Who will govern the King and France?--The pretenders to the royal favour--Position of Bassompierre--The Cardinal de Retz and Schomberg join forces and secure for their ally De Vic the office of Keeper of the Seals--They propose to remove Bassompierre from the path of their ambition by separating him from the King--Bassompierre is offered the lieutenancy-general of Guienne and subsequently the government of Béarn, but declines both offices--He inflicts a sharp reverse upon Retz and Schomberg--Condé joins the Court--His designs--The rival parties: the party of the Ministers and the party of the marshals--_Monsieur le Prince_ decides to ally himself with that of the Ministers--Mortifying rebuff administered by the King to the Ministers at the instance of Bassompierre--Failure of an attempt of the Ministers to injure Bassompierre and Créquy with Louis XIII--Arrival of the King in Paris--Affectionate meeting between him and his mother--Accident to the Queen. Luynes dead, who would govern the King and France? Such was the question which everyone was asking himself, for that Louis XIII, so jealous of his royal authority, yet too indolent to exercise it himself, would require someone to lean on was a foregone conclusion. There were many pretenders. There was Marie de’ Medici, who, now that the man who had estranged her son from her was no more, might hope to recover in time much of the influence she had once exercised over the King. And Marie’s triumph would mean that of Richelieu, who had now acquired so great an ascendancy over her that scandal asserted that he was her lover. There was the greedy and ambitious Condé, who had learned prudence from adversity, but was in other respects but little changed. Luynes, in the last months of his “reign,” had separated Condé from the King, and tricked Richelieu out of the cardinal’s hat which had been the secret condition of the prelate’s reconciliation with the favourite, addressing a formal demand for it to Gregory XV, accompanied by a private request to his Holiness not to accord it. But now the lists were again open to them. Then there were the Ministers: the Cardinal de Retz, whom Luynes had made the nominal chief of the Council, and his ally Schomberg, Superintendent of Finance; the Chancellor Brulart de Sillery and his son Puisieux, the Minister for Foreign Affairs; and old Jeannin. And all these persons felt that they might have to reckon seriously with Bassompierre, in whose society the King undoubtedly took more pleasure than in that of any of them, and whom, they knew, the late Constable had regarded as his only dangerous rival.