the King could venture to refuse her immediate return to France.  The crisis was a formidable one to Richelieu, who, judging both his injured benefactress and himself from the past, placed no faith in her professions of forgiveness; for, on his side, he felt that he should resent even to his dying hour much that had passed before she fled the kingdom, as well as the libels against him which she had sanctioned during her residence in Flanders.  He had, moreover, as he asserted, on several occasions received information that Chanteloupe meditated some design upon his life; and that the Jesuit had stated in writing that he could never induce the Queen-mother to consent to separate herself from him, although he had entreated of her to leave him in the Low Countries when she returned to France.[207] Despicable, indeed, were such alleged terrors from the lips of the Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu—­the first minister of one of the first sovereigns of Europe.  What had he to fear from a powerless and impoverished Princess, whose misfortunes had already endured a sufficient time to outweary her foreign protectors; to subdue the hopes, and to exhaust the energies of her former adherents; and to reduce her to an insignificance of which, as her present measures sufficiently evinced, she had herself become despairingly conscious?  Even had Louis XIII at this moment been possessed of sufficient right feeling and moral energy to remember that it was the dignity of a mother which he had so long sacrificed to the ambition of a minister—­that it was the widow of the great monarch who had bequeathed to him a crown whom he ruthlesssly persecuted in order to further the fortunes of an ambitious ingrate—­all these trivial hindrances might have been thrust aside at once; but the egotistical and timid temperament of the French King deadened the finer impulses of honour and of nature; and he still suffered himself to be governed, where he should have asserted his highest and his holiest prerogative.

It is impossible to contemplate without astonishment so extraordinary an anomaly as that which was presented by the King, the Queen-mother, and the Cardinal de Richelieu at this particular period.  An obscure priest, elevated by the favour of a powerful Princess to the highest offices in the realm, after having reduced his benefactress to the necessity of humbling herself before him, and so unreservedly acknowledging his supremacy as to ask, as the only condition of his forgiveness, that he would do her the favour to believe in the sincerity of her professions.—­The widow of Henry the Great, the mother of the King of France, and of the Queens of Spain and England, in danger of wearing out her age in exile, because Armand Jean du Plessis, the younger son of a petty noble of Poitou, who once considered himself the most fortunate of mortals in obtaining the bishopric of Lucon, feared that his unprecedented power might be shaken should his first friend and patroness be once more united to her son, and restored to the privileges of her rank.—­And, finally, a sovereign, who, while in his better moments he felt all the enormity of his conduct towards the author of his being, now fast sinking under the combined weight of years and suffering, was yet deficient in the energy necessary to do justice alike to her and to himself.