Even after his fall from power in the Netherlands, he interceded with the Pope in favor of the principality of Orange, which the pontiff was disposed to confiscate.  The Prince was at that time as good a Catholic as the Cardinal.  He was apparently on good terms with his sovereign, and seemed to have a prosperous career before him.  He was not a personage to be quarrelled with.  At a later day, when the position of that great man was most clearly defined to the world, the Cardinal’s ancient affection for his former friend and pupil did not prevent him from suggesting the famous ban by which a price was set upon his head, and his life placed in the hands of every assassin in Europe.  It did not prevent him from indulging in the jocularity of a fiend, when the news of the first-fruits of that bounty upon murder reached his ears.  It did not prevent him from laughing merrily at the pain which his old friend must have suffered, shot through the head and face with a musket-ball, and at the mutilated aspect which his “handsome face must have presented to the eyes of his apostate wife.”  It did not prevent him from stoutly disbelieving and then refusing to be comforted, when the recovery of the illustrious victim was announced.  He could always dissemble without entirely forgetting his grievances.  Certainly, if he were the forgiving Christian he pictured himself, it is passing strange to reflect upon the ultimate fate of Egmont, Horn, Montigny, Berghen, Orange, and a host of others, whose relations with him were inimical.

His extravagance was enormous, and his life luxurious.  At the same time he could leave his brother Champagny—­a man, with all his faults, of a noble nature, and with scarcely inferior talents to his own—­to languish for a long time in abject poverty; supported by the charity of an ancient domestic.  His greediness for wealth was proverbial.  No benefice was too large or too paltry to escape absorption, if placed within his possible reach.  Loaded with places and preferments, rolling in wealth, he approached his sovereign with the whine of a mendicant.  He talked of his property as a “misery,” when he asked for boons, and expressed his thanks in the language of a slave when he received them.  Having obtained the abbey of St. Armand, he could hardly wait for the burial of the Bishop of Tournay before claiming the vast revenues of Afflighem, assuring the King as he did so that his annual income was but eighteen thousand crowns.  At the same time, while thus receiving or pursuing the vast rents of St. Armand and Afflighem, he could seize the abbey of Trulle from the expectant hands of poor dependents, and accept tapestries and hogsheads of wine from Jacques Lequien and others, as a tax on the benefices which he procured for them.  Yet the man who, like his father before him, had so long fattened on the public money, who at an early day had incurred the Emperor’s sharp reproof for his covetousness, whose family, beside all these salaries and personal property, possessed already fragments of the royal domain, in the shape of nineteen baronies and seigniories in Burgundy, besides the county of Cantecroix and other estates in the Netherlands, had the effrontery to affirm, “We have always rather regarded the service of the master than our own particular profit.”