city in, and famine soon did the rest.  Cats, dogs, and vermin became luxuries.  The starving women beseeched the inexorable enemy for permission to retire:  they remembered the mercy that Henry IV. had shown at the siege of Paris.  But war in the hands of masters has no favors to grant; conquerors have no tears.  The Huguenots, as rebels, had no hope but in unconditional submission.  They yielded it reluctantly, but not until famine had done its work.  And they never raised their heads again; their spirit was broken.  They were conquered, and at the mercy of the crown; destined in the next reign to be cruelly and most wantonly persecuted; hunted as heretics by dragonnades and executioners, at the bidding of Louis XIV., until four hundred thousand were executed or driven from the kingdom.

But Richelieu was not such a bigot as Louis XIV.; he was a statesman, and took enlightened views of the welfare of the country.  Therefore he contented himself with destroying the fortifications of La Rochelle, filling up its ditches, and changing its government.  He continued, in a modified form, the religious privileges conceded by the Edict of Nantes; but he kept a strict watch, humiliated the body by withholding civil equalities and offices in the army and navy, treating with disdain their ministers, and taking away their social rank, so that they became plebeian and unimportant.  He pursued the same course that the English government adopted in reference to Dissenters in the eighteenth century, when they were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge and church burial-grounds.  So that Protestantism in France, after the fall of La Rochelle, never asserted its dignity, in spite of Bibles, consistories, and schools.  Degraded at court, deprived of the great offices of the state, despised, rejected, and persecuted, it languished and declined.

Having subdued the Huguenots, Richelieu turned his attention to the nobles,—­the most worthless, arrogant, and powerful of all the nobility of Europe; men who made royalty a mockery and law a name.  I have alluded to their intrigues, ambition, and insolence.  It was necessary that they should be humiliated, decimated, and punished, if central power was to be respected.  So he cut off their towering heads, exiled and imprisoned them whenever they violated the laws, or threatened the security of the throne or the peace of the realm.  As individuals they hated him, and conspired against his rule.  Had they combined, they would have been more powerful than he; but they were too quarrelsome, envious, and short-sighted to combine.

The person who hated Richelieu most fiercely and bitterly was the Queen-mother,—­widow of Henry IV., regent during the minority of Louis XIII.  And no wonder, for he had cheated her and betrayed her.  She was a very formidable enemy, having a great ascendency over the mind of her son the King; and once, it is said, she had so powerfully wrought upon him by her envenomed sarcasms, in the palace of the Luxembourg