The most powerful man in France had come to pray over the corpse of the beautiful boy he had ordered killed.

The Cardinal's Last Confession: Richelieu Buries His Greatest Enemy

When France's master manipulator attended the funeral of the man he destroyed

Cardinal Richelieu attended the funeral of the beautiful young courtier he had just executed for treason — a man he had created.

The September morning was cold for Paris, and Cardinal Richelieu's red robes seemed to blaze against the grey stone of the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis as he stepped from his carriage on September 9, 1642. He had come to bury the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, the man he had ordered beheaded just days before.

Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, had been twenty-two years old when the executioner's blade found his neck in Lyon. Beautiful, ambitious, and fatally naive, he had been Louis XIII's last favorite — the young companion the melancholic king had cherished with an intensity that bordered on obsession. Richelieu himself had placed Cinq-Mars in the king's orbit, hoping to control the monarch through his affections. It was, the Cardinal would later admit, his greatest miscalculation.

The youth had turned against his patron with the recklessness of the young. He had conspired with Spain — France's mortal enemy — plotting to murder Richelieu and force a humiliating peace. When the Cardinal's spies intercepted the treaty bearing Cinq-Mars's signature, the favorite's fate was sealed. Not even the king's tearful pleas could save him.

What the mourners in that Parisian church could…

💡 Richelieu was so ill during Cinq-Mars's trial that he conducted the proceedings while being carried on a litter through the streets, his portable bed becoming a mobile courtroom.