“I should not have sufficiently gained by the change,” was, however, Anne’s reply, when the accusation of her desire for this was made against her in the course of the rigorous inquiry and treatment to which she and her friends were subjected. If on account alone of that time, years back now, when Gaston, to save himself, permitted one of his noblest adherents, Chalais, to perish on the scaffold at Richelieu’s command, Monsieur was not likely to be very favourably regarded by her. Nearly half a score of years had passed since the brave man had died in the flower of his life, tortured and hacked by countless bungling strokes of a creature found at last, among the dregs of the prison, to do the hideous task which the professional headsman managed to evade by absenting himself and remaining _perdu_. In the interval, the queen’s mother had been effectually, and for ever, banished from France. “The Day of Dupes” had come and gone, leaving Richelieu all-triumphant; but still the contest raged, and the virulence of the minister against the queen broke furiously on the pretext he found at last, of discovering that she was keeping up a private correspondence with the King of Spain, and the cardinal infant, her two brothers, and also with persons in Madrid and Brussels, whose friendship she valued—the more, doubtless, for the isolation and lack of affection and harshness surrounding her. It was a boast of Richelieu’s, that with only two lines of an innocent man’s writing he could ruin him. Naturally, therefore, however innocent the correspondence, Anne was anxious to hold her letters uninspected by the cardinal, and she kept them in her own private oratory chamber in the Benedictine convent of the Val de Grâce, in the rue St Jacques, which she had founded. The letters, on their arrival, were received by one of the nuns, who placed them away in a closet to await the queen’s coming, and her replies to them were forwarded from thence. But Richelieu’s spies were at work; they swarmed of course in Paris; and before long they scented out the secret correspondence, and Richelieu informed the king of it, holding up before His Majesty’s dreary imagination all the terrors of national peril it signified. The alarmed king hurried the queen out of Paris to the Château of Chantilly, where she was confined to her own rooms and compelled to listen to a string of rigid interrogation from the chancellor. She was in a cruelly forlorn situation; for, in fear of Richelieu’s anger and the activity of his spies, the courtiers and following of the royal pair did not venture so much as to lift their eyes to her window as they passed. For her own servants, they had been at once disposed of in various prisons; while the chancellor proceeded to ransack the convent of Val de Grâce for more papers and letters. But it was labour lost, which possibly was no more than he expected; since it is believed that the queen had warning from him of his