After their marriage, Marion and Cinq-Mars went to the castle on the Loire, where they spent a brief period of delight. Only the servants of the household were there, and Cinq-Mars was their lord. They showed willing, even delighted, obedience to all his behests; but the marquise his mother returned home somewhat unexpectedly, and her anger at the stolen marriage equalled in its way that of Richelieu himself. Doubtless this fomented the affair to a yet speedier issue, and Cinq-Mars was arrested, and along with him, his friend de Thou, who was entirely innocent of complicity in the plot. The two were taken into the presence of Richelieu at Tarascon (a place old stories tell named after one Tarasque, “a fearful dragon who infested the borders of the Rhone, preying upon human flesh, to the universal terror and disturbance”), and hence his dying Eminence—for death was very near—commanded them to be placed, tied and bound, in a boat fastened behind his own, in which he was returning to Paris by the waterway of the Rhone, as far as Lyons. There, being disembarked, the two young victims were led immediately to a hastily-erected scaffold, and there bravely they met their fate by the headsman’s axe—de Thou guilty of refusing to betray his friend, and Cinq-Mars’ crime not proved, suffering mainly from the cowardly depositions laid against him by the Duke of Orléans. Then Richelieu continued his triumphal way to Paris, where in his magnificent palace he died; and during his last agonies, the king was seen to smile at what he called “Death’s master-stroke of policy.” There was a letter, written three days before the cardinal’s death, found among his papers. It was dated from the Bastille, and it consisted of one bitter reproach of his injustice to the writer, in keeping him immured in the terrible place for eleven years. It was a letter of some length, and an eloquently written appeal for release. “There is a time, my lord,” it began, “when man ceases to be barbarous and unjust; it is when his approaching dissolution compels him to descend into the gloom of his conscience, and to deplore the cares, griefs, pains and misfortunes which he has caused to his fellow-creatures. Had I,” the unhappy man, whose name was Dessault, goes on to say, “performed your order, it would have condemned my soul to eternal torment, and made me pass into eternity with blood-stained hands.... I implore you, my lord, order my chains to be broken before your death-hour comes,—permit yourself to be moved by the most humble prayer of a man who has ever been a loyal subject to the king.”