Another pupil almost, as it were, forced himself into this little circle of students. Cyrano de Bergerac was a youth of great talents, but of a wild and turbulent disposition, and had been dismissed from the college of Beauvais for putting the master into a farce. He was a Gascon--lively, insinuating, and ambitious. Gassendi could not resist his efforts to get admitted as his pupil; and his quickness and excellent memory rendered him an apt scholar. Chapelle himself, the friend afterwards of Boileau and of all the literati of Paris, a writer of songs, full of grace, sprightliness, and ease, displayed talent, but at the same time gave tokens of that heedless, gay, and unstable character that followed him through life, and occasioned his father, instead of making him his heir as he intended, to leave him merely a slight annuity, over which he had no control. Bernier became afterwards a great eastern traveller. [Sidenote: 1641. Ætat. 19.] Immediately on leaving college Poquelin entered on his service of royal _valet de chambre_. Louis XIII. made a journey to Narbonne; and he attended instead of his father.[33] This journey is only remarkable from the public events that were then taking place. Louis XIII. and cardinal de Richelieu had marched into Rousillon to complete the conquest of that province from the house of Austria--both monarch and minister were dying. The latter discovered the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, the unfortunate favourite of the king, and had seized on him and his innocent friend De Thou--they were condemned to death; and conveyed from Tarrascon to Lyons in a boat, which was towed by the cardinal's barge in advance. Terror at the name of the cardinal, contempt for the king, and anxiety to watch the wasting illnesses of both, occupied the court: the passions of men were excited to their height; and the young and ardent youth, fresh from the schools of philosophy, witnessed a living drama, more highly wrought than any that a mimic stage could represent.