Henry IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII, (1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have roots firm enough to withstand rough handling. The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of 1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the Hôtel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes--an idea not to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives, speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless in giving some caustic warnings. The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the Revolution. Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’ adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at first. The minister had the greedy Prince of Condé arrested within the palace of the Louvre and sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the arrest--possibly the death--of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife, Leonora Galigaï had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the Grève.