Let me beseech you, madame, with all submission, to call now to mind the
commands you were pleased to honour me with a little before your
departure from Paris, that I should give you a precise account of every
circumstance and accident of my life, and conceal nothing. You see, by
what I have already related, that my ecclesiastical occupations were
diversified and relieved, though not disfigured, by other employments of
a more diverting nature. I observed a decorum in all my actions, and
where I happened to make a false step some good fortune or other always
retrieved it. All the ecclesiastics of the diocese wished to see me
succeed my uncle in the archbishopric of Paris, but Cardinal de Richelieu
was of another mind; he hated my family, and most of all my person, for
the reasons already mentioned, and was still more exasperated for these
two which follow.

I once told the late President de Mesmes what seems now to me very
probable, though it is the reverse of what I told you some time ago, that
I knew a person who had few or no failings but what were either the
effect or cause of some good qualities. I then said, on the contrary, to
M. de Mesmes, that Cardinal de Richelieu had not one great quality but
what was the effect or cause of some greater imperfection. This, which
was only 'inter nos', was carried to the Cardinal, I do not know by whom,
under my name. You may judge of the consequences. Another thing that
angered him was because I visited the President Barillon, then prisoner
at Amboise, concerning remonstrances made to the Parliament, and that I
should do it at a juncture which made my journey the more noticeable. Two
miserable hermits and false coiners, who had some secret correspondence
with M. de Vendome, did, upon some discontent or other, accuse him very
falsely of having proposed to them to assassinate the Cardinal, and to
give the more weight to their depositions they named all those they
thought notorious in that country; Montresor and M. Barillon were of the