In the meantime the Queen and her camarilla were all-powerful. After various weak and futile explosions, the smashing of crockery and breaking of furniture and the like, the poor King, for the sake of peace, let her have her own way, and ostensibly favoured the claims of the Austrian Archduke to his inheritance. But like most semi-idiots he could not relax his grasp on an idea of which he had once become possessed, and though he was surrounded day and night by the Queen's creatures, and was content that they should have their way whilst he was well, he no sooner fell into one of his periodical fits of deadly sickness than, with all the terror and dread of death, and constant fear of poison and witchcraft upon him, he yearned for the presence of those who had been with him in earlier and happier days, before the German Queen and her base blood-suckers had come to disturb his tranquillity. The story of the strange and obscure Court intrigue which resulted in the gaining by the French faction of the upper hand in the palace during the critical time preceding Charles's death, has often and variously been told, mostly with an ignorant or wilful distortion of events. M. Morel-Fatio has shown how Victor Hugo has deliberately falsified the character of the Queen Marie Anne of Neuberg, in order that he might make use of the local colour furnished by the Countess d'Aulnoy's letters written from Spain fifteen years before the period represented by the dramatist;[3] and many other writers, French and {294} English, who have been attracted by the romantic elements of the witchcraft story, have surrounded it with a cloud of fictitious persons and incidents which makes it difficult now to distinguish between history and romance. Every writer on the subject, so far as I know, moreover, has stopped short at the story of the exorcism itself, whereas it really developed into a great struggle of many years' duration between the Grand Inquisitor on the one hand and the Council of Inquisitors on the other, in which, curiously enough, the latter body championed the cause of legal process as against the arbitrary power assumed by its own chief.