Politics interfered with _Mirame_. The play was assailed by difficulties similar to those which met Napoleon's _Vie de César_ under the Second Empire. The Opposition eagerly seized the occasion to annoy "Croquemitaine"; open protestations were circulated to the effect that the play was not worth playing. Some, rising above the question of literary merit, said that the piece was morally objectionable because it contained allusions to Anne of Austria's episode with Buckingham. Richelieu became the scapegoat of the hour; even the King had something to say regarding his Minister's literary venture. Louis was not gifted with critical discrimination; he knew it, and his timid pride and his prudence restrained him from launching into observations upon subjects with which he was not fitted to cope; but guided by the cherub detailed to protect the mentally incompetent, he struck with instinctive subtlety at the one vulnerable point in the Cardinal's armour and declared that he had nothing to say regarding the preciosity of the play, but that he had been "shocked by the questionable composition of the audience." It relieved the King's consciousness of his own inferiority to "pinch the Cardinal." He told Monsieur that he had been "shocked" when he realised "what species of society" he had been invited to meet. Monsieur, seizing the occasion to strike his enemy, answered that, to speak "frankly," he also had "been shocked" when he perceived "little Saint Amour among the Cardinal's guests." The royal brothers turned the subject in every light, and the more they studied it the darker grew its aspect. They agreed in thinking that the King's delicacy had been grossly outraged; they worked upon the fact until it assumed the proportions of a personal insult. Richelieu, visited by the indignant pair, was galvanised by the double current of their wrath. He knew that Saint Amour had not been in any earthly locality by his will; tact, if not religious prejudice, would have forbidden the admission of a personage of the doubtful savour of Saint Amour to the presence of the King. But Monsieur and the King had seen with their own eyes, and as no one would have dared to enter the Palais Cardinal uninvited, it was an undisputable fact that some one had tampered with the invitations. Richelieu's detectives were put upon the scent and they discovered that an Abbé who "could not refuse a woman anything" had been entrusted with the invitations-list. Richelieu could not punish the amiable lady who had unconsciously sealed the Abbé's doom; but justice was wrought, and absolute ignorance of facts permits us to hope that it fell short of the justice meted out to Puylaurens. It was said that the Abbé had been sent back to his village. Wherever he was "sent," Louis XIII. refused to be comforted, and to the end of his days he told the people who surrounded him that the Cardinal had invited him to his palace to meet Saint Amour.