jealousy towards the Prince of Conde.  The affair was called on before a commission composed of dukes and peers, some councillors of state and some members of the Parliament, which demanded that the duke should be removed to its jurisdiction.  “I will not have it,” answered the king; “you are always making difficulties; it seems as if you wanted to keep me in leading-strings; but I am master, and shall know how to make myself obeyed:  It is a gross error to suppose that I have not a right to bring to judgment whom I think proper and where I please.”  The king himself asked the judges for their opinion. [Isambert, Recueil des anciennes Lois Francaises, t. xvi.] “Sir,” replied Counsellor Pinon, dean of the grand chamber, “for fifty years I have been in the Parliament, and I never saw anything of this sort; M. de La Valette had the honor of wedding a natural sister of your Majesty, and he is, besides, a peer of France; I implore you to remove him to the jurisdiction of the Parliament.”  “Your opinion!” said the king, curtly.  “I am of opinion that the Duke of La Valette be removed to be tried before the Parliament.”  “I will not have that; it is no opinion.”  “Sir, removal is a legitimate opinion.”  “Your opinion on the case!” rejoined the king, who was beginning to be angry; “if not, I know what I must do.”  President Bellievre was even bolder.  “It is a strange thing,” said he to Louis XIII.’s face, to see a king giving his vote at the criminal trial of one of his subjects; hitherto kings have reserved to themselves the rights of grace, and have removed to their officers’ province the sentencing of culprits.  Could your Majesty bear to see in the dock a nobleman, who might leave your presence only for the scaffold?  It is incompatible with kingly majesty.”  “Your opinion on the case!” bade the king.  “Sir, I have no other opinion.”  The Duke of La Valette had taken refuge in England:  he was condemned and executed in effigy.  The attorney-general, Matthew Mold, “did not consider it his business to carry out an execution of that sort:  “and recourse was obliged to be had to the lieutenant-governor of convicts at the Chatelet of Paris.

The cup had overflowed, and the cardinal resolved to put an end to an opposition which was the more irritating inasmuch as it was sometimes legitimate.  A notification of the king’s, published in 1641, prohibited the Parliament from any interference in affairs of state and administration.  The whole of Richelieu’s home-policy is summed up in the preamble to that instrument, a formal declaration of absolute power concentrated in the hands of the king.  “It seemeth that, the institution of monarchies having its foundation in the government of a single one, that rank is as it were the soul which animates them and inspires them with as much force and vigor as they can have short of perfection.  But as this absolute authority raises states to the highest pinnacle of their glory, so, when it happens to be