Such, however, was the actual position of the several individuals; and the fate of Marie de Medicis was decided.

A desire of repose, consequent upon his failing health, self-gratulation at his triumph over an inimical and powerful faction, and a desire to exculpate himself from the charge of ingratitude, would have led the Cardinal to accede to a reconciliation with his long-estranged benefactress; but he soon silenced these natural impulses to dwell only upon the dangers of her reappearance in France, which could not, as he believed, fail to circumscribe his own absolute power—­a power to which he had laboriously attained not more by genius than by crime—­which had been cemented by blood, and heralded by groans.  Nor was this the only consideration by which Richelieu was swayed when he resolved that the Queen-mother should never again, so long as he had life, set foot upon the soil of France.  His high-soaring ambition had, within the last few weeks, grasped at a greatness to which even she had not yet attained.  For a time, as is asserted by contemporary historians, he indulged visions of royalty in his own person, and had in imagination already fitted the crown of one of the first nations in Europe to his own brow; but the dream had been brief, and he had latterly resolved to transfer to one of his relatives the ermined purple in which he was not permitted to enfold himself.  That relative was his niece and favourite, Madame de Comballet, whose hand he had offered to the Cardinal-Duc Francois de Lorraine, when that Prince succeeded to the sovereignty of the duchy on the abdication of his unfortunate brother Charles; but to avoid this alliance the new Duke had contracted a secret marriage with his cousin the Princesse Claude; a disappointment which the minister of Louis XIII was desirous of repairing by causing the dissolution of the marriage of Gaston d’Orleans with Marguerite de Lorraine, and making Monsieur’s union with his own beautiful and unprincipled niece the condition of his restoration to favour.

Aware that the Queen-mother would resent such an indignity even to the death, Richelieu was consequently resolved to put at once a stop to a negotiation of which the result could not be otherwise than fatal to his project, should the King in some moment of piety and contrition suffer himself to remember that it was a mother as well as a Queen who appealed to his indulgence; and who, however she might have erred, had bitterly expiated her faults.  Thus then, the Cardinal no sooner saw the agitation of Louis on reading the letter of the exiled Princess, and marked the flashing of his eyes as he became aware that she promised, as he had required of her, to restore the Cardinal to her affection, than the latter hastened to remind him that he must not overlook the fact that he was a sovereign as well as a son; and that the safety of the state required his attention no less than the gratification of his natural feelings.