Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/71

Rh Madame de Chevreuse desired; she was not only absolved in it from her flight from France, but "from the other faults and crimes which she might have committed against the fidelity which she owed to the king;" and Richelieu thus evasively returned to his original purpose of imposing upon the unhappy exile, indirectly at least, a confession of crimes which she maintained that she had never committed—a confession at once humiliating and dangerous, and placing her wholly at his mercy. Yet such was the desire of the poor woman to behold her country and her family that, after having a second time vainly protested against it, she resigned herself to this doubtful grace. She did more; Richelieu having hastened to remit to the Abbé du Dorat and to Boispille the money necessary to acquit the debts which she had contracted in England, and to enable her to quit that court in a style befitting her rank and dignity, she consented to permit two intermediate agents to sign in her name a writing designed to satisfy Richelieu without too deeply compromising herself, in which she humbly spoke of her past misconduct in very general terms, and pledged herself never to come in secret to Paris, provided she were allowed to live in perfect freedom at Dampierre. The entreaties of the Abbé du Dorat and of Boispille, and the solemn promise which Richelieu renewed to her in a final letter of April 13th, 1639, might well have conquered her scruples, stifled her suspicions, and caused her to yield her secret instincts to the solicitations of her family.

Affairs stood in this wise; the proud duchess had bowed her head beneath the weight of exile and misfortune; she was about to depart; her adieus were already made to the Queen of England, and a vessel was ready to conduct her to Dieppe where a carriage awaited her; when suddenly, at the end of the month of April, she received the following letter, without date or signature, which we faithfully transcribe: