The end was not yet. The doctors advised a move from the marshes and stagnant lakes of Narbonne to the healthier air of Provence and the Rhône. Any ordinary conveyance was impossible for the Cardinal’s pain-racked body. He travelled in his bed, carried by eighteen men in an immense litter hung with crimson and gold. So large, we are told, was the “machine,” that gateways had to be widened, doors and windows taken out, walls pulled down, at the many stopping-places on His Eminence’s journey. He was overtaken by bad news: the Maréchal de Guiche had been defeated by the Spaniards near Cambray, and for a few days there was great alarm in the north of France, with new outcries against the Cardinal; his enemies were even mad enough to accuse him of having arranged the defeat in order to prove himself still necessary to France. If this absurd report reached him, his already troubled mind was soothed by a letter from the King, brought to him at Arles by M. de Chavigny: “Je finiroy en vous asseurant que quelque faux bruit qu’on fasse courre je vous ayme plus que jamais et qu’il y a trop longtemps que nous sommes ensemble pour nous jamais séparer ce que je veux bien que tout le monde sache.” Richelieu’s reply to that letter was to send the King, by the hand of Chavigny, a copy or rough sketch of his brother’s secret treaty with Spain. By what means that copy reached him has been one of the secrets of history. Among many guesses, Michelet favours the story that Queen Anne, aware of the treaty, took this means of making her peace with the Cardinal. But it seems more likely, on the whole, that Richelieu’s own spies at the Court of Madrid had made the discovery. In any case it meant for him a final triumph. At first the King was irresolute. Ill from the heat, he had returned to Narbonne from the camp at Perpignan, leaving the siege to his officers. Though he knew Cinq-Mars to be a traitor, he did not at once arrest him, half hoping, perhaps, that the “pauvre diable” might save his life by escaping over the frontier. Fontrailles had already done so, but Cinq-Mars, proud, foolhardy, confident in his master’s affection, followed him to Narbonne. Urgent letters to the King from the Cardinal decided his fate. When too late he hid himself in a house at Narbonne; the mistress had pity on his curly head, but her hard-hearted husband denounced him; the royal guards seized him and conveyed him to the castle of Montpellier. De Thou, the least guilty of all and the first to be taken, was sent to Tarascon, where Richelieu had already arrived. The Duc de Bouillon, arrested at Casale, was brought back to France and imprisoned at Lyons in the old castle of Pierre-Encise, which in those days still dominated the city.