The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [218]
It is not our intention to give an account of the siege but merely to describe events connected with the tale that we are relating. We need but state that the expedition succeeded, to the vast astonishment of the King and to the greater glory of Monsieur le Cardinal. The English, repulsed foot by foot, beaten in all encounters and crushed in the passage of the Ile de Loix, were forced to sail away, leaving numerous casualties on the field, including five colonels, three lieutenant-colonels, two hundred and fifty captains and twenty gentlemen of rank. Four pieces of cannon fell into the hands of the French; sixty flags, likewise captured, were taken to Paris by Claude de Saint-Simon and suspended amid great pomp under the arches of Nôtre-Dame. Te Deums were chanted in camp and the news spread throughout France.
The Cardinal was now free to carry on the siege without having anything to fear, for the present at least, from the English. But this security proved short-lived indeed.
An envoy of the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Montagu, having been captured, proof was obtained of a league between the Empire, Spain, England and Lorraine. This league was of course directed against France. Further proof was found in Buckingham’s quarters which he had been forced to abandon more hurriedly than he expected; these papers confirmed the existence of this league; and, as the Cardinal later asserted in his Memoirs, they strongly compromised Madame de Chevreuse and consequently the Queen.
The whole responsibility for meeting this problem fell squarely on the Cardinal’s shoulders, for no man can be a despotic minister without incurring vast liabilities. All the resources of his mighty genius were employed night and day in learning and analyzing the vaguest rumors afoot in the great kingdoms of Europe.
The Cardinal was acquainted with Buckingham’s activity and more particularly with the hatred Buckingham bore him. If the league which threatened France were to triumph, Richelieu’s influence would be at an end; Spanish policy and Austrian policy would have representatives in the Louvre cabinet, where as yet they had only partisans, and he, Richelieu, the French minister, the national minister par excellence, would be ruined. Though the King obeyed him like a child, he detested him too, as a child detests his master. Louis XIII would surely abandon him to the personal vengeance of the Duc d’Orléans and the Queen; Richelieu would then be lost and France perhaps with him. It was imperative that he prepare now against any such eventuality.
And so, in the little house by the bridge of La Pierre that served as Richelieu’s headquarters, night and day in rapid succession and in ever-increasing numbers, the couriers arrived, paused and departed on their mysterious errands. There were monks who wore the frock with such an ill grace that obviously they belonged to the church militant . . . there were women somewhat inconvenienced by their costume as pages and not wholly able to conceal their rounded forms despite the wide trousers they wore . . . and there were peasants with blackened hands but of noble form who smacked of the man of quality a league off. . . . There were also other less agreeable visitors, for it was reported that the Cardinal had narrowly escaped assassination two or three times.
Truth to tell, certain enemies of His Eminence accused him of having himself set these bungling assassins to work in order to create justification for reprisals if these became necessary. But statements made by ministers or by their enemies are not always to be credited.
These attempts did not prevent the Cardinal, to whom his most inveterate detractors have never denied personal bravery, from making nocturnal excursions, sometimes to communicate important orders to the Duc d’Angoulême, sometimes to confer with the King, sometimes to interview a messenger he was unwilling to meet at home.
Meanwhile the musketeers, having little to do, were not under strict orders. They