrigues against Richelieu, were banished the Court, but for the present no further steps were taken against the Cardinal’s more prominent enemies. On the other hand, Montmorency and Toiras were created marshals of France, in order to secure them; and, to keep Monsieur quiet, the Cardinal bought the good offices of his two favourites, Puylaurens and Le Coigneux, the former by the promise that he should be created a duke, and the latter by the charge of PrÉsident au mortier in the Parlement and the present of a large sum of money.

Meanwhile, efforts were made to persuade the Queen-Mother to be reconciled to the Cardinal, and Louis XIII sent PÈre Suffren and the Nuncio Bagni to Marie to offer never to oblige her to restore the relatives of Richelieu to their posts in her Household, provided she would consent to resume her place in the Council. This she refused to do, so long as the Cardinal sat there.

With the New Year intrigues began again. The PrÉsident Le Coigneux, under the impression that the new Keeper of the Seals, ChÂteauneuf, was working to ruin him, persuaded Monsieur to break with the Cardinal and quit the Court. On the morning of January 30, Gaston went to Richelieu’s hotel, informed the Cardinal, in a threatening tone, that he renounced his friendship, since he had failed in all the promises which he had made him; then, refusing to listen to any explanation, he added that he was retiring to his appanage and that, “if he were molested, he should defend himself very well.” And, the same day, he left Paris for OrlÉans.

On learning of the abrupt departure of Monsieur, Bassompierre went to the Cardinal for his orders, as the King was still at Saint-Germain, when Richelieu told him that he had sent in all haste to acquaint his Majesty with what had happened and to counsel his immediate return to Paris. Louis XIII arrived that same evening and alighted at the Cardinal’s hotel, where Bassompierre was awaiting him. To his surprise, the King greeted him most cordially, presented him with a wild boar which he had killed that day, and, after visiting the Cardinal, invited Bassompierre to enter his coach and accompany him to the Louvre.

On the way Louis informed the marshal that “he was going to scold the Queen his mother for having persuaded his brother to leave the Court.” Bassompierre answered that, if the Queen-Mother had done so, she would be much to blame, but he should be greatly surprised if she had counselled such a thing. To which the King rejoined that he was positive she had, “on account of the hatred which she entertained for the Cardinal.”

A few days later Louis XIII announced his intention of spending the Carnival at CompiÈgne, whither the two Queens decided to follow him, for Marie cherished the illusion that, with the aid of her daughter-in-law, she might yet succeed in undermining the power of the Cardinal, and she was determined not to repeat the fault she had committed on the Day of Dupes.

On February 16, the day before the Court set out for CompiÈgne, Bassompierre, who had been given permission to remain in Paris, went to take leave of their Majesties. The King received him very graciously and promised him a gratification to compensate him for the heavy expenses which he had incurred during his embassy to Switzerland. Afterwards the marshal went to visit the Princesse de Conti, who was to accompany the Court to CompiÈgne. Little did he imagine as he bade his wife farewell that they were never to meet again!

In the afternoon of Sunday, February 23, as Bassompierre, who had been dining with the MarÉchal de CrÉquy, was on his way to the Place-Royale to visit his brother-in-law Saint-Luc, his coach had to pull up, owing to the road being blocked by a waggon on which was a sumptuous four-poster bed. He sent one of his servants to inquire to whom the bed belonged, and was told that it was the property of the AbbÉ de Foix, a meddlesome ecclesiastic, who had been concerned somewhat prominently in the recent intrigues against Richelieu, and that it was on its way to the Bastille, whither its owner had been conveyed a prisoner that morning. From the fact that Foix had been arrested Bassompierre inferred that the Cardinal had resumed the offensive against his enemies; and this surmise proved to be only too correct.

That evening, as Bassompierre was about to set out for the house of his friend Saint-GÉran, to witness a play, which was to be followed by a ball, he received a message from d’Épernon begging him to come to him at once. On his arrival, the duke informed him that the King and Court had quitted CompiÈgne that morning for Senlis, leaving the Queen-Mother under arrest at the chÂteau; that the Princesse de Conti had been exiled to her brother’s estate at Eu, by a lettre de cachet; that Vautier, the Queen-Mother’s first physician, had been arrested and conveyed to Senlis, and, finally, that he had learned on good authority that it had been proposed to arrest Bassompierre, CrÉquy, and himself. He added that no resolution had as yet been taken against CrÉquy or himself, but it had been decided to arrest Bassompierre when the King returned to Paris on the Tuesday, and that he had sent for him to warn him of his danger.

Bassompierre asked d’Épernon what he advised him to do, and what he proposed to do himself. The old noble replied that, if he were only fifty years old—the age of the marshal—he would not remain in Paris a single hour, and would make for some place of safety, from which he would be afterwards able to make his peace; but that, since he was nearly eighty and had no desire to play the courtier any longer at his age, he should employ all the influence he possessed to disarm the resentment of the King and the Cardinal, at least so far as to obtain permission to retire to his government and spend the rest of his days there in peace. With Bassompierre, however, the case was different. He was still comparatively young, and could afford to wait until Fortune smiled again; and he therefore advised him to leave France at once and offered him the loan of 50,000 Écus to enable him to live a couple of years abroad in a style befitting his rank, which he could repay him when his exile was at an end.

He concluded by declaring that, instead of taking to flight, it was his intention to go on the morrow to Senlis to present himself to the King, in order to justify himself, if he were accused, or to go to prison, if he were suspected, or even to die, if his ill fortune or the fury of his enemies went to that extremity.

When he had finished speaking, d’Épernon embraced him, with tears in his eyes, and said: “I know not what will happen to you, and I pray God with all my heart that it may be nothing but good; but I have never known a gentleman better born than you, nor who better deserved all good fortune. You have enjoyed it up to the present. May God preserve it for you! And, although I fear the resolution which you have taken, nevertheless, after having heard and considered your reasons, I approve of it and counsel you to follow it.”

The marshal and d’Épernon then proceeded to Saint-GÉran’s house, where they found CrÉquy, whom the duke informed of the warning which had reached him and of what Bassompierre intended to do. CrÉquy expressed his approval of his resolution, and said that, for his part, he should do what he could to avert the storm, but that he should not run away from it. After the ball was over, they all three went to sup at Madame de Choisy’s house, where they were presently joined by the Duc de Chevreuse, who did not appear to be much affected by the exile of his sister, the Princesse de Conti, and was as gay as usual. As they were leaving, the Comte du Plessis-Praslin, who had been sent by the King to convey to Chevreuse an official notification of his sister’s disgrace, arrived, and informed the duke that the princess had been exiled, not from any hostility which his Majesty entertained towards the House of Guise, but “for the good of his service.”

On the following morning Bassompierre rose before daybreak, and, foreseeing that, if he were arrested his house would be searched, burned “more than six thousand love-letters” which he had received from various fair ladies during his long career of gallantry, “these being the only papers I possessed,” says he, “which might be able to injure anyone a little.” This task accomplished, he set out for Senlis, in company with the Cardinal de la Valette, the Comte de Soissons, the Duc de Bouillon and the Comte de Gramont. As they were on the point of starting, Soissons warned Bassompierre that he had positive information that it was intended to arrest him, and advised him to make his escape, which he offered to facilitate. The marshal thanked him, but declined, declaring that, “as he had nothing sinister on his conscience, he feared nothing,” and that he proposed to have the honour of accompanying Monsieur le Comte to Senlis.

The next morning the anticipated blow fell: