Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/56

42 In the mean time, Anne of Austria had early felt the need, for her own safety, of acquainting Madame de Chevreuse with all that had passed; and, having promised to hold no intercourse with her, she charged La Rochefoucauld, who was going to Poitou, to tell her what she dared not write to her herself. La Rochefoucauld had just made the same promise to his father and Chavigny, a confidant of the cardinal, and he who pretends that he would gladly have carried off the queen and Madame de Hautefort, paused with admirable scrupulousness before the pledge he had just given, and begged Craft, the English gentleman who was so much suspected by the king and by Richelieu, to execute the queen's commission. On her part, Madame de Hautefort had despatched one of her relatives, M. de Montalais, to Tours, when affairs were at their crisis, to inform Madame de Chevreuse of the real state of things, and to tell her that she would send her a prayer-book bound in green if affairs took a favorable turn, while a prayerbook bound in red should be a token that she must hasten to provide for her safety. A fatal contempt of the sign agreed on, together with a profound distrust of the designs of Richelieu and the king, hurried Madame de Chevreuse into a desperate resolve. She chose rather to condemn herself to a new exile than to run the risk of falling into the hands of her enemies, and fled from Touraine, determining to reach Spain by journeying through the whole of the South of France.

Her sole confidant was her old admirer, the Archbishop of Tours. As he was from Bearn and had relatives on the frontier, he gave her letters of introduction with all necessary information respecting the different roads which she should take. But in her haste to fly, she forgot them all, and set out on the 6th of September, 1637, in a carriage, as if to take an