Père Suffren, the Maréchal d’Estrées--formerly known as Marquis de Coenores--and a Secretary of State, M. de la Ville-aux-Clercs, were left behind with the King’s apologies and farewells to his mother, whom he never saw again. They were also entrusted with a letter, begging Her Majesty to retire to Moulins, where she might live in all honour and liberty as governor of the Bourbonnais; it being understood that in her present mind she was no longer welcome at Court. This very unpleasant news was broken to Marie before she left her bed, not by the appointed messengers, but by Queen Anne, her daughter-in-law, who paid her a hurried visit before following the King, and parted from her with embraces and tears. “Both,” says Madame de Motteville, “were deeply moved at finding themselves the victims of the Cardinal de Richelieu, their common enemy. It was the last time they saw each other.” As to Moulins, Marie would have none of it. She could not openly refuse to obey the King, but her excuses dragged on from day to day: bad roads and wintry weather; an epidemic in the Bourbonnais; the ruinous state of the Château de Moulins; a severe cold which kept her in her room. All the spring royal messengers were galloping between Compiègne and Paris. Sometimes they carried persuasion, sometimes threats. If the Queen-mother disliked the Bourbonnais, would she accept her old abode of Angers, with the government of Anjou? Let her remember that no law in Holy Scripture obliged a son to live always with his mother when of age to govern himself, whereas we are enjoined in divers places to obey the King, as God’s lieutenant on earth. And many more arguments; but in short, her disobedience was insupportable, and would in the end force the King to treat her more rigorously. It appeared that of her own free will she would never leave Compiègne. In spite of the great courtesy shown her by M. d’Estrées, in command of the guard--every morning he came to her for the pass-word, and every night offered her the keys of the town--she treated herself as a prisoner. As the season advanced, though free of all the country round, she never went beyond the castle walls, hoping thus, says Aubery, to excite general hatred against the Cardinal. In the meanwhile her friends disappeared one by one. Her physician, Vautier, was flung into the Bastille; the same fate befell the unlucky Bassompierre. The Duc de Guise, intriguing for Monsieur, his stepson-in-law, in his government of Provence, was forced to fly to Italy, a lifelong exile as it proved. The Princesse de Conti, the Duchesse d’Elbeuf (Henriette de Vendôme), the Duchesse de Roannez, the Maréchale d’Ornano, and other great ladies, were ordered to retire to their country houses; and the brilliant Princesse de Conti, sister of Guise, the Queen-mother’s constant friend, adored by Bassompierre, to whom they say she was secretly married, died at Eu of a broken heart on the last day of April.