There was one drawback to the military prospects of Armand de Richelieu. The delicate, aguish boy had not grown into a strong youth. His keen spirit was now, as ever, a sword too sharp for its frail sheath. Hard study and lack of fresh air during his college days had had their likely effect on his weak constitution and slight frame. For his sake, his mother did not mourn over the family circumstances that forbade him, after all, to be a soldier. “Mon malade,” as she called him, was not of those who could sleep on open field or fell, in mud or mire, as soundly as within stone walls with curtains round his bed. For the family, it was a question of losing the revenues of the see of Luçon. Alphonse de Richelieu, its intended Bishop, at the age of nineteen or twenty, turned away in disgust from the worldly-wise arrangement, and decided to become a Carthusian monk. It may not be unfair to describe him as “dévot et bizarre”; but one seems to see in this singular resolution an outcome of the reaction against the dead and conscienceless state into which the sixteenth century had brought the French Church; the reaction which was already living and moving in such men as François de Sales, Vincent de Paul, Pierre de Bérulle, though leading them, as to their religious life, into reforming action rather than lonely contemplation. Armand’s choice was soon made. No doubt the change was to him inevitable. There could not be two young men more different than himself and Alphonse; yet he too had a conscience of his own, of the truly Latin kind which demands any and every sacrifice for the sake of the family. He is said to have written to his uncle, who, one may well believe, was sincerely sorry for him: “The will of God be done: I accept all, for the good of the Church and the glory of our name.” The latter aspiration, at least, was fulfilled. At seventeen, in the year 1602, the Marquis du Chillou laid down his sword and his title, left M. de Pluvinel’s Academy and returned to the University. A year or two later, there was no more eager student of philosophy and theology than the Abbé de Richelieu. There are merry stories of the time which suggest that he and his private tutor M. Mulot, afterwards his chaplain, were concerned in wild pranks, such as robbing gardens and orchards, which would have been impossible under the strict discipline of old Master Yon. There is a pretty legend which tells that the Cardinal, in his last days, sent for an old college gardener whose peaches he had stolen--the good man’s name was Rabelais, and he came from Chinon--and paid him a large sum of money as compensation for being both robbed and frightened: at that time, an unlucky wretch who was summoned before the Eminentissime went in very reasonable fear of his life.