While continuing his _sourdes et déloyales pratiques_--no secret to Richelieu, who endured them with sphinx-like patience--Luynes did his best to let all men believe him on the best of terms with the Queen-mother’s chief counsellor. He suggested the union of their families by a marriage between his nephew, Antoine de Beauvoir du Roure, Seigneur de Combalet, and Richelieu’s niece, Marie Magdeleine Vignerot du Pont-de-Courlay. She was a very pretty girl of sixteen; he was a coarse, red-faced, awkward soldier. She was not a willing sacrifice; neither was her uncle particularly eager; he hesitated long indeed for several reasons, but the Queen-mother advised him, for fear of Luynes, to consent, and the marriage was celebrated in Paris in November, during the Court festivities that followed the triumphant return of Louis XIII. from his short campaign against the Protestants of Béarn. Madame de Combalet’s unwelcome husband did not annoy her long; he was killed at the siege of Montpellier in September 1622. The young widow, a girl of independent spirit, worthy of her mother’s family, at once resolved that she would not be sacrificed again. She made a vow--“un peu brusquement,” says Tallemant--that she would become a Carmelite nun.... “She dressed as modestly as a _dévote_ of fifty.... She wore a gown of woollen stuff, and never lifted her eyes. With all this she was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen-mother and never stirred from the Court. She was then in the full bloom of her beauty. This sort of thing lasted a long time.” It lasted till the supreme power of the Cardinal made his niece equal to the greatest ladies in France and a probable match for princes. But Madame de Combalet--better known as Madame d’Aiguillon--kept her vow so far as that she never married again. The campaign against the Protestants of Béarn, undertaken by Louis XIII. immediately after the battle of the Ponts-de-Cé, was successful in its object of enforcing the royal edict of 1617 and restoring Church property, now held by the Huguenots, to the use of the Catholic clergy. At the same time, Henry IV.’s independent little kingdom of Béarn was formally united to the kingdom of France. All this was done with much noise and little bloodshed. It amused the King immensely. One game for another, fighting was better than falconry. Through the darkening days he galloped back to Paris, and had the additional joy of arriving before he was expected.