Thus setting himself to terrorise the Queen-mother and her friends, Luynes did not forget the Bishop of Luçon. On Wednesday in Holy Week, 1618, Richelieu received a letter from the King full of vague accusations of “goings and comings and secret proceedings which caused umbrage and suspicion, affecting the King’s service and the tranquillity of his subjects,” ordering him to retire immediately to Avignon, there to remain till further commands. “I was not surprised at receiving this despatch,” he says in his _Memoirs_, “having always expected unjust, barbarous and unreasonable treatment from the cowards who governed us.... But as I was accused of acting against His Majesty’s service, I humbly begged him to send some dispassionate person to examine the facts on the spot, being sure that by such means His Majesty would be convinced of my innocence.” It does not appear indeed that Richelieu had been much concerned, if at all, in the recent intrigues between Blois and Paris. But Luynes was afraid of him; and he was forced to depart instantly for that exile which was the saddest experience of his younger life--proving once more the old truth that the night is darkest before the dawn. He left Luçon on Good Friday, for the royal commands admitted of no delay, and started on the long, difficult, cross-country journey from Poitou to the Venaissin. In wind-swept Avignon, still a half-Italian city belonging to the Pope, he hired a house and settled himself to endure the cruel idleness of banishment. He was not alone. His brother and brother-in-law, M. de Richelieu and M. du Pont-de-Courlay, shared his exile, for they too were old adherents of the Queen-mother, and Luynes feared them all. He shut up his captive birds in the same cage--“a great consolation to us,” says the Bishop, “though it was not done for that end, but in order to keep us in sight together.” Once more he flung himself into hard study. He wrote or dictated a large collection of fragmentary notes, which took the form of a kind of apology or explanation of his political views and doings. He wrote a religious book, _L’Instruction du Chrétien_, planned long before. He seems to have led a solitary and studious life, seeing few people, writing few letters except to his diocese, meditating much and suffering much, for he was ill in body as in mind. And in the autumn the gloom of exile was deepened by severe family sorrows. The young Marquise de Richelieu, Marguerite Guiot des Charmeaux, whom her husband had been obliged to leave behind, died at Richelieu after the birth of her first child. The little boy, François Louis, only lived a few weeks, and was then laid in the vault at Braye with his mother and his ancestors. It was not long before Henry de Richelieu himself joined that company.