A day sufficed to change terror into enthusiasm. On August 5 representatives of all the trade guilds and syndicates were received by Louis XIII. in the great gallery of the Louvre, “and offered him their persons and their goods with so great gaiety and affection, that most of them embraced and kissed his knees.” Louis rose to the occasion and kissed them all, not excepting the chief of the cobblers, whose guild made the noble gift of 5,000 francs. The Parliament--not without grudging conditions--the municipality, the colleges, monasteries, and other bodies, poured money at the King’s feet: there was enough to pay and keep, for three months at least, twelve thousand foot and three thousand horse. In the meanwhile, the news that the enemy had taken Corbie on the Somme, thus drawing alarmingly near to Amiens, on the direct road to Paris, fanned the flame so fiercely that “tout le jeune bourgeois,” says Montglat, “à toute force, vouloit aller à la guerre.” Not many days later, the King and the Cardinal advanced to Amiens, and a strong army, commanded by Monsieur and the Comte de Soissons, held the enemy in effectual check along the banks of the Somme. By the middle of September, all the actual danger of invasion was past, though the Imperialists still held Corbie. John of Werth and his merry men, loaded with booty, had galloped back across the frontier of Artois. Corbie was not retaken till November, but the Cardinal Infant, his aunt’s successor as ruler of the Netherlands, with the other Spanish and Imperialist generals, discouraged by the advance of the French army, had already withdrawn from French territory; and it seemed, as the autumn advanced, as if the fortune of war was changing in Richelieu’s favour. The enemy was repulsed everywhere: in Burgundy, by Weimar, Condé, and the Cardinal de la Valette; on the Spanish frontier, where St. Jean de Luz was taken, but further advance was resisted by the old Duc d’Épernon and the Comte de Grammont, governors of Guyenne and of Béarn; on the Morbihan coast, where a Spanish force, disembarking near Vannes, attacked the Abbey of Prières. The sturdy monks defended themselves so gallantly that the country-side had time to rise against the invaders, who fled back in disorder to their ships. At this moment of danger, the two young men whom Richelieu had called to the command of the King’s armies were busily plotting his destruction. To them and their like the death of the Minister and the anarchy that must follow were not only desirable for their own ends, but the best medicines for the ills of France.