Let us turn now to the second great object of his policy. He must break the power of the nobility: on that condition alone could France have strength and order, and here he showed his daring at the outset. "It is iniquitous," he was wont to tell the King, "to try to make an example by punishing the lesser offenders; they are but trees which cast no shade: it is the great nobles who must be disciplined." It was not long before he had to begin this work--and with the highest--with no less a personage than Gaston, Duke of Orléans, favorite son of Mary, brother of the King. He who thinks shall come to a higher idea of Richelieu's boldness when he remembers that for many years after this Louis was childless and sickly, and that during all those years Richelieu might awake any morning to find Gaston--king. In 1626 Gaston, with the Duke of Vendôme, half-brother of the King, the Duchess of Chevreuse, confidential friend of the Queen, the Count of Chalais, and the Marshal Ornano, formed a conspiracy after the old fashion. Richelieu had his hand at their lofty throats in a moment. Gaston, who was used only as a makeweight, he forced into the most humble apology and the most binding pledges; Ornano he sent to die in the Bastille; the Duke of Vendôme and the Duchess of Chevreuse he banished; Chalais he sent to the scaffold. The next year he gave the grandees another lesson. The serf-owning spirit had fostered in France, through many years, a rage for duelling. Richelieu determined that this should stop. He gave notice that the law against duelling was revived, and that he would enforce it. It was soon broken by two of the loftiest nobles in France--by the Count of Bouteville Montmorency and the Count des Chapelles. They laughed at the law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from those days to these--invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de la Grève--the place of execution for the vilest malefactors. No doubt that under the present domineering of the pettifogger caste there are hosts of men whose minds run in such small old grooves that they hold legal forms not a means, but an end; these will cry out against this proceeding as tyrannical. No doubt, too, that under the present palaver of the "sensationist" caste, the old ladies of both sexes have come to regard crime as mere misfortune: these will lament this proceeding as cruel. But for this act, if for no other, an earnest man's heart ought in these times to warm toward the great statesman. The man had a spine. To his mind crime was not mere misfortune: crime was _crime_.