A fresh proscription instigated by the implacable justice of the cardinal decimated Languedoc. The estates were dispersed, many of the nobility and gentry executed or sent to the galleys, five bishops deposed, the castles and fortifications of the towns destroyed. The hateful and miserable author of all this misery, Gaston himself, alone escaped. Protected by his birth and his readiness to betray his friends, he was permitted to take refuge in Brussels. There, in conjunction with the queen-mother and the Spaniards, he renewed his plots against France and the cardinal. But Richelieu now felt himself so thoroughly the master both of the nobles and of the nation, that Gaston was more dangerous to him as an open enemy than he would be as the leader of the disaffected at home. The promise of the king’s favour, and renewed gifts to himself and his friends, soon induced him to betray the queen-mother and his hosts. In October 1634 he left his wife and his mother, was formally reconciled to the king and the cardinal, and retired into private life at his castle of Blois. Marie took refuge with her daughter in London, and Richelieu, freed for the time from all anxiety as to revolts and court intrigues, was enabled to turn his whole attention to the aggrandisement of France. In the following year, 1635, he entered openly into the Thirty Years’ War. [Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, 1642.=] Once more but a few months before his death had Richelieu to defend himself against a court intrigue, but it was one which had its roots far more in personal ambition than in serious political rivalry. Cinq-Mars, the son of the marquis d’Effiat, the superintendent of finance, chafing under the stern and all-pervading masterfulness of the cardinal, abused his position of intimacy with the king, to try and poison his mind against his minister, who at that time was thought to be dying. Gaston, that veteran intriguer, and the duc de Bouillon the lord of the feudal dependency of Sedan, gave some political importance to the intrigue by lending it their countenance. The system of espionage established by Richelieu was far too good to permit intrigues of that sort to pass unnoticed. Still neither Richelieu nor the king interfered until they received proof that Cinq-Mars was actually in communication with the national enemy, the Spaniards. Then they struck, and as usual struck hard. The duc de Bouillon was compelled to surrender Sedan to France. Cinq-Mars and his friend de Thou perished on the scaffold, the last of a long list of victims, including five dukes, four counts, and a marshal of France, who were sacrificed by the pitiless cardinal to the genius of his country. [Sidenote: =Centralising policy of Richelieu.=]