The brother was pardoned, but the wife had transgressed beyond forgiveness. The King, already violently irritated against the Queen by her coquetry with Buckingham, was exasperated beyond measure at the part which she was reported to have played in this miserable affair. His jealous and suspicious nature easily persuaded him that there was some intrigue between her and _Monsieur_, not perhaps to hasten his demise, but to marry whenever that event should take place; and such remained his settled conviction until the end of his life.[49] In the first transports of his wrath, he summoned his consort to appear before a special council, at which Richelieu and the Queen-Mother assisted. Instead of being accommodated with the _fauteuil_ due to her royalty, Anne suffered the indignity of having to sit upon a folding-seat, as though she had been a criminal, the while the King upbraided her with having conspired against his life, in order to have another husband. “The Queen,” writes Madame de Motteville, “to whom innocence gave strength, incensed by the cruelty of the accusation, spoke with firmness and a generous boldness, and told him, as I have heard from her own lips, that she had too little to gain by the change to blacken her soul for so small a profit. Then, with the imperiousness of a princess of her birth, she reproached the Queen-Mother with the persecutions which she and the Cardinal de Richelieu were inflicting upon her.” Anne’s boldness, and particularly the disdainful answer which she had given him, served only to exasperate the angry monarch still further, and he resolved to punish her by a public humiliation. Accordingly, an order was issued, signed by Louis and countersigned by the Cardinal, forbidding entry to the Queen’s apartments to all nobles and gentlemen other than those attached to her Household, unless they paid their respects to her Majesty in the King’s presence and entered and quitted her apartments in his suite. He also forbade the Queen to grant any private audience without informing the Queen-Mother or the Cardinal, and naming the person whom she proposed to receive and the object of the interview. Madame de Chevreuse remained to be dealt with, and for a time it looked as though matters were likely to go hardly with her. Her husband, however, who was in high favour with Louis XIII, intervened and persuaded the King to be content with her banishment from the Court, promising to be answerable for her future conduct. She accordingly retired to the duke’s château of Dampierre, near Rambouillet, where she was kept under close surveillance, all communication with the Queen being strictly forbidden her. She would appear, however, to have been so imprudent as to disobey this command; anyway, six months later she received orders to leave France. Her request that she might be permitted to retire to England was refused, and she was obliged to seek an asylum at Nancy, with her husband’s kinsman, Charles IV of Lorraine.