The King’s illness disinclined him to linger in the south, either for the conquest of Roussillon or for the trial of traitors. On the very day of his favourite’s arrest he left Narbonne for Fontainebleau, and stopped at Tarascon for an interview with the Cardinal. Both were so ill that Louis was carried on a bed into his Minister’s room, and there, side by side, the rulers of France, neither of whom had a year to live, discussed the Spanish treaty and its authors. Louis gave them up, without conditions, to the vengeance of Richelieu. He, assured of the King’s eternal faith and affection, forgot bodily pain in mental triumph, and was ready to take up, with all his old energy, the full regal power and authority with which he found himself suddenly invested. This extended not only to the punishment of State criminals, but to the Spanish campaign and the whole government of the south. It seems that Bouillon and Cinq-Mars had a legal loophole of escape. They appeared in the actual treaty only as “deux seigneurs de qualité,” their names, with that of Sedan, being added in a secret memorandum; Monsieur and His Catholic Majesty of Spain were the only two persons openly mentioned. The fate of his fellow-conspirators therefore depended largely on Monsieur; and they, knowing this, may well have despaired. He was at Blois, “faisant le malade,” when the news of the arrest of Cinq-Mars reached him. As a first precaution, he burned the original treaty. Then, finding that all was known, he sent the Abbé de la Rivière to Richelieu with letters of confession and grovelling entreaties for pardon. Richelieu told the messenger that his master deserved death, and might think himself fortunate if he escaped with confiscation and banishment. He had no longer the saving quality of being heir to the throne of France. He was terribly frightened. The Cardinal, with great show of severity, insisted that he should renounce for ever all “charges and administrations” in the kingdom, and should retire for the present, on a pension, to Annecy in Savoy, after being confronted at Lyons with his captive confederates. This trial the King spared him; but he had to save himself by signing a declaration that Messieurs de Bouillon and de Cinq-Mars were in fact the two “seigneurs de qualité” to whom the Spanish treaty referred.