That happiness I must tear from the hands of Fortune, or die on that scaffold.  At this instant I experience the joy of having broken down all doubt.  What! blush you not at having thought me ambitious from a base egoism, like this Cardinal—­ambitious from a puerile desire for a power which is never satisfied?  I am ambitious, but it is because I love.  Yes, I love; in that word all is comprised.  But I accuse you unjustly.  You have embellished my secret intentions; you have imparted to me noble designs (I remember them), high political conceptions.  They are brilliant, they are grand, doubtless; but—­shall I say it to you?—­such vague projects for the perfecting of corrupt societies seem to me to crawl far below the devotion of love.  When the whole soul vibrates with that one thought, it has no room for the nice calculation of general interests; the topmost heights of earth are far beneath heaven.”

De Thou shook his head.

“What can I answer?” he said.  “I do not understand you; your reasoning unreasons you.  You hunt a shadow.”

“Nay,” continued Cinq-Mars; “far from destroying my strength, this inward fire has developed it.  I have calculated everything.  Slow steps have led me to the end which I am about to attain.  Marie drew me by the hand; could I retreat?  I would not have done it though a world faced me.  Hitherto, all has gone well; but an invisible barrier arrests me.  This barrier must be broken; it is Richelieu.  But now in your presence I undertook to do this; but perhaps I was too hasty.  I now think I was so.  Let him rejoice; he expected me.  Doubtless he foresaw that it would be the youngest whose patience would first fail.  If he played on this calculation, he played well.  Yet but for the love that has urged me on, I should have been stronger than he, and by just means.”

Then a sudden change came over the face of Cinq-Mars.  He turned pale and red twice; and the veins of his forehead rose like blue lines drawn by an invisible hand.

“Yes,” he added, rising, and clasping together his hands with a force which indicated the violent despair concentred in his heart, “all the torments with which love can tear its victims I have felt in my breast.  This timid girl, for whom I would shake empires, for whom I have suffered all, even the favor of a prince, who perhaps has not felt all I have done for her, can not yet be mine.  She is mine before God, yet I am estranged from her; nay, I must hear daily discussed before me which of the thrones of Europe will best suit her, in conversations wherein I may not even raise my voice to give an opinion, and in which they scorn as mate for her princes of the blood royal, who yet have precedence far before me.  I must conceal myself like a culprit to hear through a grating the voice of her who is my wife; in public I must bow before her—­her husband, yet her servant!  ’Tis too much; I can not live thus.  I must take the last step, whether it elevate me or hurl me down.”