Armand de Richelieu was such a bishop; and the horror of these early experiences may partly explain the Minister’s terrible severity, many years later, towards Urbain Grandier, the unworthy priest who was accused of bewitching the Ursuline nuns of Loudun. During his residence, from 1609, with intervals, to 1614, Richelieu threw all his young strength into the labour of civilising and christianising Bas-Poitou. Travelling into every corner of the province, he preached, confirmed, scolded, advised, converted. Great and small had to listen to his admonitions. His passion for order and discipline brought new and amazing experiences to a parish clergy which had lived as it listed, idle, drunken, immoral, in the happy delusion that no one would ever interfere. Richelieu interfered to some purpose. One of his chief objects was to get the appointment of the curés into his own hands. Many livings--if they could be called so--were in the gift of private persons, subject to an episcopal consent which was never refused: others belonged to abbeys, and this often meant, in the end, the patronage of some prince or noble to whom the monastic revenues were paid. For instance, a hundred benefices in the diocese of Luçon alone, and many more elsewhere, belonged to the great Benedictine abbey of Saint-Michel-en-l’Ermitage, of which the Comte de Soissons, the King’s cousin, was the titular abbot. There is little to be said in that prince’s favour; he was a man of “mœurs infâmes”; but Richelieu, in later years his son’s bitter and powerful enemy, had occasion to write M. le Comte a quite grovelling letter of thanks in 1609. He had made the Bishop his “vicar” with regard to all the clergy in the diocese of Luçon who depended on the Abbey of Saint-Michel. Richelieu dealt with private patrons in a more plain-spoken way. “One called André” having been preferred to a benefice by a great lady, Madame de Sainte-Croix, the Bishop flatly declined to allow so incapable a man “to lead a flock dear to Jesus Christ.” Yet, with all his firmness, he was kind. If the patroness would set a good example to the diocese by placing her living among those to which, after careful examination, the Bishop undertook to appoint the best men, he was willing that André should try his powers with the rest. So strong, so wise and religious, are the arguments of the letter, that its result is not surprising. Madame de Sainte-Croix sent her presentation to the Bishop _en blanc_. Nobody knows what became of the unlucky André.