in one room, while her majesty looked on at the performance from behind a screen in an adjoining one; a musician, concealed also from view, was to accompany the performance on the violin. The duchess, who had not bargained for her own share in the sport, took care not to be deprived of it, but stood beside the queen, peeping through the screen, while the haughty statesman, bedizened in the variegated costume of harlequin, “with bells on his fingers, and bells on his toes,” and jingling from his comical fool’s cap, tripped it on the light fantastic toe. Mme. de Chevreuse describes the scene with the mischievous glee of a schoolboy: herself and the queen squeezing each other’s hands, and terrified lest one explosive burst should betray them and suddenly cut short the performance; the musician convulsed in another corner, scratching away frantically at his fiddle to drown the irrepressible laughter of the trio; while Richelieu, the proud, the grave, the vindictive and all-powerful Richelieu, capered backwards and forwards on the polished floor, snapping his fingers at each rapid _pirouette_, stamping his heel and pointing his toe as the figures of the saraband demanded. The performance over, he donned his cloak, and made his way back discreetly to the Palais Cardinal. No time was lost in recapitulating the farce to the court, and the merriment that it provoked may be readily imagined. But who might laugh with impunity at Richelieu? The true motive of the unseemly burlesque to which he had lent himself was soon made known to the hero, and terrible was the vengeance that awaited its authors. He bided awhile, and then began that series of calumnies and persecutions that poisoned so many years of the young queen’s life. Richelieu had insinuated himself into the confidence of Louis XIII., and his influence over him was boundless. This tremendous weapon he used against the queen with cruel ingenuity. He contrived to implicate her in the odious and diabolical conspiracy of the arch-traitor de Chalais; accused her of having plotted to dethrone and murder the king, with a view to putting Gaston d’Orléans, his brother, on the throne, and marrying him. When Louis XIII. brutally challenged his wife to vindicate herself from the twofold criminal charge, she replied, with _spirituelle_ disdain: “I had too little to gain by the exchange.” It is more than probable that Louis never seriously suspected Anne of Austria of having had any share in the guilt laid to her charge by Richelieu; but the calumny did its work efficiently in another way: it cut at the root of her affection for her husband and of his trust in her—it chilled and alienated them for years. The Duchesse de Chevreuse, accused, with some show of truth, of having conspired with Gaston d’Orléans to dethrone the king, was exiled from France. Richelieu followed up the advantage of his first attack by accusing the queen of keeping up a correspondence with the enemies of the state.