Guiton the Mayor kept a dagger on the city council-table to stab any man who should speak of surrender; some who spoke of yielding he ordered to execution as seditious.  When a friend showed him a person dying of hunger, be said, “Does that astonish you?  Both you and I must come to that.”  When another told him that multitudes were perishing, he said, “Provided one remains to hold the city-gate, I ask nothing more.”

But at last even Guiton had to yield.  After the siege had lasted more than a year, after five thousand were found remaining out of fifteen thousand, after a mother had been seen to feed her child with her own blood, the Cardinal’s policy became too strong for him.  The people yielded, and Richelieu entered the city as master.

And now the victorious statesman showed a greatness of soul to which all the rest of his life was as nothing.  He was a Catholic cardinal,—­the Rochellois were Protestants; he was a stern ruler,—­they were rebellious subjects who had long worried and almost impoverished him;—­all Europe, therefore, looked for a retribution more terrible than any in history.

Richelieu allowed nothing of the sort.  He destroyed the old franchises of the city, for they were incompatible with that royal authority which he so earnestly strove to build.  But this was all.  He took no vengeance,—­he allowed the Protestants to worship as before,—­he took many of them into the public service,—­and to Guiton he showed marks of respect.  He stretched forth that strong arm of his over the city, and warded off all harm.  He kept back greedy soldiers from pillage,—­he kept back bigot priests from persecution.  Years before this he had said, “The diversity of religions may indeed create a division in the other world, but not in this”; at another time he wrote, “Violent remedies only aggravate spiritual diseases.”  And he was now so tested, that these expressions were found to embody not merely an idea, but a belief.  For, when the Protestants in La Rochelle, though thug owing tolerance and even existence to a Catholic, vexed Catholics in a spirit most intolerant, even that could not force him to abridge the religious liberties he had given.

He saw beyond his time,—­not only beyond Catholics, but beyond Protestants.  Two years after that great example of toleration in La Rochelle, Nicholas Antoine w as executed for apostasy from Calvinism at Geneva.  And for his leniency Richelieu received the titles of Pope of the Protestants and Patriarch of the Atheists.  But he had gained the first great object of his policy, and he would not abuse it:  he had crushed the political power of the Huguenots forever.

Let us turn now to the second great object of his policy.  He must break the power of the nobility:  on that condition alone could France have strength and order, and here he showed his daring at the outset.  “It is iniquitous,” he was wont to tell the King, “to try to make an example by punishing the lesser offenders:  they are but trees which cast no shade:  it is the great nobles who must be disciplined.”