-as
La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the Duke a
trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That love-token--for it
amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to the
Duke.

Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire
to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he
at once communicated to France that he was coming over as the ambassador
of the King of England to treat of certain masters connected with
Spain. But Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in London
that portraits of the Queen of France were excessively abundant at York
House, the Duke's residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform
the King. Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride too
deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an expression of
Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a form of vain,
empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.

As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of
Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable as
Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning this,
the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason ("well
known to himself") and in protesting that he would go to France to see
the Queen with the French King's consent or without it. This was duly
reported to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most
Christian Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on
the part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.

Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who
was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when
considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria,
it is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the
nature of a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted
upon believing.

Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other
matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had a bitter and
secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself there
had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the Duke.
Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into
correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this
correspondence he m