ry,--brother of the King. He who thinks
shall come to a higher idea of Richelieu's boldness, when he remembers
that for many years after this Louis was childless and sickly, and
that during all those years Richelieu might awake any morning to find
Gaston--King.

In 1626, Gaston, with the Duke of Vendome, half-brother of the King, the
Duchess of Chevreuse, confidential friend of the Queen, the Count
of Soissons, the Count of Chalais, and the Marshal Ornano, formed a
conspiracy after the old fashion. Richelieu had his hand at their lofty
throats in a moment. Gaston, who was used only as a makeweight, he
forced into the most humble apologies and the most binding pledges;
Ornano he sent to die in the Bastille; the Duke of Vendome and the
Duchess of Chevreuse he banished; Chalais he sent to the scaffold.

The next year he gave the grandees another lesson. The serf-owning
spirit had fostered in France, through many years, a rage for duelling.
Richelieu determined that this should stop. He gave notice that the law
against duelling was revived, and that he would enforce it. It was
soon broken by two of the loftiest nobles in France,--by the Count of
Bouteville-Montmorency and the Count des Chapelles. They laughed at the
law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the
law would be carried out against _them_. The Cardinal would, they
thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering
law-breakers from those days to these,--invent some quibble and screen
them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both,
and executed both on the Place de Greve,--the place of execution for the
vilest malefactors.

No doubt, that, under the present domineering of the pettifogger caste,
there are hosts of men whose minds run in such small old grooves that
they hold legal forms not a means, but an end: these will cry out
against this proceeding as tyrannical. No doubt, too, that, under the
present palaver of the "sensationist" caste, the old ladies of both
sexes have come to regard crime as mere misfortune: these will lament
this proceeding as cruel. But, for this act, if for no other, an earnest
man's heart ought in these times to warm toward the great statesman. The
man had a spine. To his mind crime was cot mere misfortune: crime was
CRIME. Crime was strong; it would pay him well to screen it; it might
cost him dear to fight it. But he was not a modern "smart" lawyer, to
seek popularity by s