form. In six weeks I got
her away from Port Royal; I was very diligent in paying her my respects,
and the satisfaction I had in her company, with some other agreeable
diversions, qualified in a great measure the chagrin which attended my
profession, to which I was not yet heartily reconciled. This enchantment
had like to have raised such a storm as would have given a new face to
the affairs of Europe if fortune had been ever so little on my side.

M. the Cardinal de Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not
bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed
and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public
assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe
jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me. She was sensibly
affronted, but I was enraged. For at last there was a sort of an
understanding between us, which was often ill-managed, yet our interests
were inseparable. At this time Madame de La Meilleraye, with whom,
though she was silly, I had fallen in love, pleased the Cardinal to that
degree that the Marshal perceived it before he set out for the army, and
rallied his wife in such a manner that she immediately found he was even
more jealous than ambitious. She was terribly afraid of him, and did not
love the Cardinal, who, by marrying her to his cousin, had lessened his
own family, of which he was extremely fond. Besides, the Cardinal's
infirmities made him look a great deal older than he was. And though all
his other actions had no tincture of pedantry, yet in his amorous
intrigues he had the most of it in the world. I had a detail of all the
steps he had made therein, which were extremely ridiculous. But
continuing his solicitation, and carrying her to his country seat at
Ruel,--[The Cardinal de Richelieu's seat, three leagues from
Paris.]--where he kept her a considerable time, I guessed that the lady
had not brains enough to resist the splendour of Court favour, and that
her husband's jealousy would soon give way to his interest, but, above
all, to his blind side, which was an attachment to the Court not to be
equalled. When I was in the hottest pursuit of this passion I proposed
to myself the most exquisite pleasures in triumphing over the Cardinal de
Richelieu in this fair field of battle; but on a sudden I had the
mortification to hear the whole family was changed. The husband allowed
his wife to go to Ruel as often as she pleased, and h