"I am very sorry," he wrote, under date of January 4, 1641, "to trouble you about the ill-tempers of M. Le Grand. I upbraided him with his heedlessness; he answered that for that matter he could not change, and that he should do no better than he had done. I said that, considering his obligations to me, he ought not to address me in that manner. He answered in his usual way; that he didn't want my kindness, that he could do very well without it, and that he would be quite as well content to be Cinq-Mars as M. Le Grand, but as for changing his ways and his life, he couldn't do it. And so, he continually nagging at me and I at him, we came as far as the court-yard, where I said to him that, being in the temper he was in, he would do me the pleasure of not coming to see me. I have not seen him since." This letter yields a curious revelation of the secret history of a royal court. There have been few kings with whom such impudent independence would have served. Louis XIII. was one of them. Cinq-Mars seems to have known his man. The quarrel was not of long continuance. Richelieu, who had first placed the youth near the king, easily reconciled them, a service which the foolish boy soon repaid by lending an ear to the enemies of the cardinal. For this Richelieu was in a way responsible. He had begun to find the constant attendance of the favorite upon the king troublesome to himself, and gave him plainly to understand so. "One day he sent word to him not to be for the future so continually at his heels, and treated him even to his face with as much tartness and imperiousnesss as if he had been the lowest of his valets." Such treatment was not likely to be well received by one of the independent disposition of Cinq-Mars. He joined in a plot against the cardinal. The king was ill; the cardinal more so. Gaston, Duke of Orleans, was again in Paris, and full of his old intriguing spirit. The Duke of Bouillon was there also, having been sent for by the king to take command of the army of Italy. He, too, was drawn into the plot which was being woven against Richelieu. The queen, Anne of Austria, was another of the conspirators. The plot thus organized was the deepest and most far-reaching which had yet been laid against the all-powerful minister. Bouillon was prince-sovereign of the town of Sedan. This place was to serve the conspirators as an asylum in case of reverse. But a town was not enough; an army was needed; whence should it come? Spain might furnish it.