Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/46

32 in her neighborhood, and of the letters of Queen Anne. She remained at Tours four long years, from 1633 to the middle of 1637, employing her leisure and activity in concocting a mysterious correspondence between the queen, Charles IV., the Queen of England, and the King of Spain.

What was the real nature of this correspondence? Hitherto, all that we have known with certainty has been that it furnished food for the gravest accusations against the queen and Madame de Chevreuse. In this correspondence, the queen availed herself of the services of one of her valets de chambre, named La Porte. Sometimes, too, she retired to the Val-de-Grâce under the pretence of offering prayers, and there wrote letters which the superior, Louise de Milley, Mother de Saint Etienne, doubly devoted to Anne of Austria both as a Catholic and a Spaniard, undertook to forward to their address. The queen and her friends believed themselves acting under an impenetrable disguise; but the police of the suspicious cardinal were on the alert. A note of Anne to Madame de Chevreuse, which had been confided by La Porte to a man of whom he believed himself sure, but who betrayed him, was intercepted; and La Porte was arrested, thrown into a dungeon of the Bastille, and examined in turn by the most skilful agents of the cardinal, Laffemas and La Poterie, by the chancellor, Pierre Séguier, and by Richelieu himself. At the same time, the chancellor, accompanied by the Archbishop of Paris, ordered the gates of the Val-de-Grâce to be opened, searched the cell of the queen, seized all her papers, and examined the superior, the Mother de Saint Etienne, after