As the stock of goods and provisions diminished, owing to previous depredations, the methods of extortion became more savage; and the longer this savagery was drawn out, the more there were, on both sides, who contracted a taste for savagery. Soldiers amused themselves by taking pot-shots at passing civilians; by setting their mastiffs, not on bears or bulls, but on human beings; by trying, experimentally, how often and how deeply a man could be cut without dying; by lashing people to trestles and sawing them apart, as though they were logs of wood. Such, then, were the first fruits of Richelieu’s entry into the war. In the second year of the campaign the well laid plans of the Cardinal and the Capuchin resulted in the invasion of France and, very nearly, the capture of Paris. The failure of an expedition into Belgium by Richelieu’s Dutch allies and the arrival of reinforcements from Germany made it possible for the
Cardinal-Infante to break through the defences of the north-western frontier. Corbie and La Capelle were taken, the Somme was crossed and the Spaniards advanced as far as Compiegne.
Inadequately fortified and practically undefended (for all the French armies were far away on the borders or abroad), Paris seemed to lie at their mercy. There was general panic and, along with terror, a violent uprush of anger against its cause. All the popular hatred of Richelieu, accumulated during eleven years of a rule that had brought hardship to almost everyone in the country, suddenly burst out. People remembered the oppressive taxes and the Cardinal’s own fabulous wealth, the ostentatious magnificence in which he lived. They remembered, too, the senseless war in Italy, the chance to make peace, the refusal to ratify the treaty of Ratisbon -a refusal which public opinion attributed not to its real cause, the patriotic conviction that the French monarchy would be best served by war, but to the Cardinal’s personal ambition, to his desire to make himself indispensable by plunging the country into a war which he alone could direct. Well, he had had his war; and what had happened? The Spaniards were at Compiegne and in a few days more would be in Paris. The people remembered what had happened five years before at Magdeburg and, remembering, they hated the Cardinal with yet more passionate fury.
Richelieu had been ill and was suffering under the strain of overwork and unremitting anxiety. Unforeseen disaster, the terrible burden of responsibility and now the openly expressed detestation of the people were too much for him. His nerve failed. He talked of resigning, of going into retirement and leaving others to negotiate a peace with Spain. Once again, as at La Rochelle, Father Joseph stepped in. Eloquently, in the prophetic tones of Ezechiely, he told the Cardinal that, if he now resigned, he would be shirking the task to which a manifest providence had called him, he would be rejecting his cross, flouting the will of God, surrendering to the powers of evil. Listening, the Cardinal felt himself warmed and strengthened by Father Joseph’s words. The deity about whom as a young man he had written catechisms and theological treatises, whom he had defended against the heretics and daily read about in his breviary, heard about and even, he did not doubt it, substantially perceived at mass, seemed, while Ezechiely talked, to take on a new reality and saving power.
‘With God’s help’ how often (and how mechanically) he had spoken and written the words! Standing there before him in his dirty old habit, his eyes shining with the light of inspiration, his deep voice vibrant with a passionate zeal, Ezechiely made him actually feel that the words possessed a meaning. For Richelieu, the friar was a living conduit, through which there flowed into his own soul a power from somewhere beyond the world of time and contingency. From the general, Father Joseph passed in his exhortations to the particular. It was not enough, he insisted, to resist the temptation of resigning; it was not enough to go back to work in the well-guarded recesses of his palace. He must go out and show himself to the people; by his words and example he must revive their courage, give them back their confidence in the destinies of France.
Let him offer to lead them to the defence of their country, and they would follow enthusiastically. At the thought of the Parisian mob -the mob that had dug Concini from his grave and danced in obscene glee about the mutilated carcase, the mob that now hated him at least as bitterly as it had loathed the Italian favourite twenty years before -Richelieu’s sense of the saving power of God began to leave him. He demurred, he started to argue, he suggested alternative and less distressing courses of action. Father Joseph noted the signs of this moral relapse, and suddenly dropping the prophetic tone, assumed the almost brutal liberty of an old friend, a fellow soldier, an equal in birth.
Curtly, he told the Cardinal that he was behaving comme une poule mouillée. It was an insult for, in popular language, that ‘wet hen’ was an emblem of cowardice -but the insult of a friend, who meant, not to hurt only, but, by hurting, to arouse and tonify. The words had the effect which Father Joseph had hoped for. Richelieu pulled himself together. Ordering his carriage, he drove out, unguarded, into the streets of Paris. Halting where the crowds were thickest, he leaned out of the window of the coach and addressed the people, exhorting them to take heart, to remain calm, to enlist for the defence of the town. The Parisians cheered him to the echo. Admiring the courage of a man who, from being a wet hen, had transformed himself into the dryest of lions, the people forgot their hatred. For a little while the Cardinal enjoyed something like popularity.
Paris was saved by a combination of the ardour of its civilian defenders and the incompetence of the invading generals. Instead of attacking at once, the Spaniards lingered at Compiegne, giving time for the Parisian militia to be organized and for reinforcements of professional troops to be brought from distant fronts. Then, having missed their opportunity, they turned northward again without a battle, leaving only a garrison to hold the town of Corbie, which finally surrendered in November, after much prophesying on the subject by Father Joseph’s inspired Calvarians.
After this the war settled down to a dreary see-saw of indecisive successes and reverses. In northern Germany, Swedes fought against imperialists and Saxons. Dutch fought against Spaniards in the Netherlands and at sea. French armies fought Spaniards and imperialists and Bavarians in the Rhineland. Bernard of Saxe-Weimar advanced and retreated from his base in Alsace, a province of which (though the Cardinal had other plans) he optimistically hoped to make himself the ruling Duke. In Italy, French troops collaborated with Savoyards to operate rather ineffectively against the Spanish Milanese. And from Bayonne and Perpignan yet other French armies alternately invaded, and were pushed out of, Spain. The first significant French success did not come until a day or two before Father Joseph’s death, when Bernard of Saxe-Weimar captured Breisach, the fortress commanding the Spanish line of communications between Italy and the Netherlands. (A few months later Bernard providentially died of a fever, which settled the inconvenient question of his dukedom and left his hitherto quasi-independent army to be incorporated into the French forces.)
But Breisach was only a beginning, and it was not until 1643, when the Cardinal himself was dead, that the war which was to have been so brief and so crushingly decisive really turned in favour of France. At Rocroi, the Duke of Enghien completely annihilated that veteran army of the Netherlands, which was the keystone of Spanish power. From that time, the great arch of Hapsburg empire erected by Charles V and Philip II began to collapse. The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, put an end to Austrian pretensions, and that of the Pyrenees, in 1660, marked the final disintegration of Spain and the rise of France to European hegemony. But all this was far away in the future. For the last years of their lives, Father Joseph and the Cardinal were directing a war which, without being disastrous, was also very far from being successful.
During the years that followed his return from Ratisbon, Father Joseph’s political power had been steadily growing. Not only was he the Cardinal’s right-hand man; he was also in high favour with the King. Louis admired his talents, respected his integrity in all personal relationships, and had for many years been grateful for what the friar had done in trying, sometimes with success, to promote harmony and discipline within the intolerable royal family. Nor was this all. Pious to the point of superstition, Louis XIII felt something akin to awe in the presence of a foreign minister who was also a contemplative, a prophet, and the founder of one of the austerest orders in the whole Catholic Church.
He admired the effortless serenity of the man who, by incessant meditations, had schooled himself into a perfect self-control. Still more profoundly was he impressed by the sudden vehemences of the Old Testament prophet, the inspirations, sometimes personal, sometimes vouchsafed to one of the Calvarians under his direction, of the ecstatic visionary. Like
