The Pope refused to issue bulls for the appointment of French bishops so long as the French Government held on its present course. Richelieu was prepared to do without them. The King refused to receive the Nuncio, or to recognize his authority. The Pope absolutely refused to confirm Richelieu’s own election as Abbot-General of the Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré, or to countenance his project of advanced reform in his own Order of Cluny. A private quarrel in Rome made matters worse; one of the French Ambassador’s gentlemen was killed, and the ambassador’s wrath irritated the Pope into forbidding any funeral honours to be paid in Rome to Richelieu’s lieutenant, the soldier-Cardinal de la Valette, who died at Rivoli in the midst of his Savoyard campaign of 1639. The quarrel was at last made up: for the French Church, as for the government, it was really a question of money, and both agreed to a compromise. Richelieu’s Finance Secretaries withdrew some part of their immense demands; the clergy, very unwillingly, granted the rest; Urban VIII. was appeased, and Mazarin became a Cardinal. If Richelieu opposed the Pope, the friend of the Hapsburgs, and asserted the liberty of the Gallican Church in such matters, for instance, as the annulling of Monsieur’s marriage, he was neither unorthodox, nor unfriendly to different forms of religious effort. The great charities of the seventeenth century grew and flourished under his shadow. The spirit of St. François de Sales lived on in the Order of the Visitation, devoted to the sick and the poor. Vincent de Paul, with his Mission of Lazarist Fathers and his Sisters of Charity, bringing light into dark places and helping the miserable, both in Paris and in the deserts of the country, was a familiar and beautiful figure through most of Richelieu’s reign. Monsieur Vincent’s great Mission work, the training of the younger clergy, also nobly carried on by the congregations of the Oratory, of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet and of Saint-Sulpice, had lain very near Richelieu’s own heart in his young days. The Cardinal extended his powerful protection to the teaching Orders, Jesuits, Ursulines, and others; and the reformed Benedictines of Saint-Maur, so famous for ecclesiastical and historical learning, owed their distinction largely to him. He did very much, indeed, towards the reform and discipline of the regular clergy, and with a longer life he might have removed many of the abuses which spoiled their religious ideal. But his chief and immediate object was to nationalize the Orders, and to bring them under the same authority with France as a whole.