In compliance with the request of the King, Marie de Medicis met the astute minister with a dissimulation equal to his own; and even affected to feel flattered when he demanded her permission for his litter to travel immediately behind her own.  It was not, however, until the royal barge had received its august freight, and begun to descend the Loire, that the Cardinal had an opportunity of fully enacting the courtly character which he had assigned to himself in this serious emergency.  As the Queen-mother lay upon her couch the minister stood obsequiously beside her, beneath the crimson canopy by which she was overshadowed, occasionally dropping upon his knee in an attitude of profound and affectionate respect; a voluntary homage to which Marie replied by conversing with him in the most endearing terms; addressing him more than once as mio caro! amico del cuore mio! and other soft and flattering appellations.

To Richelieu it seemed for the time as though the past had come back upon him, but he deceived himself; the Florentine Princess had but drawn a glove over a hand of iron, a fact which he ascertained before the termination of the journey, as well as the whole extent of the intrigue at Lyons; but this knowledge did not for a moment affect his deportment towards the Queen-mother, for whom he continued to evince the deepest veneration, while he carefully noted the bearing of those by whom she was surrounded, in order that he might one day be enabled to wreak his vengeance upon such as had participated in the cabal.

The most zealous partisans of Marie de Medicis were at this period the two Marillacs and the Ducs de Guise and de Bellegarde; while her confidential friends of her own sex were the Duchesse d’Elboeuf and the Princesse de Conti.  Of these the most obnoxious to Richelieu was the elder Marillac, the Keeper of the Seals.  This minister was indebted to the Cardinal for the office which he held; and even while Richelieu was plotting the ruin of his own benefactress, he could not brook that a man whom he had himself raised to power should dare to oppose his will, or to succeed him in the good graces of the Queen-mother.  He had, moreover, ascertained that Marillac, who had, in the first instance, attached himself to Marie de Medicis at the suggestion of his brother the Marechal, had rendered her such good service that she had pledged herself to make him Prime Minister on his own dismissal.  Nor was this the only cause of anxiety to which Richelieu was at this moment exposed; as during the indisposition of the King a strong affection had grown up between the two Queens, while the Duc d’Orleans no longer made any effort to conceal his animosity; and thus the Cardinal found himself placed in opposition to the whole of the royal family with the exception of the sovereign.