Henry Bedford-Jones

Richelieu Raids a Tomb

Warsaw 2022

Contents

Richelieu Raids a Tomb

Richelieu Raids a Tomb

The malign magic of the Sphinx Emerald works its
spell anew in one of the famous dramas of history.

AVIGNON had been a great and flourishing city while the Popes dwelt here. Now, although they still owned it, and across the Rhone lay the foreign territory of France, the old city was full of decay and ruin and forgotten tombs and dead memories. In this January of 1618, with winter coming on late and bitter, Avignon was a most dismal place. No one lived here who must not. The only travelers were foreigners–sight-seeing French and Germans, or beef-eating Goddams. Even the few troops who garrisoned the citadel made scant pretense of policing the desolate city below.

So it was natural that gossip should center on the young man who had come here in the preceding April, renting a house close by the Minorite convent, and living like a recluse with his cook and lackey. There was no mystery about him. A bishop, as his episcopal ring testified, he lived simply and quietly, had few or no visitors and spent his whole time in the study of theology–he was forever writing sermons. A bishop exiled from Paris, said rumor, speaking truly for once.

This young Bishop of Luçon–a bishop who had never been a priest–had been exiled by King Louis XIII personally; had he not been an ecclesiastic, he would have lost his head, since the King hated him with panicked fear. Now, as he stood on the ramparts and gazed out across the wintry Rhone to the French shores beyond, his thinly handsome hard-jawed face was set in lines of melancholy. Behind him lay complete ruin, just when he had attained power as Secretary of State, thanks to his influence with the Queen-mother, Marie de Medici. Now the boy- king had clapped her into prison and seized power, sending to death or exile or the Bastille those who served her–chief among them the Bishop of Luçon, whom he hated implacably.

Standing here, looking out at the French landscape, the Bishop’s manner might well be melancholy. His family held the bishopric of Luçon in its gift, and needed to make sure of its revenues, so he had been plucked from his university studies at the age of twenty-one and created bishop–things were done that way in France. And now, though still bishop, he was a man without a future, his life ruined.

“There lies France, Cadillac; and here stand we, exiled,” he said sadly to the faithful lackey who followed him like a shadow.

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