I will leave you to imagine my affliction when I saw myself in flight, pursued by the cavalry with which they had threatened me! so that I would be frightened and run the faster out of your kingdom; by that means constraining me to press on thirty leagues without either eating or drinking, to the end that I might escape from their hands. (Avesnes, 28 July, 1631.)
Instead of feeling pity for the plaints of the old woman who realised that she had been conquered, Louis XIII. replied:
Madame, I am the more annoyed by your resolution to retire from my state because I know that you have no real reason for doing so. The imaginary prison, the supposititious persecutions of which you complain, and the fears that you profess to have felt at Compiègne during your life there, were as lacking in foundation as the pursuit that you pretend my cavalry made when you made your retreat.
After these words, the King delivered a pompous eulogy on the Cardinal and ended it thus:
You will permit me, an it please you, to tell you, Madame, that the act that you have just committed, and all that has passed during a period more or less recent, make it impossible for me to be ignorant of your intentions in the past, and the action that I have to expect from you in the future. The respect that I owe to you hinders me from saying any more.
It is true that Marie de Médicis received nothing that she did not deserve; but it may be possible that it was not for her son to speak to her with brutality.
In their way Gaston's letters are _chefs-d'œuvre_. They do honour to the psychological sensibility of the intelligent _névrosé_. Monsieur knew both the strength and the weakness of his brother. He knew him to be jealous, ulcerated by the consciousness of his own insignificance--an insignificance brought into full relief by the importance of the superior Being then hard at work making "of a France languishing a France triumphant"[24]; and with marvellous art he found the words best qualified to irritate secret wounds.
His letters open with insinuations to the effect that Richelieu had a personal interest in maintaining the enmity between "the King and his own brother," so that the King, "having no one to defend him," could be held more closely in his, Richelieu's, grasp.