“Paralysis of the arm did not prevent the head from acting;” the dying cardinal had dictated to the king, stretched on a couch at his side, in a chamber of his house at Monfrin, near Tarascon, those last commands which completed the dishonor of the Duke of Orleans and the ruin of the favorite.  Louis XIII. slowly took the road back to Fontainebleau in the cardinal’s litter, which the latter had lent him.  The prisoners were left in the minister’s keeping, who ordered them before long to Lyons, whither he was himself removed.  The grand equerry coming from Montpellier, M. de Thou from Tarascon, in a boat towed by that of the cardinal, and the Duke of Bouillon from Pignerol, were all three lodged in the castle of Pierre-Encise.  Their examination was put off until the arrival of such magistrates “as should be capable of philosophizing and perpetually thinking of the means they must use for arriving at their ends.”  That was useless, inasmuch as the grand equerry “never ceased to say quite openly that he had done nothing to which the king had not consented.”

Louis XIII. was, no doubt, affected by such language; for, scarcely had he arrived at Fontainebleau, whither he had been preceded by news of the end of the queen his mother, who had died at Cologne in exile and poverty, when he wrote to all the parliaments of his kingdom, to the governors of the provinces, and to the ambassadors at foreign courts, to give his own account of the arrest of the guilty and the part he himself had played in the matter.  “The notable and visible change which had for the last year appeared in the conduct of Sieur de Cinq-Mars, our grand equerry, made us resolve, as soon as we perceived it, to carefully keep watch on his actions and his words, in order to fathom them and discover what could be the cause.  To this end, we resolved to let him act and speak with us more freely than heretofore.”  And in a letter written straight to the chancellor, the king exclaims in wrath, “It is true that having seen me sometimes dissatisfied with the cardinal, whether from the apprehension I felt lest he should hinder me from going to the siege of Perpignan, or induce me to leave it, for fear lest my health might suffer, or from any other like reason, the said Sieur de Cinq-Mars left nothing undone to chafe me against my said cousin, which I put up with so long as his evil offices were confined within the bounds of moderation.  But when he went so far as to suggest to me that the cardinal must be got rid of, and offered to carry it out himself, I conceived a horror of his evil thoughts, and held them in detestation.  Although I have only to say so for you to believe it, there is nobody who can deem but that it must have been so; for, otherwise, what motive would he have had for joining himself to Spain against me, if I had approved of what he desired?”

The trial was a foregone conclusion; the king and his brother made common cause in order to overwhelm the accused, “an earnest of a peace which was not such as God announced with good will to man on Christmas day,” writes Madame de Motteville, “but such as may exist at court and amongst brothers of royal blood.”