This strange and clever being was a canon of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. His family, Langlois by name, had long been attached to the fortunes of the house of Richelieu, and his brother was the Cardinal’s own man of business. The Sieur de Fancan had had a wider experience in the employment of the Duc de Longueville and of the Comtesse de Soissons. He had done some diplomatic work, and had developed bold opinions of his own in matters of politics and religion, posing as “bon français” in opposition to Luynes and the Spanish ultra-Catholic trend of affairs. His Protestant leanings carried him far, according to the correspondence with Germany and England discovered after his death. For several years Fancan was high in Richelieu’s favour. Unknown, anonymous, brilliant, unscrupulous, he and one or two others made public opinion in France. His pamphlets or _libelles_, in their blue covers, were sold by hundreds on the bridges and in the book-shops of Paris. They attacked the Ministers of the moment in verse or prose full of ironical fury, personal violence and political wisdom, coarse, impudent and strong. Either in a direct or roundabout way they were addressed to the King. Sometimes France, on her dying bed, held converse with her ancient heroes; sometimes Henry the Great talked with the leaders of his time; sometimes unworthy favourites were gibbeted; sometimes the people cried to their sovereign in bitter complaint of religious tyranny and civil war, and boldly offered the counsel for which nobody asked them. The King, the Ministers, the nobles, the literary men, the citizens, all read these pamphlets, talked of them, and did not forget them. Louis was much influenced by them; they touched his conscience and sense of truth, if they deepened the gloom in which he followed his hounds in the Forest of Saint-Germain. In the days of the Brûlarts and their successor, the Marquis de la Vieuville, while the affairs of the kingdom were slipping from bad to worse, the pamphlets not only complained more loudly than ever, they advised more strongly than ever, and the King knew well that their advice was good, however unwilling he might be to take it. They told him that there was one man in France whose hand ought to be on the helm, a man who would serve his own country and his own King, not the interests of a foreign power; a man of high courage, prudence and incomparable dexterity, as wise as he was brilliant, ready, like a burning torch, to consume himself in giving light to the State. This man would be the saviour of France, renewing the great days of Henry. It was hardly necessary to name the Cardinal de Richelieu.