At the Palais Cardinal, Buckingham learned fresh lessons of an ostentatious display, wholly inconsistent with the condition of a subject. The Cardinal’s body-guard, assigned to him by the King, equalled in number that of his royal master; and the horse soldiers had a table appropriated to him in his hall; of these, the Cardinal had the power of appointment and dismissal. His ordinary personal attendants in his own house were composed of thirty-six pages, selected from noble families, and reared in his house under the tutorage of able masters--a system again recalling the household of Wolsey. When he travelled, the Cardinal was followed by a train consisting of his secretaries, his physicians, and his confessor; by eight carriages, with four horses each; and by eighty baggage mules. His guard escorted him, and his pages; his band, composed of musicians of the first eminence, and a numerous body of domestic servants, followed the litter in which the great Richelieu, delicate from his birth, and infirm in health, was carried; the walls of the towns through which he passed being levelled to receive this princely procession, when the gates happened to be too narrow to permit its entrance. Often, indeed, it was found necessary to widen the roads.[212] Footnote 212: Petilot, Notice sur Richelieu, ii., p. 112. But, whilst Buckingham might read in the extreme expenditure of the Cardinal a plea for his own magnificence, there was much to be learned in that palace which Richelieu, like Wolsey, afterwards bestowed on the monarch to whom he owed his wealth. There, the minister of Charles might see a systematic regulation of expense; generosity without prodigality, and almost unlimited alms-giving. Abhorring solicitation, which always defeated its own aim, absolute and irascible, the Cardinal, nevertheless, loved to benefit those who served him. No hasty words escaped from him for which he was not eager to atone; and, whilst his principle was that men are only to be maintained in their duty by severity, his nature was placable to his inferiors, although proud and unrelenting to his political enemies.