deficient in the energy necessary to do justice alike
to her and to himself.

Such, however, was the actual position of the several individuals; and
the fate of Marie de Medicis was decided.

A desire of repose, consequent upon his failing health, self-gratulation
at his triumph over an inimical and powerful faction, and a desire to
exculpate himself from the charge of ingratitude, would have led the
Cardinal to accede to a reconciliation with his long-estranged
benefactress; but he soon silenced these natural impulses to dwell only
upon the dangers of her reappearance in France, which could not, as he
believed, fail to circumscribe his own absolute power--a power to which
he had laboriously attained not more by genius than by crime--which had
been cemented by blood, and heralded by groans. Nor was this the only
consideration by which Richelieu was swayed when he resolved that the
Queen-mother should never again, so long as he had life, set foot upon
the soil of France. His high-soaring ambition had, within the last few
weeks, grasped at a greatness to which even she had not yet attained.
For a time, as is asserted by contemporary historians, he indulged
visions of royalty in his own person, and had in imagination already
fitted the crown of one of the first nations in Europe to his own brow;
but the dream had been brief, and he had latterly resolved to transfer
to one of his relatives the ermined purple in which he was not permitted
to enfold himself. That relative was his niece and favourite, Madame de
Comballet, whose hand he had offered to the Cardinal-Duc Francois de
Lorraine, when that Prince succeeded to the sovereignty of the duchy on
the abdication of his unfortunate brother Charles; but to avoid this
alliance the new Duke had contracted a secret marriage with his cousin
the Princesse Claude; a disappointment which the minister of Louis XIII
was desirous of repairing by causing the dissolution of the marriage of
Gaston d'Orleans with Marguerite de Lorraine, and making Monsieur's
union with his own beautiful and unprincipled niece the condition of
his restoration to favour.

Aware that the Queen-mother would resent such an indignity even to the
death, Richelieu was consequently resolved to put at once a stop to a
negotiation of which the result could not be otherwise than fatal to his
project, should the King in some moment of piety and contrition suffer
himself to remember that it was a mother as well as a Qu