and after him the principal accused, the
Count de Beaupuis, son of the Count de Maille, had found means of
sheltering himself from the minister's first searches; he had succeeded
in escaping from France and sought an asylum at Rome under the avowed
protection of Spain. Mazarin left no stone unturned to obtain from the
Court of Rome the extradition of Beaupuis, in order that he might be
legally tried. The Pope at first could not refuse, at least for form's
sake, to have Beaupuis committed to the Castle of St. Angelo. But he was
soon liberated, and provided with a State lodging wherein he was allowed
to see nearly every one who came. Mazarin complained loudly of such
indulgence. "It is all arranged," said he, "that when necessary he may
escape, or at any rate the Duke de Vendome is furnished with every
facility for poisoning him, in order that with Beaupuis may perish the
principal proof of his son's treason. If all this happened in Barbary,
people would be highly indignant. And this is suffered to take place in
Rome, in the capital of Christianity, under the eyes and by the orders
of a Pope!"

Failing Beaupuis, Mazarin would have liked to put his hand upon one of
the brothers Campion, intimately connected as they were with Beaufort
and Madame de Chevreuse, and too closely in the confidence of both not
to know all their secrets. He himself complains, as we have seen, of
being very badly seconded. And then he had to do with emerited
conspirators, consummate in the art of concealing themselves and of
leaving no trace of their whereabouts--with the active and indefatigable
Duchess de Chevreuse, and with the Duke de Vendome, who, in order to
save his son, set about forwarding the escape of all those whose
depositions might help to convict him, or kept them somehow in his own
hands, hidden and shut up close at Anet. Mazarin was thus only able to
arrest a few obscure individuals who were ignorant of the plot, and
could throw no light upon it.

But it is needless to exhaust existing proofs in demonstration of the
fact that Mazarin did not enact a farce by instituting proceedings
against the conspirators, that he pursued them with sincerity and
vigour, and that he was perfectly convinced that a project of
assassination had been formed against him, when the existence of that
project is elsewhere averred, when, in default of a sentence of the
parliament, which could not have been given in the teeth of insufficient
evidence, neith