Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/21

Rh, a zealous servant of Henri IV., Peer and Master of the Hounds, and Governor of Paris and of the Isle of France, and of his first wife, , sister of Urbain de Laval, Marshal de Bois-Dauphin. Born almost with the seventeenth century, in December, 1600, she lost her mother at a very early age, and in 1617 espoused that audacious favorite of Louis XIII., who, on the faith of the fickle friendship of a king, dared attempt to overthrow the authority of the queen-mother,, destroyed , combated the Princes and the Protestants at the same time, and attempted against Richelieu himself the system of Richelieu. Let us ask in passing, Is it not unworthy of history to attribute the elevation of Luynes to the caprice of a king, who takes one of his pages, a petty gentleman, for his prime minister, solely because he finds him skilful in the art of training falcons? Such, perhaps, was the beginning of the fortunes of Luynes,—such was not the cause of it. This petty gentleman, son of Captain de Luynes, as he was called, one of the bravest and most intelligent of the officers of Henri IV., was himself a man of talent and courage, who, under the direct inspiration of Louis XIII., honorably restored and sustained while he lived the work of the great king which Richelieu had at first opposed in his character of the favorite of Marie de Medicis, and which he afterwards undertook with great zeal, gradually turning against his old friends and his first protectress, so far as to exile her precisely as De Luynes had done. The young