Therefore I hired a palace, kept a great table, and entertained fourscore persons in liveries.  The Cardinal d’Est, the very day after the creation of the new Pope, forbade all Frenchmen to give me the way in the streets, and charged the superiors of the French churches not to admit me.  M. de Lionne, who resided here as a sort of private secretary to Mazarin, was so nettled because the new Pope had granted me the pallium for my archbishopric that he told him the King would never own me, insinuated that there would be a schism among the clergy of France, and that the Pope must expect to be excluded from the congress for a general peace.  This so frightened his Holiness that he made a million of mean excuses, and said, with tears in his eyes, that I had imposed upon him, and that he would take the first opportunity to do the King justice.  Upon this M. de Lionne sent word to the Cardinal that he hoped very shortly to acquaint him of my being prisoner in the Castle of Saint Angelo, and that the Cardinal would be no better off for his Majesty’s amnesty, because the Pope said none but he could absolve or condemn cardinals.  Meantime all my domestics who were subjects of the King of France were ordered to quit my service, on pain of being treated as rebels and traitors.  I could have little hope of protection from the Pope, for he was become quite another man, never spoke one word of truth, and continually amused himself with mere trifles, insomuch that one day he proposed a reward for whoever found out a Latin word for “calash,” and spent seven or eight days in examining whether “mosco” came from “muses,” or “musts” from “mosco.”  All his piety consisted in assuming a serious air at church, in which, nevertheless, there was a great mixture of pride, for he was vain to the last degree, and envious of everybody.  The work entitled “Sindicato di Alexandro VII.” gives an account of his luxury and of several pasquinades against the said Pope, particularly that one day Marforio asking Pasquin what he had said to the cardinals upon his death-bed, Pasquin answered, “Maxima de aeipso, plurima de parentibus, parva de principibus, turpia de cardinalibus, pauca de Ecclesia, de Deo nihil.” ("He said fine things of himself, a great many things of his kindred, some things of princes, nothing good of the cardinals, but little of the Church, and nothing at all of God").  His Holiness, in a consistory, laid claim to the merit of the conversion of Christina, Queen of Sweden, though everybody knew to the contrary, and that she had abjured heresy a year and a half before she came to Rome.

Having heard that Bussiere, who is Chamberlain to the Ambassadors at Rome, had declared I should not have a place in Saint Louis’s church on the festival of that saint, I was not discouraged from going thither.  At my entrance he snatched the holy water stick from the cure just as he was going to sprinkle me; nevertheless, I took my place, and was resolved to keep up the status and dignity of