Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/159

Rh sorry to be obliged, in the beginning, to do violence to one of the greatest men of the kingdom for his private interest, without showing a reason which compelled him to treat the duke with such rigor. In despair at being unable to convince the others of that of which he himself was fully certain, he wished much to have me in his hands. He judged, however, that it was necessary to give me time to reassure myself in order to seize me with greater facility."

We can add to all this that Henri de Campion, after being pursued and closely pressed in his retreat at Anet, the house of the Duke de Vendôme, having fled from France to Rome to find his friend, the Count de Beaupuis, recounts the persevering efforts which Mazarin made to obtain the extradition of the latter, the resistance of Pope Innocent X., and the regard which he had for Beaupuis when he was forced to place him in the Château Saint-Ange; facts which, being found both in the Carnets and letters of Mazarin and in the memoirs of Henri de Campion, place the sincerity of the movements of the cardinal and the exactness of his information beyond a doubt.

Is not this sufficient to reduce to nothing the interested doubts of La Rochefoucauld and the impassioned denials of the chief of the Fronde, the very spiritual but very unveracious Cardinal de Retz, the most bitter and the most obstinate of all the enemies of Mazarin? As to ourselves, it seems to us either that there is no longer any reliance to be placed upon history, or that we must henceforth regard it as a point fully demonstrated that there was a plot for the assassination of Mazarin which was foiled, that this plot was originated by Madame de Chevreuse and in some sort forced upon Beaufort by her and Madame de Montbazon, that Beaufort's principal accomplices were the Count de Beaupuis and Alexandre de Campion, that Henri de Campion afterwards entered into the affair at the urgent solicitation of the duke, as well as two other officers of a subordinate rank, that during the month