reath, when their wishes had been at once
forgotten: Cardinal Richelieu still governed in his grave.

[Illustration: The Palais-Cardinal----305]

The king had distributed amongst his minister's relatives the offices and
dignities which he had left vacant; the fortune that came to them was
enormous; the legacies left to mere domestics amounted to more than three
hundred thousand-livres. During his lifetime Richelieu had given to the
crown "my grand hotel, which I built, and called Palais-de-Cardinal, my
chapel (or chapel-service) of gold, enriched with diamonds, my grand
buffet of chased silver, and a large diamond that I bought of Lopez." In
his will he adds, "I most humbly beseech his Majesty to think proper to
have placed in his hands, out of the coined gold and silver that I have
at my decease, the sum of fifteen hundred thousand livres, of which sum
I can truly say that I made very good use for the great affairs of his
kingdom, in such sort, that if I had not had this money at my disposal,
certain matters which have turned out well would have, to all
appearances, turned out ill; which gives me ground for daring to beseech
his Majesty to destine this sum, that I leave him, to be employed on
divers occasions which cannot abide the tardiness of financial forms."

The minister and priest who had destroyed the power of the grandees in
France had, nevertheless, the true instinct respecting the perpetuation
of families. "Inasmuch as it hath pleased God," he says in his will,
"to bless my labors, and make them considered by the king, my kind
master, showing recognition of them by his royal munificence, beyond what
I could hope for, I have esteemed it a duty to bind my heirs to preserve
the estate in my family, in such sort that it may maintain itself for a
long while in the dignity and splendor which it hath pleased the king to
confer upon it, in order that posterity may know that, as I served him
faithfully, he, by virtue of a complete kingliness, knew what love to
show me, and how to load me with his benefits."

The cardinal had taken pleasure in embellishing the estate of Richelieu,
in Touraine, where he was born, and which the king had raised to a
duchy-peerage. Mdlle. de Montpensier, in her _Memoires,_ gives an
account of a visit she paid to it in her youth. "I passed," she says,
"along a very fine street of the town, all the houses of which are in the
best style of building, one like another, and quite newly ma