ressed to her son she touchingly
complained of the indignities to which she was subjected by Monsieur and
his favourite, and implored his Majesty to extricate her from a position
against which she was unable to contend.

In his reply Louis assured her that he much regretted to learn that the
Duc d'Orleans had been wanting in respect towards her person, but
reminded her that such could never have been the case had she followed
his own advice and that of his faithful servants; and terminated his
missive by an intimation that in the event of her placing in his power
all her evil counsellors, in order that he might punish them as they
deserved, and of her also pledging herself to love, as she ought to do,
the good servants of the Crown, he might then believe that she was no
longer so ill-disposed as she had been when she left France.

The disappointed Queen-mother at once recognized the hand of the
Cardinal in this cold and constrained despatch, which was merely a
renewal of her sentence of banishment; as Richelieu well knew that the
high heart and generous spirit of the Tuscan Princess would revolt at
the enormity of sacrificing those who had clung to her throughout her
evil fortunes, in order to secure her own impunity.

Unfortunately, alike for Marie de Medicis and Gaston d'Orleans, the
amiable Infanta, who had proved so patient as well as so munificent a
host--and who had, without murmur or reproach, seen her previously
tranquil and pious Court changed by the dissipation and cabals of her
foreign guests into a perpetual arena of strife and even bloodshed--the
Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, whose very name was reverenced
throughout the whole of the Low Countries, expired on the 1st of
December at the age of sixty-eight, after having governed Flanders
during thirty-five years.

This event was a source of alarm as well as of sorrow to the royal
exiles, who could not anticipate an equal amount of forbearance from the
Marquis d'Ayetona,[202] by whom she was provisionally replaced in the
government; and who had long and loudly expressed his disgust at the
perpetual feuds which convulsed the circles of the Queen-mother and her
son, and declared that they had caused him more annoyance than all the
subjects of the King his master in the Low Countries.[203] In this
extremity both Marie and Monsieur became more than ever anxious to
procure their recall to France; and Gaston soon succeeded in
ascertaining the conditions upon w