It might be supposed that if, in these circumstances, Bassompierre had little to hope for, he had little to fear. Such, however, was not the case. Some notes written by him in the margin of a history of the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII, composed by the Historiographer Royal, Scipion Dupleix, the proofs of which are said to have been corrected by Richelieu himself, were published under his name, but entirely without his authority, by a monk named Père Renaud, the confessor of his fellow-prisoner the Abbé de Foix, to whom he had lent the copy containing them. The marshal’s criticisms were probably pretty stringent, but those which appeared in print were a great deal more so, and the work aroused a considerable sensation. Dupleix complained to the Cardinal, and, says Bassompierre, “they did not fail to report the matter to the King and to tell him that it appeared evident from these memoirs that I entertained an aversion to his person and State.” About the same time, a soldier of the Light Cavalry named Valbois was arrested and brought to the Bastille, charged with having recited a sonnet against the Cardinal, beginning, ‘_Mettre Bassompierre en prison_;’ and the marshal was warned by his friends outside to destroy all his papers which might be capable of injuring him, as it was intended to seize them, with a view to bringing him to trial. “I confess,” writes Bassompierre, “that this last warning, which followed so many unfortunate incidents, was almost sufficient to destroy my reason. It was the 9th of October [1637] that I received it. I passed six nights without closing an eye, and in an agony which was worse to me than death.” Finally, however, Valbois, after being interrogated several times, probably with the object of ascertaining whether Bassompierre had had anything to do with the composition of the objectionable sonnet, was set at liberty, and, as no action was taken against him, the marshal’s mind became calmer. Nevertheless, he appears to have lived in constant apprehension lest his papers should be impounded; and this no doubt accounts for the fact that, in his _Mémoires_, the composition of which were now his chief occupation, he exercises a rigorous discretion in his comments on current events, although he was kept informed by his friends of everything that was happening in the world outside. “I shall say nothing,” he writes naïvely, as though to shelter himself from all reproach, “of the quarrel between the King and the Queen ... of the punishment of the nuns of the Val-de-Grâce ... of the dismissal of the King’s confessor, Père Caussin ... nor, finally, of the entry of the Chancellor into the Val-de-Grâce, where he caused the Queen’s cabinets and caskets to be broken open, in order to seize the papers which she had placed in them.”