Volume V Part 7 (1/2)
It was against Marshal Schomberg that Montmorency was advancing. The latter found himself isolated in his revolt, shut up within the limits of his government, between the two armies of the king, who was marching in person against him. Calculations had been based upon an uprising of several provinces and the adhesion of several governors, amongst others of the aged Duke of Epernon, who had sent to Monsieur to say, ”I am his very humble servant; let him place himself in a position to be served;”
but no one moved, the king every day received fresh protestations of fidelity, and the Duke of Epernon had repaired to Montauban to keep that restless city to its duty, and to prevent any attempt from being made in the province.
At three leagues' distance from Castelnaudary, Marshal Schomberg was besieging a castle called St. Felix-de-Carmain, which held out for the Duke of Orleans. Montmorency advanced to the aid of the place; he had two thousand foot and three thousand horse; and the Duke of Orleans accompanied him with a large number of gentlemen. The marshal had won over the defenders of St. Felix, and he was just half a league from Castelnaudary when he encountered the rebel army. The battle began almost at once. Count de Moret, natural son of Henry IV. and Jacqueline de Bueil, fired the first shot. Hearing the noise, Montmorency, who commanded the right wing, takes a squadron of cavalry, and, ”urged on by that impetuosity which takes possession of all brave men at the like juncture, he spurs his horse forward, leaps the ditch which was across the road, rides over the musketeers, and, the mishap of finding himself alone causing him to feel more indignation than fear, he makes up his mind to signalize by his resistance a death which he cannot avoid.” Only a few gentlemen had followed him, amongst others an old officer named Count de Rieux, who had promised to die at his feet and he kept his word.
In vain had Montmorency called to him his men-at-arms and the regiment of Ventadour; the rest of the cavalry did not budge. Count de Moret had been killed; terror was everywhere taking possession of the men. The duke was engaged with the king's light horse; he had just received two bullets in his mouth. His horse, ”a small barb, extremely swift,” came down with him and he fell wounded in seventeen places, alone, without a single squire to help him. A sergeant of a company of the guards saw him fall, and carried him into the road; some soldiers who were present burst out crying; they seemed to be lamenting their general's rather than their prisoner's misfortune. Montmorency alone remained as if insensible to the blows of adversity, and testified by the grandeur of his courage that in him it had its seat in a place higher than the heart.” [_Journal du Duc de Montmorency (Archives curieuses de l'Histoire de France),_ t. iv.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry, Duke of Montmorency, at Castelnaudary----199]
Whilst the army of the Duke of Orleans was retiring, carrying off their dead, nearly all of the highest rank, the king's men were bearing away Montnmorency, mortally wounded, to Castelnaudary. His wife, Mary Felicia des Ursins, daughter of the Duke of Bracciano, being ill in bed at Beziers, sent him a doctor, together with her equerry, to learn the truth about her husband's condition. ”Thou'lt tell my wife,” said the duke, ”the number and greatness of the wounds thou hast seen, and thou'lt a.s.sure her that it which I have caused her spirit is incomparably more painful, to me than all the others.” On pa.s.sing through the faubourgs of the town, the duke desired that his litter should be opened, ”and the serenity that shone through the pallor of his visage moved the feelings of all present, and forced tears from the stoutest and the most stolid.”
[_Journal du Due de Montmorency (Archives curieuses de l'Histoire de France)_, t. iv.]
The Duke of Orleans did not lack the courage of the soldier; he would fain have rescued Montmorency and sought to rally his forces; but the troops of Languedoc would obey none but the governor; the foreigners mutinied, and the king's brother had no longer an army. ”Next day, when it was too late,” says Richelieu, ”Monsieur sent a trumpeter to demand battle of Marshal Schomberg, who replied that he would not give it, but that, if he met him, he would try to defend himself against him.”
Monsieur considered himself absolved from seeking the combat, and henceforth busied himself about nothing but negotiation. Alby, Beziers, and Pezenas hastened to give in their submission. It was necessary for the d.u.c.h.ess of Montmorency, ill and in despair, to quicken her departure from Beziers, where she was no longer safe. ”As she pa.s.sed along the streets she heard nothing but a confusion of voices amongst the people, speaking insolently of those who would withdraw in apprehension.” The king was already at Lyons.
He was at Pont-Saint-Esprit when he sent a message to his brother, from whom he had already received emissaries on the road. The first demands of Gaston d'Orleans were still proud; he required the release of Montmorency, the rehabilitation of all those who had served his party and his mother's, places of surety and money. The king took no notice; and a second envoy from the prince was put in prison. Meanwhile, the superintendent of finance, M. de Bullion, had reached him from the king, and ”found the mind of Monsieur very penitent and well disposed, but not that of all the rest, for Monsieur confessed that he had been ill-advised to behave as he did at the cardinal's house, and afterwards leave the court; acknowledging himself to be much obliged to the king for the clemency he had shown to him in his proclamation, which had touched him to the heart, and that he was bounden therefor to the cardinal, whom he had always liked and esteemed, and believed that he also on his side liked him.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. viii. p. 196.]
The d.u.c.h.ess of Montmorency knew Monsieur, although she, it was said, had pressed her husband to join him; and all ill as she was, had been following him ever since the battle of Castelnaudary, in the fear lest he should forget her husband in the treaty. She could not, unfortunately, enter Beziers, and it was there that the arrangements were concluded.
Monsieur protested his repentance, cursing in particular Father Chanteloube, confessor and confidant of the queen his mother, ”whom he wished the king would have hanged; he had given pretty counsel to the queen, causing her to leave the kingdom; for all the great hopes he had led her to conceive, she was reduced to relieve her weariness by praying to G.o.d.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. viii. p. 196.] As for Monsieur, he was ready to give up all intelligence with Spain, Lorraine, and the queen his mother, ”who could negotiate her business herself.” He bound himself to take no interest ”in him or those who had connected themselves with him on these occasions for their own purposes, and he would not complain should the king make them suffer what they had deserved.” It is true that he added to these base concessions many entreaties in favor of M. de Montmorency; but M. de Bullion did not permit him to be under any delusion. ”It is for your Highness to choose,” he said, ”whether or not you prefer to cling to the interests of M. de Montmorency, displease the king and lose his good graces.” The prince signed everything; then he set out for Tours, which the king had a.s.signed for his residence, receiving on the way, from town to town, all the honors that would have been paid to his Majesty himself. M. de Montmorency remained in prison.
”He awaited death with a resignation which is inconceivable,” says the author of his _Memoires;_ ”never did man speak more boldly than he about it; it seemed as if he were recounting another's perils when he described his own to his servants and his guards, who were the only witnesses of such lofty manliness.” His sister, the Princess of Conde, had a memorial prepared for his defence put before him. He read it carefully, then he tore it up, ”having always determined,” he said, ”not to (chicaner) go pettifogging for (or, dispute) his life.” ”I ought by rights to answer before the Parliament of Paris only,” said he to the commission of the Parliament of Toulouse instructed to conduct his trial, ”but I give up with all my heart this privilege and all others that might delay my sentence.”
There was not long to wait for the decree. On arriving at Toulouse, October 27, at noon, the duke had asked for a confessor. ”Father,” said he to the priest, ”I pray you to put me this moment in the shortest and most certain path to heaven that you can, having nothing more to hope or wish for but G.o.d.” All his family had hurried up, but without being able to obtain the favor of seeing the king. ”His Majesty had strengthened himself in the resolution he had taken from the first to make in the case of the said Sieur de Montmorency a just example for all the grandees of his kingdom in the future, as the late king his father had done in the person of Marshal Biron,” says Richelieu in his Memoires. The Princess of Conde could not gain admittance to his Majesty, who lent no ear to the supplications of his oldest servants, represented by the aged Duke of Epernon, who accused himself by his own mouth of having but lately committed the same crime as the Duke of Montmorency. ”You can retire, duke,” was all that Louis XIII. deigned to reply. ”I should not be a king if I had the feelings of private persons,” said he to Marshal Chatillon, who pointed out to him the downcast looks and swollen eyes of all his court.
It was the 30th of October, early: and the Duke of Montmorency was sleeping peacefully. His confessor came and awoke him. ”_Surgite, eamus_ (rise, let us be going),” he said, as he awoke; and when his surgeon would have dressed his wounds, ”Now is the time to heal all my wounds with a single one,” he said, and he had himself dressed in the clothes of white linen he had ordered to be made at Lectoure for the day of execution. When the last questions were put to him by the judges, he answered by a complete confession; and when the decree was made known to him, ”I thank you, gentlemen,” said he to the commissioners, ”and I beg you to tell all them of your body from me, that I hold this decree of the king's justice for a decree of G.o.d's mercy.” He walked to the scaffold with the same tranquillity, saluting right and left those whom he knew, to take leave of them; then, having with difficulty placed himself upon the block, so much did his wounds still cause him to suffer, he said out loud, ”_Domine Jesu, accipe spiritum meum (Lord Jesus, receive my spirit)!_” As his head fell, the people rushed forward to catch his blood and dip their handkerchiefs in it.
Henry de Montmorency was the last of the ducal branch of his house, and was only thirty-seven.
It was a fine opportunity for Monsieur to once more break his engagements. Shame and anxiety drove him equally. He was universally reproached with Montmorency's death; and he was by no means easy on the subject of his marriage, of which no mention had been made in the arrangements. He quitted Tours and withdrew to Flanders, writing to the king to complain of the duke's execution, saying that the life of the latter had been the tacit condition of his agreement, and that, his promise being thus not binding, he was about to seek a secure retreat out of the kingdom. ”Everybody knows in what plight you were, brother, and whether you could have done anything else,” replied the king.
”What think you, gentlemen, was it that lost the Duke of Montmorency his head?” said Cardinal Zapata to Bautru and Barrault, envoys of France, whom he met in the antechamber of the King of Spain. ”His crimes,”
replied Bautru. ”No,” said the cardinal, ”but the clemency of his Majesty's predecessors.” Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu have a.s.suredly not merited that, reproach in history.
So many and such terrible examples were at last to win the all-powerful minister some years of repose. Once only, in 1636, a new plot on the part of Monsieur and the Count of Soissons threatened not only his power, but his life. The king's headquarters were established at the castle of Demuin; and the princes, urged on by Montresor and Saint-Ibal, had resolved to compa.s.s the cardinal's death. The blow was to be struck at the exit from the council. Richelieu conducted the king back to the bottom of the staircase.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The King and the Cardinal----204]
The two gentlemen were awaiting the signal; but Monsieur did not budge, and retired without saying a word. The Count of Soissons dared not go any further, and the cardinal mounted quietly to his own rooms, without dreaming of the extreme peril he had run. Richelieu was rather lofty than proud, and too clear-sighted to mistake the king's feelings towards him. Never did he feel any confidence in his position; and never did he depart from his jealous and sometimes petty watchfulness. Any influence foreign to his own disquieted him in proximity to a master whose affairs he governed altogether, without ever having been able to get the mastery over his melancholy and singular mind.
Women filled but a small s.p.a.ce in the life of Louis XIII. Twice, however, in that interval of ten years which separated the plot of Montmorency from that of Cinq-Mars, did the minister believe himself to be threatened by feminine influence; and twice he used artifice to win the monarch's heart and confidence from two young girls of his court, Louise de La Fayette and Marie d'Hautefort. Both were maids of honor to the queen. Mdlle. d'Hautefort was fourteen years old when, in 1630, at Lyons, in the languors of convalescence, the king first remarked her blooming and at the same time severe beauty, and her air of n.o.bility and modesty; and it was not long before the whole court knew that he had remarked her, for his first care, at the sermon, was to send the young maid of honor the velvet cus.h.i.+on on which he knelt for her to sit upon.
Mdlle. d'Hautefort declined it, and remained seated, like her companions, on the ground; but henceforth the courtiers' eyes were riveted on her movements, on the interminable conversations in which she was detained by the king, on his jealousies, his tiffs, and his reconciliations. After their quarrels, the king would pa.s.s the greater part of the day in writing out what he had said to Mdlle. d'Hautefort and what she had replied to him. At his death, his desk was found full of these singular reports of the most innocent, but also most stormy and most troublesome love-affair that ever was. The king was especially jealous of Mdlle.
d'Hautefort's pa.s.sionate devotion to the queen her mistress, Anne of Austria. ”You love an ingrate,” he said, ”and you will see how she will repay your services.” Richelieu had been unable to win Mdlle.
d'Hautefort; and he did his best to embitter the tiff which separated her from the king in 1635. But Louis XIII. had learned the charm of confidence and intimacy; and he turned to Louise de La Fayette, a charming girl of seventeen, who was as virtuous as Mdlle. d'Hautefort, but more gentle and tender than she, and who gave her heart in all guilelessness to that king so powerful, so a-weary, and so melancholy at the very climax of his reign. Happily for Richelieu, he had a means, more certain than even Mdlle. d'Hautefort's pride, of separating her from Louis XIII.; Mdlle. de La Fayette, whilst quite a child, had serious ideas of becoming a nun; and scruples about being false to her vocation troubled her at court, and even in those conversations in which she reproached herself with taking too much pleasure, Father Coussin, her confessor, who was also the king's, sought to quiet her conscience; he hoped much from the influence she could exercise over the king; but Mdlle. de La Fayette, feeling herself troubled and perplexed, was urgent.
When the Jesuit reported to Louis XIII. the state of his fair young friend's feelings, the king, with tears in his eyes, replied, ”Though I am very sorry she is going away, nevertheless I have no desire to be an obstacle to her vocation; only let her wait until I have left for the army.” She did not wait, however. Their last interview took place at the queen's, who had no liking for Mdlle. de La Fayette; and, as the king's carriage went out of the court-yard, the young girl, leaning against the window, turned to one of her companions and said, ”Alas! I shall never see him again!” But she did see him again often for some time. He went to see her in her convent, and ”remained so long glued to her grating,” says Madame de Motteville, that Cardinal Richelieu, falling a prey to fresh terrors, recommenced his intrigues to tear him from her entirely. And he succeeded.” The king's affection for Mdlle.
d'Hautefort awoke again. She had just rendered the queen an important service. Anne of Austria was secretly corresponding with her two brothers, King Philip IV. and the Cardinal Infante, a correspondence which might well make the king and his minister uneasy, since it was carried on through Madame de Chevreuse, and there was war at the time with Spain. The queen employed for this intercourse a valet named Laporte, who was arrested and thrown into prison. The chancellor removed to Val-de-Grace, whither the queen frequently retired; he questioned the nuns and rummaged Anne of Austria's cell. She was in mortal anxiety, not knowing what Laporte might say or how to unloose his tongue, so as to keep due pace with her own confessions to the king and the cardinal.
Mdlle. d'Hautefort disguised herself as a servant, went straight to the Bastille, and got a letter delivered to Laporte, thanks to the agency of Commander de Jars, her friend, then in prison. The confessions of mistress and agent being thus set in accord, the queen obtained her pardon, but not without having to put up with reproaches and conditions of stern supervision. Madame de Chevreuse took fright, and went to seek refuge in Spain. The king's inclination towards Mdlle. d'Hautefort revived, without her having an idea of turning it to profit on her own account. ”She had so much loftiness of spirit that she could never have brought herself to ask anything for herself and her family; and all that could be wrung from her was to accept what the king and queen were pleased to give her.”
Richelieu had never forgotten Mdlle. d'Hautefort's airs: he feared her, and accused her to the king of being concerned in Monsieur's continual intrigues. Louis XIII.'s growing affection for young Cinq-Mars, son of Marshal d'Effiat, was beginning to occupy the gloomy monarch; and he the more easily sacrificed Mdlle. d'Hautefort. The cardinal merely asked him to send her away for a fortnight. She insisted upon hearing the order from the king's own mouth. ”The fortnight will last all the rest of my life,” she said: ”and so I take leave of your Majesty forever.” She went accompanied by the regrets and tears of Anne of Austria, and leaving the field open to the new favorite, the king's ”rattle,” as the cardinal called him.