Cinq-Mars profited by this; and raising his eyes, “Pleasures of youth,” he cried—­“love, music, joyous dances—­why do you not alone occupy our leisure hours?  Why are not you our sole ambition?  What resentment may we not justly feel that we have to make our cries of indignation heard above our bursts of joy, our formidable secrets in the asylum of love, and our oaths of war and death amid the intoxication of and of life!”

“Curses on him who saddens the youth of a people!  When wrinkles furrow the brow of the young men, we may confidently say that the finger of a tyrant has hollowed them out.  The other troubles of youth give it despair and not consternation.  Watch those sad and mournful students pass day after day with pale foreheads, slow steps, and half-suppressed voices.  One would think they fear to live or to advance a step toward the future.  What is there then in France?  A man too many.”

“Yes,” he continued; “for two years I have watched the insidious and profound progress of his ambition.  His strange practices, his secret commissions, his judicial assassinations are known to you.  Princes, peers, marechals—­all have been crushed by him.  There is not a family in France but can show some sad trace of his passage.  If he regards us all as enemies to his authority, it is because he would have in France none but his own house, which twenty years ago held only one of the smallest fiefs of Poitou.

“The humiliated parliament has no longer any voice.  The presidents of Nismes, Novion, and Bellievre have revealed to you their courageous but fruitless resistance to the condemnation to death of the Duke de la Vallette.

“The presidents and councils of sovereign courts have been imprisoned, banished, suspended—­a thing before unheard of—­because they have raised their voices for the king or for the public.

“The highest offices of justice, who fill them?  Infamous and corrupt men, who suck the blood and gold of the country.  Paris and the maritime towns taxed; the rural districts ruined and laid waste by the soldiers and other agents of the Cardinal; the peasants reduced to feed on animals killed by the plague or famine, or saving themselves by self-banishment—­such is the work of this new justice.  His worthy agents have even coined money with the effigy of the Cardinal-Duke.  Here are some of his royal pieces.”

The grand ecuyey threw upon the table a score of gold doubloons whereon Richelieu was represented.  A fresh murmur of hatred toward the Cardinal arose in the apartment.

“And think you the clergy are less trampled on and less discontented?  No.  Bishops have been tried against the laws of the State and in contempt of the respect due to their sacred persons.  We have seen, in consequence, Algerine corsairs commanded by an archbishop.  Men of the lowest condition have been elevated to the cardinalate.  The minister himself, devouring the most sacred things, has had himself elected general of the orders of Citeaux, Cluny, and Premontre, throwing into prison the monks who refused him their votes.  Jesuits, Carmelites, Cordeliers, Augustins, Dominicans, have been forced to elect general vicars in France, in order no longer to communicate at Rome with their true superiors, because he would be patriarch in France, and head of the Gallican Church.”