On September 5, 1622--Richelieu’s thirty-seventh birthday--the faithful Sébastien Bouthillier sang his _Nunc Dimittis_. Writing from Rome to his brother, he said: “It seems to me that I now have nothing more to desire in this world, since M. de Luçon is Cardinal.... Indeed, God must destine him for the continuing of the great works in which he has already been employed, since He has raised him to this deserved dignity in spite of the most powerful impediments.” The news arrived in France when Louis XIII. was at Avignon, his troops being engaged in that unlucky siege of Montpellier which closed his second campaign against the Protestants. A letter was immediately sent to the Queen-mother, who had spent the summer at Pougues-les-Eaux and was on her way to Lyons with her favourite Bishop in attendance. It reached her at a village on the road called La Pacaudière; there, she herself announced the news to Richelieu. From Lyons he started for Avignon, travelling down the Rhône, to thank the King in person. Three months later, the whole Court being at Lyons, his cardinal’s biretta was presented to him by His Majesty with solemn ceremony at the Archbishop’s palace. The first thing he did with the red cap so long desired was to lay it at the feet of Marie de Médicis. It would always remind him, he said, that he had vowed to shed his blood in her service. And now--if one may venture on a quotation from M. Hanotaux’ vivid pages--“he moves to his right place, among the great and nobly born. His dignity is but the finishing touch. He is thirty-seven years old; thin, slender, hair and beard black, eye clear and piercing, he still has beauty, if beauty is compatible with an evident, intimidating superiority. He has the colourless complexion of a man worn by watching and suffering, gnawed by his own thoughts. It may with truth be said of him that the blade wears out the sheath; and indeed, long, slight and flexible, he is like a sword. He places the cardinal’s red cap on his triangular head. He wraps himself in flowing folds of purple. Thus, all red, he enters history, realising the most complete and powerful image of a ‘cardinal’ that imagination and art have ever dreamed.” After this striking picture, it is interesting to read the impressions of Michelet, whose prejudices, historical and religious, hardly permitted him to be fair to Richelieu’s genius, not to mention his character. Philippe de Champagne’s well-known portrait, painted at a much later date than 1622, but breathing all the stateliness, the sense of innate power, which M. Hanotaux so finely suggests, is the text for Michelet’s famous discourse. Philippe’s art is so true and so penetrating, he says, that it answers alike to historical knowledge and to popular impressions.