Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/176

162 enmity of Mazarin to the justice of Anne of Austria. But the physician who had been arrested and thrown into the Bastille made confessions which gave a clue to some very serious matters; and an officer of the king's guards was despatched to Madame de Chevreuse with an order for her retirement to Angoulême, together with the charge to conduct her there. In Angoulême was a strong château which served as a prison of state, in which her friend Châteauneuf had been confined ten years for her sake. This memory, which was always present to the mind of Madame de Chevreuse, filled her with alarm; she feared that this was the retreat to which they wished to convey her, and, preferring any extremity to a prison, she decided to re-engage in the adventures which she had confronted in 1637, and to take again, for the third time, the road to exile.

But how changed were all the circumstances about her, and how she herself was changed! Her first exile from France in 1626, had been one continuous triumph. Young, beautiful, and everywhere adored, she had quitted Nancy and the Duke of Lorraine, forever submissive to the sway of her charms, to return to Paris to trouble the heart of Richelieu. Her flight to Spain in 1637 had been a severer trial; she had been forced to travel through France in disguise, to brave more than one peril, and to endure many hardships, to find at the end of all this but five long years of impotent agitation. But she