“In place of liberating me,” writes the poor marshal, “they deprived me of that portion of my salary which had been paid me during the two preceding years, notwithstanding that I was a prisoner, amounting to one-third of what I had been accustomed to draw every year. This made me see plainly that it was intended to keep me eternally in the Bastille.” On February 25--the same day on which two years before Bassompierre had been sent to the Bastille--Châteauneuf, the Keeper of the Seals, who had foolishly allowed himself to be drawn by Madame de Chevreuse, with whom he was madly in love, into a fresh conspiracy against Richelieu, was arrested at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and conducted to the Château of Angoulême, where he remained in close confinement until the Cardinal’s death, ten years later. At the same time, the gates of the Bastille opened to admit his nephew, the Marquis de Leuville, and several other persons who had been concerned in the affair, including Bassompierre’s old friend, the Chevalier de Jars. The Cardinal attached great importance to the arrest of Jars, as he believed that he might be induced to reveal the part which Anne of Austria had played in the conspiracy. But the chevalier, if a somewhat feather-brained, was a brave and honourable, man, and, though he was kept in close confinement for nearly a year and subjected to repeated examinations by his Eminence’s myrmidons, he steadfastly refused to make the least admission that might incriminate the Queen or any of her friends. Finally, he was transferred to Troyes, and then brought to trial for high treason before a special commission, at the head of which was the notorious Laffemas, who was known as “the Cardinal’s executioner,” and made it his boast that he could condemn any man, if he had but two lines of his writing. Laffemas bullied and browbeat the prisoner and “did all the mean things that the base soul is capable of suggesting,”[141] but to no purpose, for he could wring nothing from him. Accordingly, the judges proceeded to pass sentence of death on Jars, who was in due course conducted to the scaffold, “where he made his appearance with a demeanour full of courage, smiling at his enemies and prepared to meet death without flinching.”[142] But it was only a grim farce after all, for Richelieu had nothing to gain by the removal of such small fry as the chevalier, and the only object of the trial had been to intimidate him into betraying his accomplices. And so, at the moment when the condemned man was about to lay his head on the block, Laffemas interrupted the proceedings by producing an order from the King which remitted the capital sentence and directed that the chevalier should be conducted back to the Bastille.