Burgundy that the siege of Dole is raised, and from Saintonge that there are fifteen thousand peasants revolted, and that there is fear lest Poitou and Guienne may follow this example.  Bad news comes thickly, the sky is overcast on all sides, the tempest beats upon us in all directions, and from no quarter whatever does a single ray of good fortune shine upon us.  Amidst all this darkness, did the cardinal see less clearly?  Did he lose his head during all this tempest?  Did he not still hold the helm in one hand, and the compass in the other?  Did he throw himself into the boat to save his life?  Nay, if the great ship he commanded were to be lost, did he not show that he was ready to die before all the rest?  Was it luck that drew him out of this labyrinth, or was it his own prudence, steadiness, and magnanimity?  Our enemies are fifteen leagues from Paris, and his are inside it.  Every day come advices that they are intriguing there to ruin him.  France and Spain, so to speak, have conspired against him alone.  What countenance was kept amidst all this by the man who they said would be dumbfounded at the least ill-success, and who had caused Le Havre to be fortified in order to throw himself into it at the first misfortune?  He did not make a single step backward all the same.  He thought of the perils of the state, and not of his own; and the only change observed in him all through was that, whereas he had not been wont to go out but with an escort of two hundred guards, he walked about, every day, attended by merely five or six gentlemen.  It must be owned that adversity borne with so good a grace and such force of character is worth more than a great deal of prosperity and victory.  To me he did not seem so great and so victorious on the day he entered La Rochelle as then; and the journeys he made from his house to the arsenal seem to me more glorious for him than those which he made beyond the mountains, and from which he returned with the triumphs of Pignerol and Suza.”

This was Cardinal Richelieu’s distinction, that all his contemporaries, in the same way as Voiture, identified the mishaps and the successes of their country with his own fortunes, and that upon him alone were fixed the eyes of Europe, whether friendly or hostile, when it supported or when it fought against France.

For four years the war was carried on with desperation by land and sea in the Low Countries, in Germany, and in Italy, with alternations of success and reverse.  The actors disappeared one after another from the scene; the emperor, Ferdinand II., had died on the 15th of February, 1637;—­the election of his son, Ferdinand III., had not been recognized by France and Sweden; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar succumbed, at thirty-four years of age, on the 15th of July, 1639, after having beaten, in the preceding year, the celebrated John van Weert, whom he sent a prisoner to Paris.  At his death the landgravate of Elsass reverted to France, together with the town of Brisach, which he had won from the Imperialists.