The clever Eleonora, when arraigned on the charge of sorcery, replied, “The only magic I have used is that of a strong mind over a weak one.”  Albert de Luynes’s head was never carried about Paris on a pike, as was hers.  But he experimented with the same kind of magic.

This wretched period after the death of the great Henry had occupied twelve years.  But in 1622 Cardinal Richelieu took his seat among the advisers of the king.  The true man had been found.  King, nobles, people of all ranks and religions, realized that a master had appeared in the land; a master inscrutable in his purposes, and clothed with a mysterious power.

The foundations of this man’s policy lay deep, out of sight of all save his own far-reaching intelligence.  Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed every obstacle to his purpose.  Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds, catholics, protestants, nobles, parliaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the king, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.

The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe.  The power of the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away.  One great noble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.

The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen; and even while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the king, across the channel to become queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act of supreme audacity was to come.  This high prelate of the Church, this cardinal-minister, formed an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great leader of the Protestants in the war upon the emperor and the pope!

He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him.  He was for France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless dominion.  By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a commonplace king one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own colossal ambition, he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.

It was great, it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one thing which revolutions and time have not swept away:  the “French Academy” alone survives as his monument.  Out of a gathering of literary friends he created a national institution, its object the establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in speaking or writing the French language.  In a country where few things endure, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.

But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition.  He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille.  Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it.  And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did the enemies of France.