uis of La
Vieuville. He, at the same time, stood out against the danger of
concentrating all the power of the government in a single pair of hands.
"Your Majesty," he said, "ought not to confide your public business to a
single one of your councillors and hide it from the rest; those whom you
have chosen ought to live in fellowship and amity in your service, not in
partisanship and division. Every time, and as many times as a single one
wants to do everything himself, he wants to ruin himself; but in ruining
himself he will ruin your kingdom and you, and as often as any single one
wants to possess your ear and do in secret what should be resolved upon
openly, it must necessarily be for the purpose of concealing from Your
Majesty either his ignorance or his wickedrnpss." [_Memoires de
Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 349.] Prudent rules and acute remarks, which
Richelieu, when he became all-powerful, was to forget.

Eighteen months had barely rolled away when Colonel Ornano, lately
created a marshal at the Duke of Anjou's request, was again arrested and
carried off a prisoner "to the very room where, twenty-four years ago,
Marshal Biron had been confined." For some time past "it had been
current at court and throughout the kingdom that a great cabal was going
on," says Richelieu in his _Memoires,_ "and the cabalists said quite
openly that under his ministry, men might cabal with impunity, for he was
not a dangerous enemy." If the cabalists had been living in that
confidence, they were most wofully deceived. Richelieu was neither
meddlesome nor cruel, but he was stern and pitiless towards the
sufferings as well as the supplications of those who sought to thwart his
policy. At this period, he wished to bring about a marriage between the
Duke of Anjou, then eighteen years old, and Mdlle. de Montpensier, the
late Duke of Montpensier's daughter, and the richest heiress in France.
The young prince did not like it. Madame de Chevreuse, it was said,
seeing the king an invalid and childless, was already anticipating his
death, and the possibility of marrying his widowed queen to his
successor. "I should gain too little by the change," said Anne of
Austria one day, irritated by the accusations of which she was the
object. Divers secret or avowed motives had formed about the Duke of
Anjou what was called the "aversion" party, who were opposed to his
marriage; but the arrest of Colonel Ornano dismayed the accomplices for a
while. T