A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 5Guizot, François
History
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 5
Guizot, François
France -- History
What had become of the most guilty, if not the most dangerous, of all the
accomplices? Monsieur, “the king’s only (unique) brother,” as Madame de
Motteville calls him, had come as far as Moulins, and had sent to ask the
grand equerry to appoint a place of meeting, when he heard of his
accomplice’s arrest, and, before long, that of the Duke of Bouillon.
Frightened to death as he was, he saw that treachery was safer than
flight, and, just as the king had joined the all but dying cardinal at
Tarascon, there arrived an emissary from the Duke of Orleans bringing
letters from him. He assured the king of his fidelity; he entreated
Chavigny, the minister’s confidant, to give him “means of seeing his
Eminence before he saw the king, in which case all would go well.” He
appealed to the cardinal’s generosity, begging him to keep his letter as
an eternal reproach, if he were not thenceforth the most faithful and
devoted of his friends.
Abbe de La Riviere, who was charged to implore pardon for his master,
was worthy of such a commission: he confessed everything, he signed
everything, though he “all but died of terror,” and, at the cardinal’s
demand, he soon brought all those poltrooneries written out in the Duke
of Orleans’ own hand. The prince was all but obliged to appear at the
trial and deliver up his accomplices in the face of the whole world.
The respect, however, of Chancellor Seguier for his rank spared him this
crowning disgrace. The king’s orders to his brother, after being
submitted to the cardinal, bore this note in the minister’s hand:
“Monsieur will have in his place of exile twelve thousand crowns a month,
the same sum that the King of Spain had promised to give him.”
“Paralysis of the arm did not prevent the head from acting;” the dying
cardinal had dictated to the king, stretched on a couch at his side, in a
chamber of his house at Monfrin, near Tarascon, those last commands which
completed the dishonor of the Duke of Orleans and the ruin of the
favorite. Louis XIII. slowly took the road back to Fontainebleau in the
cardinal’s litter, which the latter had lent him. The prisoners were
left in the minister’s keeping, who ordered them before long to Lyons,
whither he was himself removed. The grand equerry coming from
Montpellier, M. de Thou from Tarascon, in a boat towed by that of the
cardinal, and the Duke of Bouillon from Pignerol, were all three lodged
in the castle of Pierre-Encise. Their examination was put off until the
arrival of such magistrates “as should be capable of philosophizing and
perpetually thinking of the means they must use for arriving at their
ends.” That was useless, inasmuch as the grand equerry “never ceased to
say quite openly that he had done nothing to which the king had not
consented.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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