the Condes, the Orleans, the Montmorencys and all the most
powerful nobles brought pressure to bear on the king and swore that
the sentence should never be carried out. But Richelieu was firm as a
tower. "It is an infamous thing," he told Louis, "to punish the weak
alone; they cast no baleful shade: we must keep discipline by striking
down the mighty." Richelieu crushed the Parlement and revolutionised
the provincial administrations. He maintained seven armies in the
field, and two navies on the seas at one and the same time. He added
four provinces to France--Alsace, Lorraine, Artois and Rousillon,
humiliated Austria and exalted his country to the proud position of
dominant factor in European politics. He foiled plot after plot and
crushed rebellion. The queen-mother, Gaston Duke of Orleans her second
son and heir to the throne, the Marquis of Cinq-Mars the king's own
favourite--each tried a fall with the great minister, but was thrown
and punished with pitiless severity. Marie herself was driven to
exile--almost poverty--at Brussels, and died a miserable death at
Cologne. The despicable Gaston, who twice betrayed his friends to save
his own skin, was watched, and when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave
birth to a son after twenty years of marriage, he was deprived of his
dignities and possessions and interned at Blois. The Marquis of
Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of Montmorency, son and grandson of two
High Constables of France, felt the stroke of the headsman's axe.

[Footnote 133: The Church of Notre Dame des Victoires commemorates the
victory.]

In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle
of success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. His physicians
talked the usual platitudes of hope, but he would have none of them,
and sent for the _cure_ of St. Eustache. "Do you pardon your enemies?"
the priest asked. "I have none, save those of the state," replied the
dying cardinal, and, pointing to the Host, exclaimed, "There is my
judge." Louis heard of his death without emotion, and simply
remarked--"Well, a great politician has gone." In six months his royal
master was gone too.

Paris, under Marie de' Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important
changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St.
Honore for the reformed Dominicans, destined later to be the theatre
of Robespierre's triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary
club.[134] In the same year the queen-reg