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assertion, true at bottom, in spite of the frequent grievances which the reformers had often to make the best of.

Everywhere in Europe were marks of Richelieu's handiwork. "There must be no end to negotiations near and far," was his saying: he had found negotiations succeed in France; he extended his views; numerous treaties had already marked the early years of the cardinal's power; and, after 1630, his activity abroad was redoubled. Between 1623 and 1642, seventy-four treaties were concluded by Richelieu: four with England: twelve with the United Provinces; fifteen with the princes of Germany; six with Sweden; twelve with Savoy; six with the Republic of Venice; three with the pope; three with the emperor; two with Spain: four with Lorraine; one with the Gray Leagues of Switzerland; one with Portugal; two with the revolters of Catalonia and Roussillon; one with Russia; two with the emperor of Morocco. Such was the immense network of diplomatic negotiations whereof the cardinal held the threads during nineteen years.

The foreign policy of Richelieu was a continuation of that of Henry IV.; it was to Protestant alliances that he looked for support in order to maintain the struggle against the house of Austria, whether the German or Spanish branch. So soon as he was secure that no political discussions in France itself would come to thwart his foreign designs, he marched with a firm step toward that enfeeblement of Spain and that upsetting of the empire of which Nani speaks; Henry IV. and Queen Elizabeth, pursuing the same end, had sought and found the same allies; Richelieu had the good fortune, beyond theirs, to meet, for the execution of his designs, with Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden.

The marriage of Henry IV.'s daughter with the prince of Wales was, in Richelieu's eyes, one of the essential acts of a policy necessary to the greatness of the kingship and of France. He obtained the best conditions possible for the various interests involved, but without any stickling and without favor for such and such an one of these interests, skillfully adapting words and appearance, but determined upon attaining his end.

Spain had always been the great enemy of France, and her humiliation was always the ultimate aim of the cardinal's foreign policy. The first was the question of the Valteline, a lovely and fertile valley, which, extending from the lake of Como to the Tyrol, thus serves as a natural communication between Italy and Germany. Possessed but lately, as it was, by the Gray Leagues of the Protestant Swiss, the Valteline, a Catholic district, had revolted at the instigation of Spain in 1520; the emperor, Savoy and Spain wanted to divide the spoil between them; when France, the old ally of the Grisons, interfered, and, in 1623, the forts of the Valteline had been entrusted on deposit to the pope, Urban VIII. He still retained them in 1624, when the Grison lords, seconded by a French re-enforcement under the orders of the. marquis of Cœuvres, attacked the feeble garrison of the Valteline; in a few days they were masters of all the places in the canton, and the enemies were compelled to sign the peace of Moncon (1626). The Grisons remained in

possession of the Valteline, Austria ceased to communicate with Spain, and Richelieu found himself, so to say, on the road to Vienna.

While the cardinal was holding La Rochelle besieged, the duke of Mantua had died in Italy, and his natural heir, Charles di Gonzaga, had hastened to put himself in possession of his dominions. Meanwhile the duke of Savoy claimed the marquisate of Montferrat; the Spaniards supported him; they entered the dominions of the duke of Mantua and laid siege to Casale. When La Rochelle succumbed, Casale was still holding out; but the duke of Savoy had already made himself master of the greater part of Montferrat; the duke of Mantua claimed the assistance of the king of France, whose subject he was. Here was a fresh battle-field against Spain; and, scarcely had he been victorious over the Rochellese, when the king was on the march for Italy. The siege of Casale was raised, and, by virtue of the treaty of Suza, the duchy of Mantua was secured to Richelieu's protege, the duke of Nevers. Scarcely however had Louis XIII. re-crossed the Alps when an Imperialist army advanced into the Grisons, and, supported by the celebrated Spanish general Spinola, laid siege to Mantua. Richelieu did not hesitate: he entered Piedmont in the month of March, 1630, to march before long on Pignerol, an important place, commanding the passage of the Alps. It, as well as the citadel, was carried in a few days. The result of this fresh interposition was the treaty of Cherasco (1630), where the young Giulio Mazarini won his spurs as an able and successful diplomatist.

The house of Austria, in fact, was threatened mortally. For two years. Cardinal Richelieu had been laboring to carry war into its very heart. The Thirty Years' War, now raging in all its fury, had increased a hundred-fold the emperor's power. Richelieu's genius and activity checked the progress of the great Imperialist generals, and opposed to them a warrior who, in his short career, abundantly proved that a clever system of tactics does not always ensure success. Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of Zutphen, fought at the same time the battles of Richelieu and those of the Protestant cause. After the death of the king of Sweden, the position of France became for awhile extremely difficult. The Imperialists assumed the offensive; they entered France by Burgundy and by Picardy. In the year 1640, however, Richelieu adopted a more expeditious plan; he occupied the Spaniards at home by sending support to the rebels of Catalonia and of Portugal; while, to retaliate, the government of Madrid espoused the cause of the duke of Orleans, and prepared the catastrophe which was to impart such a tragic feature to the last moments of the great cardinal. For several months past, Richelieu's health, always precarious, had taken a serious turn; it was from his sick-bed that he, a prey to cruel agonies, directed the movements of the army and, at the same time, the prosecution of Cinq-Mars. All at once his chest was attacked; and the cardinal felt that he was dying. On the 2d of December, 1642, public prayers were ordered in all the churches; the king went from St. Germain to see his minister. The cardinal was quite prepared. "I have this satisfaction," he said, "that I have never deserted the king, and that I leave his kingdom

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exalted and all his enemies abased." He commended his relatives to his Majesty, "who on their behalf will remember my services;" then, naming the two secretaries of state, Chavigny and De Noyers, he added: "Your Majesty has Cardinal Mazarin; I believe him to be capable of serving the king." And he handed to Louis XIII. a proclamation which he had just prepared for the purpose of excluding the duke of Orleans from any right to the regency in case of the king's death. The preamble called to mind that the king had five times already pardoned his brother, recently engaged in a new plot against him.

Richelieu's work survived him. On the very evening of the 3d of December, Louis XIII. called to his council Cardinal Mazarin; and the next day he wrote to the parliaments and governors of provinces: "God having been pleased to take to Himself the Cardinal de Richelieu, I have resolved to preserve and keep up all establishments ordained during his ministry, to follow out all projects arranged with him for affairs abroad and at home, in such sort that there shall not be any change." Scarcely had the most powerful kings yielded up their last breath, when their wishes had been at once forgotten: Cardinal Richelieu still governed in his grave.

The great statesman had been barely four months reposing in that chapel of the Sorbonne which he had himself repaired for the purpose, and already King Louis XIII. was sinking into the tomb. The minister had died at fiftyseven, the king was not yet forty-two; but his always languishing health seemed unable to bear the burden of affairs which had been but lately borne by Richelieu alone. He died on Thursday, May 14th, 1643. France owed to Louis XIII. eighteen years of Cardinal Richelieu's government; and that is a service which she can never forget.

For sixty years a momentous crisis had been exercising language and literature as well as society in France. They yearned to get out of it. Robust intellectual culture had ceased to be the privilege of the erudite only. it began to gain a footing on the common domain; people no longer wrote in Latin, like Erasmus; the Reformation and the Renaissance spoke French. In order to suffice for this change, the language was taking form; everybody had lent a hand to the work; Calvin with his Christian Institutes (Institution Chretienne) at the same time as Rabelais with his learned and buffoonish romance, Ramus with his Dialectics, and Bodin with his Republic, Henry Estienne with his essays in French philology, as well as Ronsard and his friends by their classical crusade. Simultaneously with the language there was being created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager. Scarcely had the translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as Montaigne says, "the breviary of women and of ignoramuses."

As for Montaigne himself, an inquiring spectator, without personal ambition, he had taken for his life's motto, "What do I know? (Que sais-je ?)" Amid the wars of religion he remained without political or religious passion.

The sixteenth century began everything, attempted everything; it accomplished and finished nothing; its great men opened the road of the

future to France; but they died without having brought their work well through, without foreseeing that it was going to be completed. The Reformation itself did not escape this misappreciation and discouragement of its age; and nowhere do they crop out in a more striking manner than in Montaigne. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rabelais, a satirist and a cynic, is, nevertheless, no skeptic, there is felt circulating through his book a glowing sap of confidence and hope. Fifty years later, Montaigne, on the contrary, expresses, in spite of his happy nature, in vivid, picturesque, exuberant language, only the lassitude of an antiquated age. "Make known to Monsieur de Geneve," said Henry IV. to one of the friends of St. Francis de Sales, "that I desire of him a work to serve as a manual for all persons of the court and the great world, without excepting kings and princes, to fit them for living Christianly, each according to their condition. I want this manual to be accurate, judicious, and such as any one can make use of." St. Francis de Sales published, in 1608, the Introduction to a Devout Life, a delightful and charming manual of devotion, more stern and firm in spirit than in form, a true Christian regimen, softened by the tact of a delicate and acute intellect, knowing the world and its ways.

Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. His independence of thought did not tend to revolt; in publishing his Discourse on Method he halted at the threshold of Christianism without laying his hand upon the sanctuary.

By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth ; he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch, which laid forever the foundations of the language. At the same moment the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.

It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it, from the hands of Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, as a first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. Peace revived with Henry IV., and the court, henceforth in accord with the nation, resumed that empire over taste, manners, and ideas, which it was destined to exercise so long and so supremely under Louis XIV. Malherbe became the poet of the court, whose business it was to please it, to adopt for it that literature which had but lately been reserved for the feasts of the learned. "All the wits were received at the Hotel Rambouillet, whatever their condition," says M. Cousin: "all that was asked of them was to have good manners; but the aristocratic tone was established there without any effort, the majority of the guests at the house being very great lords, and the mistress being at one and the same time

Rambouillet and Vivonne. The wits were courted and honored, but they did not hold the dominion."

Associations of the literary were not unknown in France; Ronsard and his friends, at first under the name of the brigade, and then under that of the Pleiad, often met to read together their joint productions, and to discuss literary questions; and the same thing was done, subsequently, in Malherbe's rooms. When Malherbe was dead, and Balzac had retired to his countryhouse on the borders of the Charente, some friends, "men of letters and of merits very much above the average," says Pellisson in his Histoire de l'Academie Française, "finding that nothing was more inconvenient in this great city than to go often and often to call upon one another without finding anybody at home, resolved to meet one day in the week at the house of one of them." Such were the commencements of the French Academy, which, even after the intervention and regulationizing of Cardinal Richelieu, still preserved something of that sweetness and that polished familiarity in their relations which caused the regrets of its earliest founders. In making of this little private gathering a great national institution, Cardinal Richelieu yielded to his natural yearning for government and dominion; he protected literature as a minister and as an admirer; the admirer's inclination was supported by the minister's influence. At the same time, and perhaps without being aware of it, he was giving French literature a center of discipline and union while securing for the independence and dignity of writers a supporting-point which they had hitherto lacked. Order and rule everywhere accompanied Cardinal Richelieu; the Academy drew up its statutes, chose a director, a chancellor and a perpetual secretary: Conrart was the first to be called to that honor; the number of Academicians was set down at forty. The letters patent for establishment of the French Academy had been sent to the parliament in 1635; they were not enregistered until 1637, at the express instance of the cardinal.

Among the earliest members of the Academy the cardinal had placed his most habitual and most intimate literary servants, Bois-Robert, Desmarets, Colletet, all writers for the theater, employed by Richelieu in his own dramatic attempts. Theatrical representations were the only pleasure the minister enjoyed, in accord with the public of his day. As for the theater, the cardinal aspired to try his own hand at the work: his literary labors were nearly all political pieces; his tragedy of Mirame, to which he attached so much value, and which he had represented at such great expense for the opening of his theater in the Palais-Cardinal, is nothing but one continual allusion, often bold even to insolence, to Buckingham's feelings toward Anne of Austria.

Many attempts have been made to fathom the causes of the cardinal's animosity to the Cid. It was a Spanish piece, and represented in a favorable light the traditional enemies of France and of Richelieu; it was all in honor of the duel, which the cardinal had prosecuted with such rigorous justice; it depicted a king simple, patriarchal, genial in the exercise of his power, con

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