Immediately after this catastrophe Charles Emmanuel of Savoy died of despair at the loss of his towns and provinces. His son, the husband of Madame Christine of France, was more alive to the wisdom of an alliance with Louis XIII. An obstacle was thus removed from the path of the peace negotiations, which went on in spite of active war all through the summer and the early autumn; the chief agents in them being Père Joseph, at the Diet of Ratisbon, and a young Italian diplomat in the service of the Pope, named Giulio Mazarini. When, late in October, the war ended with the retirement of the Austrians and Spaniards, the relief of Casale, and the restoration of Mantua to Duke Charles, it seemed as if Richelieu’s triumphs abroad and at home were signal and complete. And yet, at this very time, he was on the edge of destruction. CHAPTER VI 1630 Illness of Louis XIII.--“Le Grand Orage de la Cour”--The “Day of Dupes.” Louis XIII., always weak in health, suffered seriously from the pestilential air of that summer. In August he rejoined the Court at Lyons, where he fell ill of fever and dysentery, and the Cardinal, hurrying back from Savoy, found his royal master almost in extremity. By the end of September, after seven bleedings in one week, the case was given up as hopeless. Louis received the last Sacraments, the whole Court believed him dying, and a swift courier summoned Gaston d’Orléans from Paris. That “blind and frivolous instrument of the enemies of the State” became suddenly a personage of the very highest importance. Richelieu, as he watched his dying master, was probably the most deeply troubled man in all the distracted Court. “He saw,” writes M. Martin, “his power crumbling, his life threatened, his work, even dearer to him than life--his work, hardly sketched out, on the brink of destruction, his country falling back into the abyss from which he had raised her.” He was indeed in imminent danger. His enemies, the Queen-mother in chief, flattered themselves that his fate was at last in their hands. The King’s death was to be the signal for his arrest. In the meanwhile, Marie held counsel with her friends as to what should be done with him. All, according to tradition, held different opinions. Some condemned him to death, and among these, to his own undoing, was the Maréchal de Marillac. Some were for lifelong imprisonment; the mildest talked of perpetual exile. The story goes that Richelieu, the omniscient, always well served by spies and himself ready to play the part on occasion, listened to the debate through a chink hidden by tapestry. Further, that there came a day when each of his enemies met the fate he had recommended for the Cardinal.