The cardinal had taken pleasure in embellishing the estate of Richelieu, in Touraine, where he was born, and which the king had raised to a duchy-peerage.  Mdlle. de Montpensier, in her Memoires, gives an account of a visit she paid to it in her youth.  “I passed,” she says, “along a very fine street of the town, all the houses of which are in the best style of building, one like another, and quite newly made, which is not to be wondered at.  MM. de Richelieu, though gentlemen of good standing, had never built a town; they had been content with their village and with a mediocre house.  At the present time it is the most beautiful and most magnificent castle you could possibly see, and all the ornament that could be given to a house is found there.  This will not be difficult to believe if one considers that it is the work of the most ambitious and most ostentatious man in the world, premier minister of state too, who for a long while possessed absolute authority over affairs.  It is, nevertheless, inconceivable that the apartments should correspond so ill in size with the beauty of the outside.  I hear that this arose from the fact that the cardinal wished to have the chamber preserved in which he was born.  To adjust the house of a simple gentleman to the grand ideas of the most powerful favorite there has ever been in France, you will observe that the architect must have been hampered; accordingly he did not see his way to planning any but very small quarters, which, by way of recompense, as regards gilding or painting, lack no embellishment inside.

“Amidst all that modern invention has employed to embellish it, there are to be seen, on the chimney-piece in a drawingroom, the arms of Cardinal Richelieu, just as they were during the lifetime of his father, which the cardinal desired to leave there, because they comprise a collar of the Holy Ghost, in order to prove to those who are wont to misrepresent the origin of favorites that he was born a gentleman of a good house.  In this point, he imposed upon nobody.”

The castle of Richelieu is well nigh destroyed; his family, after falling into poverty, is extinct; the Palais-Cardinal has assumed the name of Palais-Royal; and pure monarchy, the aim of all his efforts and the work of his whole life, has been swept away by the blast of revolution.  Of the cardinal there remains nothing but the great memory of his power and of the services he rendered his country.  Evil has been spoken, with good reason, of glory; it lasts, however, more durably than material successes even when they rest on the best security.  Richelieu had no conception of that noblest ambition on which a human soul can feed, that of governing a free country, but he was one of the greatest, the most effective, and the boldest, as well as the most prudent servants that France ever had.