satisfaction,” he said, “that I have never deserted the king, and that I leave his kingdom exalted, and all his enemies abased.”  He commended his relatives to his Majesty, “who on their behalf will remember my services;” then, naming the two secretaries of state, Chavigny and De Noyers, he added, “Your Majesty has Cardinal Mazarin; I believe him to be capable of serving the king.”  And he handed to Louis XIII. a proclamation which he had just prepared for the purpose of excluding the Duke of Orleans from any right to the regency in case of the king’s death.  The preamble called to mind that the king had five times already pardoned his brother, recently engaged in a new plot against him.

The king had left the cardinal, but without returning to St. Germain.  He remained at the Louvre.  Richelieu had in vain questioned the physicians as to how long he had to live.  One, only, dared to go beyond commonplace hopes.  “Monsignor,” he said, “in twenty-four hours you will be dead or cured.”  “That is the way to speak!” said the cardinal; and he sent for the priest of St. Eustache, his parish.  As they were bringing into his chamber the Holy Eucharist, he stretched out his hand, and, “There,” said he, “is my Judge before whom I shall soon appear; I pray him with all my heart to condemn me if I have ever had any other aim than the welfare of religion and of the state.”  The priest would have omitted certain customary questions, but, “Treat me as the commonest of Christians,” said the cardinal.  And when he was asked to pardon his enemies, “I never had any but those of the state,” answered the dying man.

The cardinal’s family surrounded his bed; and the attendance was numerous.  The Bishop of Lisieux, Cospdan, a man of small wits, but of sincere devoutness, listened attentively to the firm speech, the calm declarations, of the expiring minister.  “So much self-confidence appalls me,” he said below his breath.  Richelieu died as he had lived, without scruples and without delicacies of conscience, absorbed by his great aim, and but little concerned about the means he had employed to arrive at it.  “I believe, absolutely, all the truths taught by the church,” he had said to his confessor, and this faith sufficed for his repose.  The memory of the scaffolds he had caused to be erected did not so much as recur to his mind.  “I have loved justice, and not vengeance.  I have been severe towards some in order to be kind towards all,” he had said in his will, written in Latin.  He thought just the same on his death-bed.

The king left him, not without emotion and regret.  The cardinal begged Madame d’Aiguillon, his niece, to withdraw.  “She is the one whom I have loved most,” he said.  Those around him were convulsed with weeping.  A Carmelite whom he had sent for turned to those present, and, “Let those,” he said, “who cannot refrain from showing the excess of their weeping and their lamentation leave the room; let us pray for this soul.”  In presence of the majesty of death and eternity human grandeur disappears irrevocably; the all-powerful minister was at that moment only this soul.  A last gasp announced his departure; Cardinal Richelieu was dead.