_Paris chez Odieuvre M^d d’Estampes Quai de l’Ecole vis à vis la Samarit^e à la belle Image; C.P.R._ _To face page 24._] The times, as a great commentator has defined them, were indeed peculiar. The air, full of intrigue, was maintained by Richelieu at fever-heat, and wheel worked fast and furiously within wheel. There was the king’s party, though the king was little of it, or in it. The iron hand of the Cardinal Prime-Minister was upon the helm. Richelieu, who never stayed in resistance to the encroaching efforts of Spain—in his policy of crushing the feudal strength of the nobility of the provinces—or in annihilating Huguenot power as a political element in the State—saw in every man and woman not his violent partisan, an enemy to France and to the Crown. How far he was justified, how far he could have demanded “Is there not a cause?” stands an open question; but the effect was terrible. The relentless hounding down of the suspected, forms a page of history stained with the blood of noble and gallant men. Richelieu’s crafty playing with his marked victims, chills the soul. They were as ninepins in his hands, lured to their destruction, sprung upon, crushed often when most they believed themselves secure. Sending de Thou to the scaffold for his supposed complicity in the crime Richelieu fixed on Cinq-Mars, the handsome, insouciant, brilliant young fellow he had himself provided for the king’s amusement, and when the time was ripe, having done him to death by the Lyons headsman upon a superficially-based accusation. Richelieu was dying then. The consciousness of Death’s hand upon his harassed, worn-out frame was fully with him; but no pity was in his heart for Cinq-Mars. It might have been the old rankling jealousy that urged him on, for the stern, inflexible Armand de Richelieu was a poor, weak tool of a creature where women were concerned. “There is no such word as fail,” he was wont to say; yet in his relations with women, and in his gallantries he failed egregiously. No fear of him held back Marion Delorme from the arms of Cinq-Mars, when she yielded to his persuasions to fly with him; and self-love must have been bitterly wounded, when Anne of Austria laughed his advances to scorn. Richelieu was not a lady’s man. Nature had given him a brain rarely equalled, a stupendous capacity and penetration, but she had neglected him personally—meagre, sharp-featured, cadaverous, scantily furnished as to beard and moustache, and lean as to those red-stockinged legs. True, or the mere fruit of cruel scandal, that saraband _pas seul_ he was said to have been duped into performing for the delectation of the queen, will hang ever by the memory of the great Lord Cardinal. CHAPTER III A Life-long Friend—St Evrémond’s Courtly _Mot_—Rabelais _v._ Petronius—Society and the Salons—The Golden Days—The Man in Black.