M. the Cardinal de Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me.  She was sensibly affronted, but I was enraged.  For at last there was a sort of an understanding between us, which was often ill-managed, yet our interests were inseparable.  At this time Madame de La Meilleraye, with whom, though she was silly, I had fallen in love, pleased the Cardinal to that degree that the Marshal perceived it before he set out for the army, and rallied his wife in such a manner that she immediately found he was even more jealous than ambitious.  She was terribly afraid of him, and did not love the Cardinal, who, by marrying her to his cousin, had lessened his own family, of which he was extremely fond.  Besides, the Cardinal’s infirmities made him look a great deal older than he was.  And though all his other actions had no tincture of pedantry, yet in his amorous intrigues he had the most of it in the world.  I had a detail of all the steps he had made therein, which were extremely ridiculous.  But continuing his solicitation, and carrying her to his country seat at Ruel,—­[The Cardinal de Richelieu’s seat, three leagues from Paris.]—­where he kept her a considerable time, I guessed that the lady had not brains enough to resist the splendour of Court favour, and that her husband’s jealousy would soon give way to his interest, but, above all, to his blind side, which was an attachment to the Court not to be equalled.  When I was in the hottest pursuit of this passion I proposed to myself the most exquisite pleasures in triumphing over the Cardinal de Richelieu in this fair field of battle; but on a sudden I had the mortification to hear the whole family was changed.  The husband allowed his wife to go to Ruel as often as she pleased, and her behaviour towards me I suspected to be false and treacherous.  In short, Madame de Guemenee’s anger, for a reason I hinted before, my jealousy of Madame de La Meilleraye, and an aversion to my own profession, all joined together in a fatal moment and were near producing one of the greatest and most famous events of our age.

La Rochepot, my first cousin and dear friend, was a domestic of the late Duc d’Orleans,—­[Gaston Jean Baptists de France, born 1608, and died at Blois, 1660.]—­and his great confidant.  He mortally hated the Cardinal de Richelieu, who had persecuted his mother, and had her hung up in effigy, and kept his father still a prisoner in the Bastille, and now refused the son a regiment, though Marechal de La Meilleraye, who very highly esteemed him for his courage, interceded for the favour.  You may imagine that when we came together we did not forget the Cardinal.

I being crossed in my designs, as I told you, and as full of resentment as La Rochepot was for the affronts put upon his person and family, we chimed in our thoughts and resolutions, which were, dexterously to manage the weakness of the Duc d’Orleans and to put that in execution which the boldness of his domestics had almost effected at Corbie.