not been recognized by France
and Sweden; Bernard of Saxe-Weimar succumbed, at thirty-four years of
age, on the 15th of July, 1639, after having beaten, in the preceding
year, the celebrated John van Weert, whom he sent a prisoner to Paris.
At his death the landgravate of Elsass reverted to France, together with
the town of Brisach, which he had won from the Imperialists.

The Duke of Savoy had died in 1637; his widow, Christine of France,
daughter of Henry IV., was, so far as her brother's cause in Italy was
concerned, but a poor support; but Count d'Harcourt, having succeeded, as
head of the army, Cardinal Valette, who died in 1638, had retaken Turin
and Casale from the Imperialists in the campaign of 1640; two years
later, in the month of June, 1642, the Princes Thomas and Maurice,
brothers-in-law of the Duchess Christine, wearied out by the maladdress
and haughtiness of the Spaniards, attached themselves definitively to the
interests of France, drove out the Spanish garrisons from Nice and Ivrea,
in concert with the Duke of Longueville, and retook the fortress of
Tortona as well as all Milaness to the south of the Po. Perpignan,
besieged for more than two years past by the king's armies, capitulated
at the same moment. Spain, hard pressed at home by the insurrection of
the Catalans and the revolt of Portugal at the same time, both supported
by Richelieu, saw Arras fall into the hands of France (August 9, 1640),
and the plot contrived with the Duke of Bouillon and the Count of
Soissons fail at the battle of La Marfee, where this latter prince was
killed on the 16th of July, 1641. In Germany, Marshal Guebriant and the
Swedish general Torstenson, so paralyzed that he had himself carried in a
litter to the head of his army, had just won back from the empire
Silesia, Moravia, and nearly all Saxony; the chances of war were
everywhere favorable to France, a just recompense for the indomitable
perseverance of Cardinal Richelieu through good and evil fortune. "The
great tree of the house of Austria was shaken to its very roots, and he
had all but felled that trunk which with its two branches covers the
North and the West, and throws a shadow over the rest of the earth."
[_Lettres de Malherbe,_ t. iv.] The king, for a moment shaken in his
fidelity towards his minister by the intrigues of Cinq-Mars, had returned
to the cardinal with all the impetus of the indignation caused by the
guilty treaty made by his favorite with S