Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/150

136 to the Duke de Vendôme, as he will not fail to do, those who have fled will be reassured and return, and thus enable me to lay hands on some one of them."

But why exhaust ourselves in demonstrating that Mazarin enacted no farce in the suit instituted against the conspirators, that he pursued them in good faith and with vigor, and that he was fully convinced that a project of assassination had been formed against him, when the truth of the existence of such a project is elsewhere evinced, and when, in default of a sentence of parliament which must, necessarily, have come to a stand from want of sufficient proofs, neither Beaupuis, nor any of the Campions, nor Lié, nor Brillet having been taken, we have what is still better, namely, the full and entire avowal of one of the principal conspirators, with the plan and details of the whole affair, disclosed in memoirs too recently known, but whose authenticity cannot be contested. We speak of the valuable memoirs of Henri de Campion, brother of the friend of Madame de Chevreuse, whom the latter had induced to enter with him into the service of the Duke de Vendôme, and more particularly, of the Duke de Beaufort. Henri had accompanied the duke in his flight to England after the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, and had returned with him; he possessed his entire confidence, and he recounts nothing in which he himself has not taken a considerable part. Henri was of a very different character from his brother Alexandre. He was well-informed, honorable, and courageous, no braggart, averse to all intrigues, and born to make his way in the career of arms by the most direct paths. He wrote his memoirs in the solitude in which, after the loss of his wife and daughter, he awaited death in the midst of exercises of the most fervent piety. It is not in this mood that one is apt to invent fables, and there is no