Richelieu in the meantime had reached his palace in the capital.
Roman despot was never more courted nor more feared; but death was
coming fast to close his triumphant career. A mortal malady wasted him:
yet the cardinal abated nothing of his pride, nor of his vindictiveness.
He exiled some of the king's personal and cherished officers; he
insulted Anne of Austria, the queen: remained seated during a visit that
she paid him, and threatened to separate her from her children. Even his
guards no longer lowered their arms in the presence of the monarch. His
demeanor to Louis XIII. was that of one potentate to another. In
December of 1642 the malady of the cardinal became inveterate, and every
hope of life was denied him. He summoned the king to his dying bed,
recapitulated the great and successful acts of his administration, and
recommended Mazarin as the person to continue its spirit, and to be his
successor. Louis promised obsequiousness. Richelieu then received the
last consolations of religion, and went through these pious and touching
ceremonies with an apparently firm and undisturbed conscience. The man
of blood knew no remorse. His acts had all been, he asserted, for his
country's good; and the same unbending pride and unshaken confidence
that had commanded the respect of men, seemed to accompany him into the
presence of his Maker. He died like a hero of the Stoics, though clad in
the trappings of a prince of the church. Most of those present were
edified by his firmness; but one bishop, calling to mind the life, the
arrogance, and the crimes of the minister, observed, that "the
confidence of the dying Richelieu filled him with terror." The crime of
having trodden out the last spark of his country's liberties, and of
having converted its monarchic government into pure despotism, is that
for which Richelieu is most generally condemned. But the state of
anarchy which he removed was license, not liberty. The task of
reconciling private independence with public peace, civil rights with
the existence of justice,--and this without precedent or tradition,
without that rooted stock on which freedom, in order to grow and bear
fruit, must be grafted,--was a conception which, however familiar to our
age, was utterly unknown, and impracticable to that of Richelieu. With
the horrors of civil war fresh in the memory of all, the general desire
was for tranquillity and peace, not liberty; to which, moreover, had it
been contemplated, the first necessary step was that of humbling the
aristocracy. It was impossible that constitutional freedom could grow
out of the chaos of privileges, and anarchy, and organized rebellion,
that the government had to contend with. In building up her social
fabric France had in fact gone wrong, destroyed the old foundations, and
rebuilt on others without solidity or system. To introduce order or add
solidity to so ill-constructed a fabric, was impossible; Richelieu found
it necessary to raze all at once to the ground, except the central
donjon of despotism, which he left standing. Had Richelieu, with all
his genius and sagacity, undertaken for liberty what he achieved for
royalty, his age would have rejected or misunderstood him, as it did
Bacon and Galileo. He might, indeed, as a man of letters, have consigned
such a political dream to the volume of an Utopia, but from action or
administration he would have been soon discarded as a dreamer. Liberty
must come of the claim of the mass; of the general enlightenment,
firmness, and probity. It is no great physical secret, which a single
brain, finding, may announce and so establish: it is a moral truth,
which, like a gem, hides its ray and its preciousness in obscurity, nor
becomes refulgent till all around it is beaming with light.--_Cabinet
Cyclopaedia--History of France._
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