He was dead, but his work survived him.  On the very evening of the 3d of December, Louis XIII. called to his council Cardinal Mazarin; and next day he wrote to the Parliaments and governors of provinces, “God having been pleased to take to himself the Cardinal de Richelieu, I have resolved to preserve and keep up all establishments ordained during his ministry, to follow out all projects arranged with him for affairs abroad and at home, in such sort that there shall not be any change.  I have continued in my councils the same persons as served me then, and I have called thereto Cardinal Mazarin, of whose capacity and devotion to my service I have had proof, and of whom I feel no less sure than if he had been born amongst my subjects.”  Scarcely had the most powerful kings yielded up their last breath, when their wishes had been at once forgotten:  Cardinal Richelieu still governed in his grave.

[Illustration:  The Palais-Cardinal——­305]

The king had distributed amongst his minister’s relatives the offices and dignities which he had left vacant; the fortune that came to them was enormous; the legacies left to mere domestics amounted to more than three hundred thousand-livres.  During his lifetime Richelieu had given to the crown “my grand hotel, which I built, and called Palais-de-Cardinal, my chapel (or chapel-service) of gold, enriched with diamonds, my grand buffet of chased silver, and a large diamond that I bought of Lopez.”  In his will he adds, “I most humbly beseech his Majesty to think proper to have placed in his hands, out of the coined gold and silver that I have at my decease, the sum of fifteen hundred thousand livres, of which sum I can truly say that I made very good use for the great affairs of his kingdom, in such sort, that if I had not had this money at my disposal, certain matters which have turned out well would have, to all appearances, turned out ill; which gives me ground for daring to beseech his Majesty to destine this sum, that I leave him, to be employed on divers occasions which cannot abide the tardiness of financial forms.”

The minister and priest who had destroyed the power of the grandees in France had, nevertheless, the true instinct respecting the perpetuation of families.  “Inasmuch as it hath pleased God,” he says in his will, “to bless my labors, and make them considered by the king, my kind master, showing recognition of them by his royal munificence, beyond what I could hope for, I have esteemed it a duty to bind my heirs to preserve the estate in my family, in such sort that it may maintain itself for a long while in the dignity and splendor which it hath pleased the king to confer upon it, in order that posterity may know that, as I served him faithfully, he, by virtue of a complete kingliness, knew what love to show me, and how to load me with his benefits.”