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It is natural that Madame de Montespan seeks to excuse her people and herself if she can. At Ruel, she dared take the same tone before the Duchesse de Richelieu, who rebuked her for officiousness, and out of spite, or some other reason, Madame de Maintenon refused to dine.
The main strength of its armies, which Richelieu had employed against the Spaniards, was by Mazarin directed against the Emperor; and the anxiety with which he carried on the war in Germany, proved the sincerity of his opinion, that the German army was the right arm of his king, and a wall of safety around France.
The one was that Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria, whom I have already described to the life, who, furious at her personal monstrousness, could not as a rule forgive pretty women. The other was the Duchesse de Richelieu, maid of honour to the Princess of Bavaria, once the protector of Madame Scarron, and now her antagonist, probably out of jealousy.
The general clamour of discontent which the Jesuits raised in all the Catholic courts, against the alliance between France and the enemy of the church, at last compelled Cardinal Richelieu to take a decisive step for the security of his religion, and at once to convince the Roman Catholic world of the zeal of France, and of the selfish policy of the ecclesiastical states of Germany.
"Well, my lady," he observed, "we didn't win; but we had a little fun out of it, I hope? That combination, if it had come out, would have set us up handsomely. Better luck next time, eh?" He smiled genially. "Yes, but I was to have been your luck, and I wasn't," replied Aileen. "You are all the luck I want, if you're willing to be. Come to the Richelieu to-morrow with me for lunch will you?"
The four become fast friends, and, when asked by D'Artagnan's landlord to find his missing wife, embark upon an adventure that takes them across both France and England in order to thwart the plans of the Cardinal Richelieu.
McEachern were making determined efforts to foster the state of affairs. Of this, he had sufficient proof one evening when, after scheming and plotting in a way that had made the great efforts of Machiavelli and Richelieu seem like the work of raw novices, he had cut Molly out from the throng, and carried her off for the alleged purpose of helping him feed the chickens.
The steps of the two men were still to be heard as Richelieu, with eyes fixed upon the entrance to the tent, pursued them with his irritated glance. "Wretches!" he exclaimed, when he was alone, "go and accomplish some more secret work, and afterward I will crush you, in pure instruments of my power. The King will soon succumb beneath the slow malady which consumes him.
"Do you, indeed, believe," asked the duc de Richelieu, "that the mention of these things would produce so fatal a result?" "Most assuredly I do; and out of one hundred sick persons it would have the same effect upon sixty, perhaps eighty; indeed, I have known the shock produce instantaneous death.
The Parliament was disposed to push the matter farther, when Richelieu, always as prudent as he was firm in his relations with this celebrated order, represented to the king that there are "certain abuses which are more easily put down by passing them over than by resolving to destroy them openly, and that it was time to take care lest proceedings should be carried to a point which might be as prejudicial to his service as past action had been serviceable to it."
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