Louis XIII. was, no doubt, affected by such language; for, scarcely had he arrived at Fontainebleau, whither he had been preceded by news of the end of the queen his mother, who had died at Cologne in exile and poverty, when he wrote to all the parliaments of his kingdom, to the governors of the provinces, and to the ambassadors at foreign courts, to give his own account of the arrest of the guilty and the part he himself had played in the matter. “The notable and visible change which had for the last year appeared in the conduct of Sieur de Cinq-Mars, our grand equerry, made us resolve, as soon as we perceived it, to carefully keep watch on his actions and his words, in order to fathom them and discover what could be the cause. To this end, we resolved to let him act and speak with us more freely than heretofore.” And in a letter written straight to the chancellor, the king exclaims in wrath, “It is true that having seen me sometimes dissatisfied with the cardinal, whether from the apprehension I felt lest he should hinder me from going to the siege of Perpignan, or induce me to leave it, for fear lest my health might suffer, or from any other like reason, the said Sieur de Cinq-Mars left nothing undone to chafe me against my said cousin, which I put up with so long as his evil offices were confined within the bounds of moderation. But when he went so far as to suggest to me that the cardinal must be got rid of, and offered to carry it out himself, I conceived a horror of his evil thoughts, and held them in detestation. Although I have only to say so for you to believe it, there is nobody who can deem but that it must have been so; for, otherwise, what motive would he have had for joining himself to Spain against me, if I had approved of what he desired?” The trial was a foregone conclusion; the king and his brother made common cause in order to overwhelm the accused, “an earnest of a peace which was not such as God announced with good will to man on Christmas day,” writes Madame de Motteville, “but such as may exist at court and amongst brothers of royal blood.” The cardinal did not think it necessary to wait for the sentence. He had arrived at his house at Lyons, in a sort of square chamber, covered with red damask, and borne on the shoulders of eighteen guards; there, stretched upon his couch, a table covered with papers beside him, he worked and chatted with whomsoever of his servants he had been pleased to have as his companion on the road. It was in the same equipage that he left Lyons to gain the Loire and return to Paris. On his passage, it was necessary to pull down lumps of wall and throw bridges over the fosses to make way for this vast litter and the indomitable man that lay dying within it.