ine years of age, in 1610, as Louis
XIII. For a time the regent, Marie de' Medici, was content to suffer
the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of
princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from
Paris into the retirement of his chateau of Villebon, and a feeble and
venal Florentine, Concini, who came to Paris in the time of Marie,
took his place. The Prince of Conde, now a Catholic, the Duke of
Mayenne, and a pack of nobles fell upon the royal treasury like hounds
on their quarry. In 1614, so critical was the financial situation,
that the States-General were called to meet in the Salle Bourbon,[132]
but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied between the
noblesse and the Tiers Etat. The insolence of the former was
intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a noble and could
obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public
burdens. The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to
usage, warned the court that despair might make the people conscious
that a soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that
when the vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to
be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the
common weal; each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their
meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a
royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met
again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar
pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy,
however, sat a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for
their orator, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to
fame.

[Footnote 132: In the Hotel de Bourbon, east of the old Louvre,
sometimes known as the Petit Bourbon. It was demolished to give place
to the new east facade of the Louvre.]

In 1616 the nobles were once more in arms, and Conde was again bought
off. The helpless court was in pitiful straits and the country
drifting to civil war, when Richelieu, who, meanwhile, had been made a
royal councillor and minister for foreign affairs, took the Conde
business in hand. He had the prince arrested in the Louvre itself and
flung into the Bastille; the noble blackmailers were declared guilty
of treason, and three armies marched against them. The triumph of the
court seemed assured, when Louis XIII., now sixteen