La Grande Mademoiselle. Barine Arvède
public letters he confided to them his family chagrins, and the motives of his conduct toward the foreign powers. His correspondence with his mother and his brothers was printed as fast as it was written or received by him. Apologies for his conduct were supported by a choice of documents. From time to time the pamphlets were collected and put in volumes – the volumes which were the ancestors of our "yellow books."
I have before me one of these volumes, dated 1639, without name of editor or publisher. It bears the title: Recueil de divers pièces pour servir a l'histoire. Two thirds of its space are consecrated to the King's quarrels with his family. Mademoiselle must have learned from it many things which she has not the air of suspecting. Perhaps she found it convenient or agreeable to be ignorant of them. In the pages of this instructive volume none of her immediate relations appear to any advantage. Louis XIII. is invariably dry and bombastic, or constrained and affected; he shows no trace of emotion when, in his letter of 23 February, 1631, he informs the people that
being placed in the extremity of choosing between our mother and our minister we did not even hesitate, because they have embittered the Queen our very honoured lady and mother against our very dear and very beloved cousin, Cardinal de Richelieu; there being no entreaty, no prayer or supplication, nor any consideration, public or private, that we have not put forward to soften her spirit; our said cousin recognising what he owes her, by reason of all sorts of considerations, having done all that he could do for her satisfaction; the reverence that he bears her having carried him to the point of urging us and supplicating us, divers times, to find it good that he should retire from the management of our affairs; a request which the utility of his past services and the interests of our authority have not permitted us to think of granting… And recognising the fact that none of the authors of these differences continue to maintain their disposition to diverge from our royal justice, we have not found a way to avoid removing certain persons from our Court, nor even to avoid separating ourselves, though with unutterable pain, from the Queen, our very honoured lady and mother, during such time as may be required for the softening of her heart…
Another letter, from the King to his mother, is revolting in its harshness. After her departure from France, Marie de Médicis addressed to him some very tart pages in which she accused Richelieu of having had designs on her life. In the same letter she represented herself as flying from her son's soldiers:
I will leave you to imagine my affliction when I saw myself in flight, pursued by the cavalry with which they had threatened me! so that I would be frightened and run the faster out of your kingdom; by that means constraining me to press on thirty leagues without either eating or drinking, to the end that I might escape from their hands. (Avesnes, 28 July, 1631.)
Instead of feeling pity for the plaints of the old woman who realised that she had been conquered, Louis XIII. replied:
Madame, I am the more annoyed by your resolution to retire from my state because I know that you have no real reason for doing so. The imaginary prison, the supposititious persecutions of which you complain, and the fears that you profess to have felt at Compiègne during your life there, were as lacking in foundation as the pursuit that you pretend my cavalry made when you made your retreat.
After these words, the King delivered a pompous eulogy on the Cardinal and ended it thus:
You will permit me, an it please you, to tell you, Madame, that the act that you have just committed, and all that has passed during a period more or less recent, make it impossible for me to be ignorant of your intentions in the past, and the action that I have to expect from you in the future. The respect that I owe to you hinders me from saying any more.
It is true that Marie de Médicis received nothing that she did not deserve; but it may be possible that it was not for her son to speak to her with brutality.
In their way Gaston's letters are chefs-d'œuvre. They do honour to the psychological sensibility of the intelligent névrosé. Monsieur knew both the strength and the weakness of his brother. He knew him to be jealous, ulcerated by the consciousness of his own insignificance – an insignificance brought into full relief by the importance of the superior Being then hard at work making "of a France languishing a France triumphant"24; and with marvellous art he found the words best qualified to irritate secret wounds.
His letters open with insinuations to the effect that Richelieu had a personal interest in maintaining the enmity between "the King and his own brother," so that the King, "having no one to defend him," could be held more closely in his, Richelieu's, grasp.
I beseech … your Majesty … to have the gracious prudence to reflect upon what has passed, and to examine more seriously the designs of those who have been the architects of these plans; if you will graciously examine into this matter you will see that there are interests at stake which are not yours, – interests of a nature opposed to your interests, and which aim at something further, and something far in advance of anything that you have thought of up to the present time (March 23, 1631).
In the following letter Monsieur addresses himself directly to Louis XIII.'s worst sentiments and to his kingly conscience. He feigns to be deeply grieved by the deplorable condition of his brother, who, as he says, is reduced, notwithstanding
"the very great enlightenment of his mind" to the plight of a puppet … nothing but the shadow of a king, a being deprived of his authority, lacking in power as in will, counted as nothing in his own kingdom, devoid even of the external lustre ordinarily attached to the rank of a sovereign.
Monsieur declares that Richelieu has left the King
"nothing but the name and the figure of a king," and that for a time only; for as soon as he has ridded himself of you … and of me! … he means to take the helm and steer the Ship of State in his own name.
Monsieur depicted the new "Mayor of the Palace" actually reigning in overburdened, crushed, and oppressed France,
whom he has ruined and whose blood he has sucked pitilessly and without shame. In his own person he has consumed more than two hundred millions since he took the rule of your affairs … and he expends daily, in his own house, ten times more than you do in yours… Let me tell you what I have seen! In your kingdom not one third of your subjects eat bread made of wheat flour; another third eats bread made of oats; and another third not only is reduced to beggary, but it is languishing in need so crying that some are actually starving to death; those who are not dying of hunger are prolonging their lives with acorns, herbs, and like substances, like the lower animals. And they who are least to be pitied among these last are living on bran and on blood which they pick up in the gutters in front of the butchers' shops. I have seen these things with my own eyes, and in different parts of the country, since I left Paris.
In this Monsieur told the truth. The peasant had come to that point of physical degradation. But his sufferings could not be diminished by provoking a civil war, and Richelieu did not fail to make the fact plain in the polemics of the Recueil, written under his supervision – when it was not written in his own hand. He (Richelieu) defended his policy tooth and nail, he justified his millions, his accumulated official honours.
One of Monsieur's letters bears copious notes made throughout its length and breadth in the Cardinal's own hand. Without any of the scruples of false shame, he inspired long factums to the glory of the Prime Minister of France.
In the pages inspired by him there are passages of peculiar inhumanity. In one place, justifying the King for the treatment inflicted upon his mother, he says that "the pain of the nine months that she carried him would have been sold by her at too high a price, had the King, because of it, been forced to let her set fire to his kingdom."25
Other passages are equally heartless: "Do they blame the Prime Minister for his riches? – and if the King had seen fit to give him more? The King is free to give or to take away. Can he not act his pleasure; who has the right to say him nay?"
The Recueil shows passages teeming with cynical and pampered pride. In favour of himself Richelieu wrote:
The production