ng an idea of turning it to profit on her own
account. "She had so much loftiness of spirit that she could never have
brought herself to ask anything for herself and her family; and all that
could be wrung from her was to accept what the king and queen were
pleased to give her."

Richelieu had never forgotten Mdlle. d'Hautefort's airs: he feared her,
and accused her to the king of being concerned in Monsieur's continual
intrigues. Louis XIII.'s growing affection for young Cinq-Mars, son of
Marshal d'Effiat, was beginning to occupy the gloomy monarch; and he the
more easily sacrificed Mdlle. d'Hautefort. The cardinal merely asked him
to send her away for a fortnight. She insisted upon hearing the order
from the king's own mouth. "The fortnight will last all the rest of my
life," she said: "and so I take leave of your Majesty forever." She went
accompanied by the regrets and tears of Anne of Austria, and leaving the
field open to the new favorite, the king's "rattle," as the cardinal
called him.

M. de Cinq-Mars was only nineteen when he was made master of the wardrobe
and grand equerry of France. Brilliant and witty, he amused the king and
occupied the leisure which peace gave him. The passion Louis XIII. felt
for his favorite was jealous and capricious. He upbraided the young man
for his flights to Paris to see his friends and the elegant society of
the Marais, and sometimes also Mary di Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of
Mantua, wooed but lately by the Duke of Orleans, and not indifferent, it
was said, to the vows of M. Le Grand, as Cinq-Mars was called. The
complaints were detailed to Richelieu by the king himself in a strange
correspondence, which reminds one of the "reports" of his quarrels with
Mdlle. d'Hautefort. "I am very sorry," wrote Louis XIII. on the 4th of
January, 1641, "to trouble you about the ill tempers of M. Le Grand. I
upbraided him with his heedlessness; he answered that for that matter he
could not change, and that he should do no better than he had done. I
said that, considering his obligations to me, he ought not to address me
in that manner. He answered in his usual way: that he didn't want my
kindness, that he could do very well without it, and that he would be
quite as well content to be Cinq-Mars as M. Le Grand, but, as for
changing his ways and his life, he couldn't do it. And so, he
continually knagging at me and I at him, we came as far as the
court-yard, when I said to him t