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.
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!