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.