Free The Bourbon Kings of France by Desmond Seward Page B

Monsieur fled at the first charge. Poor Montmorency, a paragon of knightly virtue, was beheaded at Toulouse. Gaston swore to relinquish evil companions and be ‘especially fond of his cousin the Cardinal de Richelieu’. He soon fled again, to join his mother.
    Louis was busy abroad, with the war of the Mantuan Succession, which broke out in 1629. (Mantua was important because it controlled one of the roads between Spanish Italy and the Empire.) The Duke of Mantua, a Gonzaga but also a Frenchman, defended his Ducal throne to the point of selling his Titians and Mantegnas. In the campaign’s early stages Richelieu took the King’s place, clad as a cavalier in clothes of
‘feuille morte’
edged with gold, wearing a cuirass of polished steel, white jackboots, a plumed hat and a rapier. In March 1630 Louis stormed the Savoyard fortress of Pignerolo, having first forced the pass of Susa where he smashed his way through three lines of fortifications. The old Duke of Savoy knelt in the snow to kiss Louis’s boots in token of submission, the war ending in April 1631 with the peace of Cherasco. Savoy ceded Pignerolo to France—with it went control of a pass over the Alps which guaranteed France access to Italy.
    An incident during the campaign shows Louis’s fatalism. The mistress of the house where he lodged fell ill with the plague. His staff were terrified but Louis, dismissing them, said simply, ‘Withdraw and pray God that your own hostesses are not stricken, but first draw my bed curtains. I shall try to get some sleep and then we will leave to-morrow morning, early and without panic.’
    During Gaston’s revolt, the Parlement of Paris had refused to ratify a royal edict condemning the rebellion. Louis soon forced them into a humiliating ratification. For the Parlement were not exempt from the revolution in government, their functions and privileges being constantly under attack. In 1641 Louis savagely told the senior President of the Paris Parlement, ‘You have been created only to judge between Maître Pierre and Maître Jean and if you continue your plots I will clip your claws so close that your flesh will suffer.’
    Culturally, the later years of Louis XIII’s reign were a period of some distinction. In 1636 Corneille’s
Le Cid
was triumphantly performed for the first time. Next year Descartes’s
Discours de la Méthode
was published. The Academie Française was set up, charged with producing a dictionary which would preserve the purity of the French language. A natural history museum, the Jardin des Plantes, was founded for the instruction of medical students. In the
chambre bleue
of her hôtel near the Louvre, Mme de Rambouillet created the salon, holding receptions at which great lords and bourgeois intellectuals could meet on equal terms. Life was becoming altogether more graceful; the forerunners of the
boulevardiers
learnt to stroll through the elegant arcades of the Place Royale as well as to strut and bow at court. There were many new buildings in which they were able to parade, notably Louis’s extension of the west wing of the Louvre and Richelieu’s Palais Cardinal. Most of the hôtels of the Marais date from this period. At Fontainebleau and at Saint-Germain the King employed Simon Vouet, one of the best painters of the day; he also commissioned Philippe de Champaigne to paint an allegory of the royal triumph over heresy at La Rochelle. However, though Louis enjoyed plays, he had no deep interest in the arts and cancelled all literary pensions when Richelieu died.
    A field in which Louis and Richelieu were less than successful was finance. Their government lived from hand to mouth, selling offices or confiscating the property of rebellious noblemen. The Cardinal increased taxes, but unlike Sully, relied on tax farmers. There were riots in Paris, peasant risings in Guyenne and Normandy—tax collectors were murdered and châteaux sacked until troops had to be sent in to restore order. One concrete