A diocese, after all, is not a bad school for governing one’s fellow-creatures. Some of Richelieu’s biographers think that he deliberately took up the work of a resident bishop with the idea of gaining experience for the larger career on which his heart was set: some, that in his state of chronic poverty he found the provinces a more honourable abode than the capital. In any case, he threw himself with eager energy into work which was difficult enough; the province of Poitou, and especially Lower Poitou, being desolated and devoured by war and by taxes, torn to pieces by schism, unhealthy, dismal, neglected, its old traditions, both of Church and State, fallen into ruin and forgetfulness. And Luçon itself, with its fine old cathedral lifted proudly and sadly above the mouldy roofs of the _bourg_, neither town nor village, seemed to lie at the other end of the world, near upon the sea, beyond leagues of wide wet marsh scattered with miserable little farms and cottages and crossed by half-drained roads and stagnant canals, the few wretched peasants shivering with fever. The occasional visits of Jacques du Plessis de Richelieu, who had now been dead sixteen years, were Luçon’s latest experience of episcopal care. Certainly the diocese owed nothing to the Richelieu family, which had swallowed its revenues and let its cathedral tumble down; but with a touching faith in the future not unjustified, it offered a hearty welcome to young Armand de Richelieu. He entered his territory at Fontenay-le-Comte, a cheerful little town which prided itself, like the rest of Poitou, on having produced many great men. The Bishop was received here, not only by the inhabitants, but by a deputation from the Chapter of Luçon, and they harangued each other with various flattering remarks. But through the formalities of the time there pierces that clear decided meaning which is never absent from any utterance of Richelieu’s, even as a young man of three-and-twenty. His speeches were never written for him. There were anger and injury in the minds of the Luçon Chapter, and he knew it. “I am not happy enough,” he said, “to have all your hearts.” But now that he and they were to live together, things would be very different. They would learn to know him, and to wish him well. For his part, he was ready to forget the past, highly esteeming the law which the ancients called “amnistie d’oubliance.” Possibly there was a wry face here and there among the old canons at this touch of generosity, and it was not very long, in fact, before they began to quarrel with their new Bishop; but he had brought with him from Paris the fame of a preacher and a theologian, and the dull little town was _en fête_ on that saint’s day in December when Richelieu first said mass and preached in his own cathedral.