"Here I would willingly have remained quiet and tranquil, till the course of time brought some change. I neither sought to return to a court where the king was no longer sovereign, nor to cabal against the power of a minister upheld by the weakness of the monarch. All I required was to be left at peace in this asylum, where I could be free from the insult and degradation which had been offered me at the court of France. I felt that I was sufficiently upholding the rights and privileges which had been transmitted to me by my ancestors, and maintaining the general cause of the nobility of France, by submitting to a voluntary exile, rather than yield to the ambitious pretensions of a misproud minister; and nothing would have induced me to raise the standard of civil war, even though the king's own good was to be obtained thereby, if Richelieu had but been content to abstain from persecuting me in my retirement. Not the persuasions of the Dukes of Vendome and La Valette, nor the entreaties of my best friend the Duke of Bouillon, nor the promises and seductions of the house of Austria, would have had any effect, had I been left at peace: but no! never for a day has the cardinal ceased to use every measure in his power to drive me to revolt. The truth is this: he calculates upon the death of my cousin Louis, and upon seizing on the regency during the dauphin's minority. He knows that there is no one who could and would oppose him but myself. The Duke of Orleans is hated and despised throughout France--the house of Condé is bound to the cardinal by alliance. He knows that he could not for a moment stand against me, without the king's support and authority; and he has resolved to ruin me while that support still lasts. For this purpose, he at one time offers me the command of one of the armies, that I may return and fall into his power; he at another threatens to treat me as a rebel and a traitor. He now proposes to _me_, a prince of the blood royal of France, a marriage with his upstart niece; and then menaces me with confiscation and attainder; while at the same time my friends on every side press me to shake off what they call apathy--to give my banner to the wind, and, marching upon Paris, to deliver the country, the king, and myself, of this nightmare cardinal, who sits a foul incubus upon the bosom of the state, and troubles its repose with black and frightful dreams." As he went on, I could see that Monsieur le Comte worked himself up with his own words to no small pitch of wrath; calling to mind, one by one, the insults and injuries that the cardinal had heaped upon him, till all his slumbering anger woke up at once, and with a flashing eye, he added, "And so I will. By Heaven! I will hurl him from his usurped seat, and put an end to this tyranny, which has lasted too long." But very soon after, relapsing again into his irresolution, he asked, "What think you, Monsieur de l'Orme? Should I not be justified? Am I not called upon so to do?"