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"But before any dies in Brittany, Gilles de Retz or another, I will judge the case," commented Pierre de l'Hopital, President of Justice and Grand Councillor of the reigning sovereign. Throughout La Vendée and all the country of Retz had run a terrible rumour. "The Marshal de Retz is the murderer of our children. He has a thousand bodies in the vaults of his castles.
They were named M. de Richelieu, M. de Buckingham, M. de Beaufort, M. de Retz, a mighty genius himself in street warfare, in short, the king, Louis XIII., and even the queen, your noble mother, who one day condescended to say, 'Thank you. I don't know what service I had had the good fortune to render her.
She possessed that great gift of 'intimateness' le terrible don de la familiarite to which Cardinal Retz refers.
M. de Lauzun marries on Sunday, at the Louvre, whom now? I give you three guesses, six, a hundred. Madame de Coulanges says, 'It is not hard to guess; it is Madame de la Vallière. Not at all, Madame! 'Mlle. de Retz? Not a bit; you are a mere provincial. 'How absurd! you say; 'it is Mlle. Colbert. Not that, either. 'Then, of course, it is Mlle. de Créqui. Not right yet. Must I tell you, then?
Finally, good historical works should be read: "Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch among the Greeks; Cæsar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus among the Latins; and among the moderns, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, the Cardinal de Retz, Vertot, Voltaire, Raynal, and Rulhière.
Our Author, John Francis Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, Sovereign of Commercy, Prince of Euville, second Archbishop of Paris, Abbot of Saint Denis in France, was born at Montmirail, in Brie, in October, 1614.
The face of Gilles de Laval, Lord of Retz, had shone all day with an unholy lustre like that of iron in which the red heat yet struggles with the black. In the Castle of Machecoul his familiars went about, wearing expressions upon their countenances in which disgust and expectation were mingled with an overwhelming fear of the terrible baron.
I must confess, to the praise of Cardinal de Richelieu, that he had formed two vast designs worthy of a Caesar or an Alexander: that of suppressing the Protestants had been projected before by Cardinal de Retz, my uncle; but that of attacking the formidable house of Austria was never thought of by any before the Cardinal. He completed the first design, and had made great progress in the latter.
Be sure that at the worst the unnameable shall not happen to the maids. For in me there is the power to slay the evil-doer. But slay I will not unless it be to keep the lives of the maids. Because I desire for Gilles de Retz a fate greater, more terrible, more befitting iniquity such as the world hath never heard spoken of since it arose from the abyss.
The picture is an unforgetable one to any who have ever read its history or seen its stones. In the year 1650, Martial de Lomenci, one of the ministers of Charles IX, was the Seigneur of Versailles, but at the will of Catherine de Médici he was summarily strangled that she might get possession of the property and make a present of it to her favourite, Albert de Gondi, Maréchal de Retz.
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