of August, 1643, had
already let slip more than one mysterious sentence. He wrote to Madame
de Montbazon in banishment:--"You must not despair, madam, there are
still some half-a-dozen honest folks who do not give up.... Your
illustrious friend will not abandon you. If to be prudent it were
necessary to renounce your acquaintance, there are those who would
prefer rather to pass for fools all their days." Like Montresor, he does
not once say that there was no plot framed against Mazarin, which is a
kind of tacit avowal; and when the storm burst, he took care to conceal
himself, advised Beaupuis to do the same, and ends with these
significant words:--"In embarking in Court affairs one cannot be certain
of being master of events, and whilst we profit by the lucky ones, we
must resolve to put up with the unlucky." Henri de Campion raises this
already very transparent veil.

He declares plainly that there was a project on foot to get rid of
Mazarin, and that that project was conceived, not by Beaufort, but by
Madame de Chevreuse in concert with Madame de Montbazon. "I think," says
he, "that the Duke's design did not spring from his own particular
sentiment, but from the persuasion of the duchesses de Chevreuse and de
Montbazon, who exercised entire sway over his mind and had an
irreconcilable hatred to the Cardinal. What makes me say so, is that,
whilst he was under that resolution, I always observed that he had an
internal repugnance which, if I mistake not, was overcome by some pledge
which he may have given to those ladies." There _was_, therefore, a
plot, and its real author, as Mazarin truly said, and Campion repeats,
was Madame de Chevreuse; if so, Madame de Montbazon was only an
instrument in her hands.

Beaufort, once inveigled, drew in also his intimate friend, Count de
Maille's son, the Count de Beaupuis, cornet in the Queen's horse-guards.
To them Madame de Chevreuse adjoined Alexandre de Campion, the elder
brother of Henri. "She loved him much," remarks the latter, and in a way
which, added to certain ambiguous words of Alexandre, excites suspicion
whether the elder Campion were not in fact one of the numerous
successors of Chalais. He was then thirty-three, and his brother
confesses that he had caught from the Count de Soissons the taste for
and the habitudes of faction. Beaupuis and Alexandre de Campion
approved of the plot when communicated to them, "the former," says
Henri, "believing that it would be a me