Learning opentelemetry: setting up and operating a modern observability system 1st edition austin pa
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Learning OpenTelemetry 1 / converted Edition Ted Young
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978-1-098-14718-1
[LSI]
Dedication
For Dylan Mae
Austin
For the OpenTelemetry cofounders
—Ted
Foreword
In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native technologies, observing an application’s performance and health is no longer a luxury, but a critical imperative. As microservice architectures become the norm, distributed systems sprawl, and data volumes explode, traditional monitoring tools struggle to keep pace. This is where OpenTelemetry emerges as a game changer, offering a standardized and vendor-neutral approach to observability. OpenTelemetry is not just a technology; it also represents a paradigm shift, “crossing the chasm” from just monitoring to complete observability. OpenTelemetry is changing the industry from silos to unified telemetry.
As the authors Ted Young and Austin Parker explain, OpenTelemetry is about embracing a unified telemetry data-driven approach to observability, leveraging open standards like the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), and being empowered to build and operate fully observable, resilient, high-performing cloud-native applications.
LearningOpenTelemetryserves as your comprehensive guide to unlocking the power of OpenTelemetry. Whether you’re a seasoned engineer grappling with the complexities of distributed tracing, a newcomer seeking to understand the fundamentals, or an organization embarking on its observability journey, this book equips you with the knowledge and practical insights to navigate this transformative technology.
The authors emphasize that observability requires understanding the cloud-native paradigm’s broader context and inherent challenges. For example, microservice architectures, while offering agility and scalability, introduce new complexities. Traditional monitoring tools, designed for monolithic applications, often struggle to capture the intricate interactions and dependencies between services. This lack of coherent visibility leads to visibility gaps, making it difficult to pinpoint performance bottlenecks, diagnose issues, and ensure application health.
LearningOpenTelemetryhighlights how OpenTelemetry addresses these challenges head-on by providing a unified and vendor-agnostic approach to collecting and exporting telemetry data. This unified approach uses metrics, traces, logs, and profiling to offer a correlated view of your application’s health and performance.
The authors delve into the intricacies of OpenTelemetry, guiding us through core concepts of OpenTelemetry and pursuing instrumentation strategies for different programming languages and frameworks such as shared libraries and shared services. They illuminate best practices for collecting and processing telemetry data using the OpenTelemetry Collector; they survey deployment patterns for scaling telemetry collection for platforms such as Kubernetes, serverless and data streaming. They’ll show you how to build scalable telemetry pipelines by balancing wide approaches with deep ones, centralized architectures with decentralized ones, and more. The final chapter explores advanced topics, such as generative AI, FinOps, and cloud sustainability.
We live in exciting times. As the worlds of cloud-native services and AI applications converge, it’s critical to use telemetry data to understand large-scale model behavior. That’s why the next giant leap in OpenTelemetry’s journey will be to provide an open framework to fully support observability for smart, distributed GenAI applications. Observability, as a practice, must incorporate viable AI models to collect and analyze telemetry at massive scale.
So, open this book, dive into the world of OpenTelemetry, and unlock the power of observability for your cloud-native journey. Remember, the path to mastery starts with a single step, and this book is a guide to your first and following steps in that journey.
Over the past decade, observability has gone from a niche discipline talked about at events like Monitorama or Velocity (RIP) to a multibillion-dollar industry that touches every part of the cloud native world. The key to effective observability, though, is highquality telemetry data. OpenTelemetry is a project that aims to provide this data and, in doing so, kick off the next generation of observability tools and practices.
If you’re reading this book, it’s highly likely that you’re an observability practitioner—perhaps a developer or an SRE—who is interested in how to profile and understand complex systems in production. You may have picked it up because you’re interested in what OpenTelemetry is, how it fits together, and what makes it different from historical monitoring frameworks. Or maybe you’re just trying to understand what all the hype is about. After all, in just five years, OpenTelemetry has gone from an idea to one of the most popular open source projects in the world. Regardless of why you’re here, we’re glad you came.
Our goal in writing this book was not to create a “missing manual” for OpenTelemetry you can find lots of documentation and tutorials and several other fantastic books that dive deep into implementing OpenTelemetry in specific languages (see Appendix B for details on those). Our goal was to present a comprehensive guide to learning OpenTelemetry itself. We want you to understand not just what the different parts are but how they fit together and why. This book should equip you with the foundational knowledge you’ll need not only to implement OpenTelemetry in a production system but also to extend OpenTelemetry itself—either as a contributor to the project or by making it part of an organizational observability strategy.
In general, this book has two main parts. In Chapters 1 through 4, we discuss the current state of monitoring and observability and show you the motivation behind OpenTelemetry. These chapters help you understand the foundational concepts that underpin the entire project. They’re invaluable not just for first-time readers but for anyone who’s been practicing observability for a while. Chapters 5 through 9 move into specific use cases and implementation strategies. We discuss the “how” behind the concepts introduced in earlier chapters and give you pointers on actually implementing OpenTelemetry in a variety of applications and scenarios.
If you’re already well versed in observability topics, you might be considering skipping ahead to the latter part of the book. While we can’t stop you, you’ll probably get something out of reviewing the initial chapters. Regardless, as long as you go into this book with an open mind, you should get something out of it—and keep coming back, time after time. We hope this book becomes the foundation for the next chapter of yourobservability journey.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank their entire team at O’Reilly for constant support, encouragement, and grace. Special thanks go out to our acquisitions editor, John Devins, and our developmental editor,
Sarah Grey. We also thank our tech reviewers for their invaluable feedback, as well as Alolita Sharma for her contribution.
This book would not be possible without the work of every OpenTelemetry contributor across the years.
Austin
I’d like to thank my coauthor for convincing me that writing another book would be a good idea, actually.
To my partner, Mandy: thank you for putting up with the long hours and unpredictable nature of writing. Tadaganiarracht.1
I would also like to thank the many people whom I used as sounding boards over the past year or so, and whose friendship and ideas have made it into these words; they include (but are not limited to) Phillip Carter, Alex Hidalgo, Jessica Kerr, Reese Lee, Rynn Mancuso, Ana Margarita Medina, Ben Sigelman, Pierre Tessier, Amy Tobey, Adriana Villela, Hazel Weakly, and Christine Yen. All y’all great humans.
Ted
I’d like to thank my coauthor for being convinced that writing another book would be a good idea, actually.
I would like to thank all the maintainers of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Both projects have the same goal: to create a universal standard for describing the computer operations of distributed systems. Choosing to put egos aside, merge the projects, and accept a years-long setback as we started over with OpenTelemetry was a difficult decision. I appreciate the bravery and trust that it took to do this.
I would also like to thank the maintainers of the Elastic Common Schema project. This was another case in which having two
standards meant that we had no standards. Their willingness to merge ECS into the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions was another important step toward our shared goal of a universally accepted telemetry system.
It’s a common (and funny) joke to point at OpenTelemetry and bring up the classic XKCDcomic #927, “How Standards Proliferate”. But I must say, aucontraire,Monsieurchuckles!OpenTelemetry did create a new standard, but in the process it deprecated three other standards. So we are now at minus two standards. I believe this may be a record in the history of standardization. I’m hoping for at least minus four before we’re done.
This is a book about the difficult problems inherent to large-scale distributed computer systems, and about how to apply OpenTelemetry to help solve those problems.
Modern software engineering is obsessed with end-user experience, and end users demand blazing-fast performance. Surveys show that users will abandon ecommerce sites that take more than two seconds to load. You’ve probably spent a fair amount of time trying to optimize and debug application performance issues, and if you’re like us, you’ve been frustrated by how inelegant and inefficient this process can be. There’s either not enough data or too much of it, and what data there is can be riddled with inconsistencies or unclear measurements.
Engineers are also faced with stringent uptime requirements. That means identifying and mitigating any issues before they cause a meltdown, not just waiting for the system to fail. And it means moving quickly from triage to mitigation. To do that, you need data.
But you don’t need just any data; you need correlateddata—data that is already organized, ready to be analyzed by a computer system. As you will see, data with that level of organization has not been readily available. In fact, as systems have scaled and become more heterogeneous, finding the data you need to analyze an issue has become even harder. If it was once like looking for a needle in a
haystack, it’s now more like looking for a needle in a stack of needles.
OpenTelemetry solves this problem. By turning individual logs, metrics, and traces into a coherent, unified graph of information, OpenTelemetry sets the stage for the next generation of observability tools. And since the software industry is broadly adopting OpenTelemetry already, that next generation of tools is being built as we write this.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Technology comes in waves. As we write this in 2024, the field of observability is riding its first real tsunami in at least 30 years. You’ve chosen a good time to pick up this book and gain a new perspective!
The advent of cloud computing and cloud native application systems has led to seismic shifts in the practice of building and operating complex software systems. What hasn’t changed, though, is that software runs on computers, and you need to understand what those computers are doing in order to understand your software. As much as the cloud has sought to abstract away fundamental units of computing, our ones and zeros are still using bits and bytes.
Whether you are running a program on a multiregion Kubernetes cluster or a laptop, you will find yourself asking the same questions:
“Why is it slow?”
“What is using so much RAM?”
“When did this problem start?”
“Where is the root cause?”
“How do I fix this?”
The astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.”2 That certainly applies here: to see why a new approach to observability is so important, you first need to be familiar with traditional observability architecture and its limitations.
This may look like a recap of rudimentary information! But the observability mess has been around for so long that most of us have developed quite the pile of preconceptions. So even if you’re an expert—especiallyif you’re an expert—it is important to have a fresh perspective. Let’s start this journey by defining several key terms we will use throughout this book.
Observability: Key Terms to Know
First of all, what is observability observing? For the purposes of this book, we are observing distributed systems. A distributedsystemis a system whose components are located on different networked computers that communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another.3 There are many kinds of computer systems, but these are the ones we’re focusing on.
WHAT COUNTS AS DISTRIBUTED?
Distributed systems aren’t just applications running in the cloud, microservices, or Kubernetes applications. Macroservices or “monoliths” that use service-oriented architecture, client applications that communicate with a backend, and mobile and web apps are all somewhat distributed and benefit from observability.
At the highest level, a distributed system consists of resources and transactions: Resources
These are all the physical and logical components that make up a system. Physicalcomponents, such as servers, containers, processes, RAM, CPU, and network cards, are all resources. Logicalcomponents, such as clients, applications, API endpoints, databases, and load balancers, are also resources. In short, resources are everything from which the system is actually constructed.
Transactions
These are requests that orchestrate and utilize the resources the system needs to do work on behalf of the user. Usually, a transaction is kicked off by a real human, who is waiting for the task to be completed. Booking a flight, hailing a rideshare, and loading a web page are examples of transactions.
How do we observe these distributed systems? We can’t, unless they emit telemetry. Telemetryis data that describes what your system is doing. Without telemetry, your system is just a big black box filled with mystery.
Many developers find the word telemetryconfusing. It’s an overloaded term. The distinction we draw in this book, and in systems monitoring in general, is between user telemetry and performance telemetry:
Usertelemetry
Refers to data about how a user is interacting with a system through a client: button clicks, session duration, information about the client’s host machine, and so forth. You can use this data to understand how users are interacting with an ecommerce site, or the distribution of browser versions accessing a webbased application.
Performancetelemetry
This is not primarily used to analyze user behavior; instead, it provides operators with statistical information about the behavior and performance of system components. Performance data can come from different sources in a distributed system and offers developers a “breadcrumb trail” to follow, connecting cause with effect.
In plainer terms, user telemetry will tell you how long someone hovered their mouse cursor over a Checkout button in an ecommerce application. Performance telemetry will tell you how long it took for that checkout button to load in the first place, and which programs and resources the system utilized along the way.
Underneath user and performance telemetry are different types of signals. A signalis a particular form of telemetry. Event logs are one kind of signal. System metrics are another kind of signal. Continuous profiling is another. These signal types each serve a different purpose, and they are not really interchangeable. You can’t derive all the events that make up a user interaction just by looking at system metrics, and you can’t derive system load just by looking at transaction logs. You need multiple kinds of signals to get a deep understanding of your system as a whole.
Each signal consists of two parts: instrumentation—code that emits telemetry data—within the programs themselves, and a transmission systemfor sending the data over the network to an analysistool, where the actual observing occurs.
This raises an important distinction: it’s common to conflate telemetry and analysis, but it’s important to understand that the system that emits the data and the system that analyzes the data are separate from each other. Telemetryis the data itself. Analysisis what you do with the data.
Finally, telemetry plus an analysis equals observability. Understanding the best way to combine these two pieces into a
useful observability system is what this book is all about.
OBSERVABILITY IS A PRACTICE
Observability doesn’t stop at the telemetry and analysis; it’s an organizational practice, similar to DevOps. In many ways, observability is the foundation of modern software development practices—it underpins everything we do, from continuous integration and deployment to chaos engineering, developer productivity, and more. Your observability sources are as wide and varied as your teams and software, and that data can be collected, analyzed, and used for continuous improvement of your entire organization. We hope you walk away from this book equipped with the foundational knowledge required to establish an observability practice in your organization, built on OpenTelemetry!
A Brief History of Telemetry
Fun fact: it’s called telemetrybecause the first remote diagnostic systems transmitted data over telegraph lines. While people often think of rockets and 1950s aerospace when they hear the term telemetry, if that was where the practice had started, it would have been called radiometry. Telemetry was actually first developed to monitor power plants and public power grids—early but important distributed systems!
Of course, computer telemetry came later. The specific history of user and performance telemetry maps to changes in software operations, and to the ever-increasing processing power and network bandwidth that have long driven those trends. Understanding how computer telemetry signals came to be and how they evolved is an important part of understanding their current limitations.
The first and most enduring form of telemetry was logging. Logsare text-based messages meant for human consumption that describe the state of a system or service. Over time, developers and operators improved how they stored and searched these logs by creating specialized databases that were good at full-text search.
While logging did tell you about individual events and moments within a system, understanding how that system was changing over time required more data. A log could tell you that a file couldn’t be written because the storage device was out of space, but wouldn’t it be great if you could track available storage capacity and make a change beforeyou ran out of space?
Metricsare compact statistical representations of system state and resource utilization. They were perfect for the job. Adding metrics made it possible to build alerting on data, beyond errors and exceptions.
As the modern internet took off, systems became more complex, and performance became more critical. A third form of telemetry was added: distributedtracing. As transactions grew to include more and more operations and more and more machines, localizing the source of a problem became more critical. Instead of just looking at individual events—logs—tracing systems looked at entire operations and how they combined to form transactions. Operations have a start time and an end time. They also have a location: on which machine did a particular operation occur? Tracking this made it possible to localize the source of latency to a particular operation or a machine. However, because of resource constraints, tracing systems tended to be heavily sampled and ended up recording only a small fraction of the total number of transactions, which limited their usefulness beyond basic performance analysis.
The Three Browser Tabs of Observability
While there are other useful forms of telemetry, the primacy of these three systems—logs, metrics, and tracing—led to the concept known today as the “three pillars of observability.”4 The three pillars are a great way to describe how we currently practice observability—but they’re actually a terrible way to designa telemetry system!
Traditionally, each form of observability—telemetry plus analysis— was built as a completely separate, siloed system, as described in Figure 1-1.
A logging system consists of logging instrumentation, a log transmission system, and a log analysis tool. A metrics system consists of metrics instrumentation, a metrics transmission system,
Figure 1-1. Apillar ofobservability
and a metrics analysis tool. The same is true for tracing—hence the three pillars described in Figure 1-2.
1-2. The threepillars ofobservability
This is basic verticalintegration: each system is built to purpose, end to end. It makes sense that observability has been built this way it’s been evolving over time, with each piece added as it was needed. In other words, observability is structured this way for no better reason than historical accident. The simplest way to implement a logging system or a metrics system is to do it in isolation, as a standalone system.
So, while the term “three pillars” does explain the way traditional observability is architected, it is also problematic—it makes this architecture sound like a good idea! Which it isn’t. It’s cheeky, but I prefer a different turn of phrase—the “three browser tabs of observability.” Because that’s what you’re actually getting.
Figure
Emerging Complications
The problem is that our systems are not composed of logging problems or metrics problems. They are composed of transactions and resources. When a problem occurs, these are the only two things we can modify: developers can change what the transactions do, and operators can change what resources are available. That’s it. But the devil is in the details. It’s possible for a simple, isolated bug to be confined to a single transaction. But most production problems emerge from the way many concurrent transactions interact.
A big part of observing real systems involves identifying patterns of bad behavior and then extrapolating to figure out how certain patterns of transactions and resource consumption cause these patterns. That’s really difficult to do! It’s very hard to predict how transactions and resources will end up interacting in the real world. Tests and small-scale deployments aren’t always useful tools for this task, because the problems you are trying to solve do not appear outside of production. These problems are emergent side effects, and they are specific to the way that the physical reality of your production deployment interacts with the system’s real users.
This is a pickle! Clearly, your ability to solve these problems depends on the quality of the telemetry your system is emitting in production.
The Three Pillars Were an Accident
You can definitely use metrics, logs, and traces to understand your system. Logs and traces help you reconstruct the events that make up a transaction, while metrics help you understand resource usage and availability.
But useful observations do not come from looking at data in isolation. You can’t look at a single data point, or even a single data type, and understand anything about emergent behavior. You’ll almost never find the root cause of a problem just by looking at logs
or metrics. The clues that lead us to answers come from finding correlations acrossthese different data streams. So, when investigating a problem, you tend to pivot back and forth between logs and metrics, looking for correlations.
This is the primary problem with the traditional three pillars approach: these signals are all kept in separate data silos. This makes it impossible to automatically identify correlations between changing patterns in our transaction logs and changing patterns in our metrics. Instead, you end up with three separate browser tabs, and each one contains only a portion of what you need.
Vertical integration makes things even worse: if you want to spot correlations across metrics, logs, and traces, you need these connections to be present in the telemetry your systems are emitting. Without unified telemetry, even if you were able to store these separate signals in the same database, you would still be missing key identifiers that make correlations reliable and consistent. So the three pillars are actually a bad design! What we need is an integrated system.
A Single Braid of Data
How do you triage your systems once you’ve noticed a problem? By finding correlations. How do you find correlations? There are two ways—with humans and with computers:
Humaninvestigation
Operators sweep through all the available data, building a mental model of the current system. Then, in their heads, they try to identify how all the pieces might be secretly connected. Not only is this approach mentally exhausting, but it’s also subject to the limitations of human memory. Think about it: they’re literally looking for correlations by using their eyeballsto look at squiggly lines. In addition, human investigation suffers as organizations
grow larger and systems become more complex. Turning something you see in a squiggly line into an actionable insight becomes harder when the required knowledge is distributed around the world.
Computerinvestigation
The second way to find correlations is by using computers. Computers may not be good at forming hypotheses and finding root causes, but they are very good at identifying correlations. That’s just statistical mathematics.
But again, there’s a catch: computers can find correlations only between connectedpieces of data. And if your telemetry data is siloed, unstructured, and inconsistent, then the assistance computers can offer you will be very limited. This is why human operators are still using their eyeballs to scan for metrics while also trying to memorize every line in every config file.
Instead of three separate pillars, let’s use a new metaphor: a single braid of data. Figure 1-3 shows my favorite way of thinking about high-quality telemetry. We still have three separate signals—there’s no conflating them—but the signals have touch points that connect everything into a single graphical data structure.
Figure 1-3. Abraidofsignals, making iteasier to findcorrelations between them
With a telemetry system like this, it’s possible for computers to walk through the graph, quickly finding distant but important connections. Unified telemetry means it’s finally possible to have unified analysis,
which is critical to developing a deep understanding of the emergent problems inherent to live production systems. Does such a telemetry system exist? It does. And it’s called OpenTelemetry.
Conclusion
The world of observability is in the process of changing for the better, and at the heart of that change will be a newfound ability to correlate across all forms of telemetry: traces, metrics, logs, profiling, everything. Correlation is the key to unlocking the workflows and automation that we desperately need to keep up with this world of ever expanding complex systems. This change is already happening, but it will take some time for the transition to be complete and for observability products to explore the kind of features that this new data unlocks. We are only at the beginning. But since the heart of this transition is a shift to a new kind of data, and since OpenTelemetry is now the widely agreed upon source of that data, understanding OpenTelemetry means understanding the future of observability in general.
This book will be your guide to learning OpenTelemetry. It is not meant to be a replacement for OpenTelemetry documentation, which can be found on the project’s website. Instead, this book explains the philosophy and design of OpenTelemetry and offers practical guidance on how to wield it effectively.
In Chapter 2, we explain the value proposition OpenTelemetry brings, and how your organization benefits from replacing proprietary instrumentation with instrumentation based on open standards.
In Chapter 3, we take a deeper dive into the OpenTelemetry model and discuss the primary observability signals of traces, metrics, and logs, along with how they’re linked via context.
In Chapter 4, we get hands-on with OpenTelemetry in the OpenTelemetry Demo, giving you an overview of its components and of how OpenTelemetry fits into an observability stack.
In Chapter 5, we dive into instrumenting an application and provide a checklist to help ensure that everything works and that the telemetry is high-quality.
In Chapter 6, we discuss instrumenting OSS libraries and services and explain why library maintainers should care about observability.
In Chapter 7, we review the options for observing software infrastructure—cloud providers, platforms, and data services.
In Chapter 8, we go into detail on how and why to build different types of observability pipelines using the OpenTelemetry Collector. In Chapter 9, we provide advice on how to deploy OpenTelemetry across your organization. Since telemetry—especially tracing—is a cross-team issue, there are organizational pitfalls when rolling out a new observability system. This chapter will provide strategies and advice on how to ensure a successful rollout.
Finally, our appendices include helpful resources on the structure of the OpenTelemetry project itself, as well as links to further reading and other titles.
If you are brand new to OpenTelemetry, we strongly suggest reading up through Chapter 4 first. After that, the chapters can be read in any order. Feel free to skip to whichever section is most relevant to the task you need to accomplish.
1 Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture andHistory ofan Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
2 Carl E. Sagan (author and presenter), in Cosmos: APersonalVoyage, season 1, episode 2, “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” produced by Adrian Malone (Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service, 1980).
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
At seventeen, in the year 1602, the Marquis du Chillou laid down his sword and his title, left M. de Pluvinel’s Academy and returned to the University. A year or two later, there was no more eager student of philosophy and theology than the Abbé de Richelieu. There are merry stories of the time which suggest that he and his private tutor M. Mulot, afterwards his chaplain, were concerned in wild pranks, such as robbing gardens and orchards, which would have been impossible under the strict discipline of old Master Yon. There is a pretty legend which tells that the Cardinal, in his last days, sent for an old college gardener whose peaches he had stolen—the good man’s name was Rabelais, and he came from Chinon—and paid him a large sum of money as compensation for being both robbed and frightened: at that time, an unlucky wretch who was summoned before the Eminentissime went in very reasonable fear of his life.
The sober University, in its clock-work course, hardly knew what to make of Armand de Richelieu. He swallowed theology as he had swallowed grammar, and the ordinary progress of learning was far too slow for him. After studying independently with several learned masters, especially with Richard Smith, an Englishman, of the University of Louvain, afterwards Vicar Apostolic in England, he was ambitious to hold a public disputation at the Sorbonne.
The doctors of that reverend foundation refused the unusual request; but Richelieu, who ardently desired to become an adept in controversy, persuaded his old College of Navarre to be less timidly narrow and conservative. Here the lad of nineteen, worn to a shadow by studying hard eight hours a day, set forth his thesis and defended it against all comers. The listeners were slightly uneasy, for his argument was based rather on philosophy than on strictly theological grounds, and was indeed flavoured by the influence of Jansenius, who came to Paris about this time. But the long struggle between Gallicans and Ultramontanes, Bishops and Jesuits, was only at its beginning, and Jansenism proper was not born; the sixteenth century had known little more than the fiercer, simpler quarrel between Catholics and Protestants, the heretic and the faithful. As a fact, in his own original way, Richelieu held all the doctrines approved and taught by the Sorbonne.
There was every reason why the future Bishop should hurry on his theological studies. The Chapter of Luçon had completely lost its patience; and this is not surprising, for both the cathedral and the episcopal palace were falling into ruins, while no money could be extracted from M. Yver and Madame de Richelieu, until, at last, a decree of the Parliament forced them to provide for the necessary repairs. If the bishopric was to remain in the Richelieu family, Armand must be consecrated with as little delay as possible.
He was not yet near the canonical age of a bishop. He had, however, been ordained deacon in 1606, and early in that year, while he was still hurrying through his last examinations, King Henry wrote to his Ambassador at Rome, recommending the Abbé Armand Jean du Plessis, royally nominated to the bishopric of Luçon, to the favour of His Holiness Paul V., and praying for an early consecration on the ground of the young man’s “mérite et suffisance,” which were such as to make the legal delays morally quite unnecessary.
Such dispensations were common enough, but this one was slow in coming. Paul V., the Borghese Pope, had not long been elected, but was already known for his determined will and strong sense of duty. He was not a man who would lightly break through any laws or customs of the Church, and certainly not to please King Henry IV., whose conversion he distrusted and whose way of life he condemned. The Abbé de Richelieu, hearing nothing from Rome, resolved to wait no longer. In the autumn of 1606 he left Paris and travelled hard to Rome, very impatient, and quite sure that if he could once gain the Pope’s ear and plead his own cause, it would speedily be won.
He was not mistaken, though Paul V. received him coldly on his first introduction by the Ambassador: a self-confident, presumptuous boy who expected to be ordained priest and consecrated bishop at twenty-one, was not likely to meet with instant favour from an elderly, legal-minded martinet. Various tales are told, by friends and enemies, as to the means by which Richelieu quickly gained his ends at the Papal Court. Some say that he added a year to his age, or falsified the date of his baptism, and that the Pope, hearing too late of the trick, observed, “This young man will be a great knave.”
On the other hand, it is said that, struck with admiration of Richelieu’s genius, the Pope made no difficulty, saying, “It is just that one whose wisdom is above his age should be ordained under age.” On the whole, the latter story seems the more probable; but neither has any real foundation.
It is certain, at any rate, that the Abbé de Richelieu made the best use of the months he spent at Rome, and convinced Paul V., himself a clever man, that King Henry’s praise was not undeserved. He preached before the Pope, and his ready learning and splendour of diction were considered miraculous. He carried on arguments with His Holiness on the morals of Henry and other subjects, so firmly yet so respectfully that Paul was altogether charmed. He studied the spirit of Rome, that mysterious city which was at once “the capital of the Catholic world and the centre of the civilized, world.” As the centre of an older world still, of ancient history and pagan art, Rome had not the same attraction for him. All that was to come later, when the Cardinal attempted, without great success, to pose as one of the chief art patrons in Europe.
At this time, his whole mind was given to present advancement, and his intuition as to his own interest was faultless. He learned Italian and Spanish, he courted the Cardinals and other dignitaries, and while dazzling his company with all the light French brilliancy of his young wit, he pleased them by the gentleness and modesty he knew well how to assume. Thus he saved himself from much envy and jealousy which might have nipped his career at the outset.
On April 17, 1607, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, aged twenty-two years and seven months, was ordained priest and consecrated bishop by the Cardinal de Givry, who had always been his friend. The suffering diocese of Luçon was no longer without a head, and the Roman Easter bells rang in one of the greatest figures in French history.
PART II
THE BISHOP OF LUÇON
1607-1622
CHAPTER I
1607-1608
A Bishop at the Sorbonne—State of France under Henry IV —Henry IV., his Queen and his Court—The Nobles and Princes—The unhealthiness of Paris—The Bishop’s departure.
The diocese of Luçon—in itself one of the least desirable in France—had to endure some months more of neglect before its new Bishop came into residence.
Richelieu’s return to France, in the early summer of 1607, was a return to Paris and the University, which now saw the unusual sight of a bishop among its students. There were still examinations to pass and distinctions to gain: the theological honours of the Sorbonne were not lightly bestowed, even on a dignitary of the Church. But Richelieu, once more, triumphantly satisfied his examiners, and in the autumn of 1607 he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of the Sorbonne. One may say that the old institution was his mother and his child. She trained the brain that transformed France and directed Europe; she was made illustrious by his munificent care, and his feverish life at last found rest in the shadow of her walls.
FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER THE PICTURE BY FRANÇOIS
PORBUS
In the winter of 1607-8, Henry IV was at the height of his power and popularity, although certain dreamers, prophets of evil, necromancers, and such-like creatures of the darkness, suggested that his useful reign was near its end. For whatever the immoralities of his life may have been—and they had a fatal influence on society —his political ends and means were excellent. His favourite dream was of a general European peace with religious toleration: and one need only realize the state of France a hundred years later— populations crushed by cruel taxation and dying of famine by thousands—to see what the difference might have been if Henry and Sully could have worked their will for twenty years more, keeping the nobles in check, insisting on justice, studying and carrying into practical effect the means of making the country prosperous by useful public works, by careful training in agriculture and other industries. Under Henry and his minister—who did not, however, share his master’s popularity—farming was encouraged, rivers were made navigable, bridges were built, waste lands were reclaimed, new roads were made, new crops, such as potato and beet-root, were introduced, a labourer’s tools were safe from seizure for debt. France was beginning to breathe after long horrors of civil war: feudal oppression was passing away, and the country generally was on the eve of better things, under the eye of a King who, absolute as he certainly meant to be, loved his people and wished them well. All was doomed to fall to pieces with the death of Henry, followed by the regency of a stupid woman and the new policy of Richelieu.
Henry was himself the centre point of Paris, the beloved city, which he made his home, only leaving the Louvre for visits to SaintGermain and Fontainebleau, or for hunting excursions in the country. Small, active, carelessly dressed, ever on the move, the Parisians saw their King among them at all seasons, all hours, riding or driving in the streets, equally eager after business and amusement; gambling at the famous Fair of Saint-Germain—held during the early months of the year on the left bank of the Seine—or planning with Sully, within the walls of the Arsenal, those economies and financial rearrangements which gained him the reputation of being a miser Henry was a curious character, half a hero, made of gold and of clay; but his Parisians, as a rule, saw little but the gold. He was a familiar
sight among them, the frank, good-natured man, with his rosy cheeks, long nose, and whitening beard and hair. They loved him because he was affable, kind, easy-going, polite, and yet could be stern and royal enough when any one displeased him. They loved his keen interest in the city, shown by plans for rebuilding and improving, some of which were already carried out when he died, while some lingered on into the days of Richelieu. His favourite works were the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, the Pont Neuf, the Hôtel de Ville, burnt by the Commune, and the Place Royale, now known as Place des Vosges.
The Court at the Louvre, under a King impatient of etiquette— except when Parliament or Protestants had to be awed, or foreign ambassadors received—seems to have been lacking in dignity. It had not the splendour, the mystery, the romance and cultivation, however evil, of the Valois; nor had it the stiff magnificence of an absolute Louis XIV. The tone of the Court, in fact, was bourgeois; and it is curious enough that the early seventeenth century in England, as well as in France, had this intimate flavour of something like vulgarity. James I. cracked coarse jokes with his courtiers and slapped them on the back. Henry IV., though a far more intelligent man, encouraged the same kind of manners among his jovial companions at the Louvre.
The King and Queen quarrelled perpetually, and in public. The young Bishop of Luçon, admitted at Court not only by the means of his elder brother, a popular courtier, but through the King’s personal liking for him, saw with his own eyes scenes to which the Cardinal de Richelieu alluded in his Memoirs, dictated many years later. With all his enmity towards Marie de Médicis, he had to acknowledge that the King’s love-affairs, result of the besetting weakness of a great prince, might justly have irritated a woman less naturally jealous, proud and unforgiving. As one intrigue succeeded another during the whole of Henry’s later life, and as the Queen could never be brought to take these things meekly, it follows that peace seldom reigned at the Louvre. Henry, on his side, turned the tables on his wife by injurious suspicions almost certainly without foundation, and the Duc de Sully himself told Richelieu that he had never known a week pass
without a quarrel. On one occasion, in passionate anger, Marie raised her hand to box Henry’s ears! “M. de Sully stopped her so roughly that her arm was bruised, crying out with an oath: ‘Are you mad, Madame? He could have your head off in half an hour. Have you lost your senses, not to remember what the King can do?’ The King went out; and after much coming and going he (Sully) appeased them both. Afterwards, the Queen complained that the Duc de Sully had struck her.”
Sometimes these quarrels had a comic side. The Queen would refuse to dine as usual with the King, and would order a small table to be brought into her cabinet. On these occasions the goodtempered Henry, who never could be angry long, and who preferred living at peace with a wife he did not really dislike, would send her choice morsels from his table, even from his plate. If Marie’s temper had not reached the level of accepting a peace-offering, she would coldly return the dainties. Court gossip declared that she was afraid of poison.
In his book on Marie de Médicis, M. Batiffol gives a curious description, drawn from old records, of the royal dinner at the Louvre when the King and Queen dined together.
No one sat at the table with them, but a privileged public, including the whole Court, crowded the room. The Swiss guards stood round the table, bearded, fierce, German-speaking warriors, “old servants of the Crown,” leaning on their halberds, dressed in velvet, white, blue, and red. Six gentlemen served their Majesties, taking the dishes from the “officers of the kitchen,” who brought them into the room. The menu, a very considerable one, was drawn up by the Queen’s maître d’hôtel and counter-signed by herself. Sometimes, generally on Sundays only, the King’s musicians gave a concert during dinner As a rule, there was a good deal of conversation. The King and Queen talked to the courtiers who stood in ranks behind the Swiss Guard; not of “affairs,” but of any light and interesting subject that might occur.
On such an occasion the King may well have shown special favour to a young man in episcopal purple, of middle height, very thin, with
black hair, a delicate, pointed face, keen dark eyes, under a broad brow full of intelligence, quick to catch and respond to every slightest glance from Royalty. Young Richelieu—“My Bishop,” Henry called him—may have had stories to tell of his Roman experiences, stories pleasing to the King, who had taken the trouble to push his fortunes; and the wit, the memory, the reasoning power, which amazed the Sorbonne, may also have been noticeable at the Louvre.
Sometimes the talk led on to thin ice, and Richelieu knew it: for instance, when the King reminded him of certain things he had written about the Maréchal de Biron, his godfather’s son, beheaded for conspiracy in 1602. It was a lesson as to giving a handle to jealous enemies, which Richelieu did not soon forget.
Dinner over, the Queen returned to her dogs and monkeys and parrots, her gaming, card-tricks and music, or walked in the garden, or drove in the city, perhaps visiting her divorced predecessor, Queen Marguerite de Valois—large, self-indulgent, with a flaxen wig —who led an extravagantly immoral but literary and charitable life in Paris, the adopted sister and aunt of the Royal family; perhaps driving out to Saint-Germain to see the children, who lived there, a large household, legitimate and otherwise, under the care of the Baronne—afterwards Marquise—de Montglat.
The King too, though never forgetful of public business, had his amusements of many kinds—gambling, hunting, building, making love. Sometimes he and the Queen dined out together in Paris, frequently with M. Zamet, banker and money-lender and Henry’s very faithful servant, at his palatial hôtel in the Marais. Sometimes they delighted the Parisians by sharing their amusements in the streets and on the bridges—jousts, sham fights in masquerade, running at the ring. Then were to be seen the young nobles of France, infected with Henry’s own dash and daring recklessness, flinging themselves so desperately into these mock battles that real wounds were given and lives were lost. The famous Baron de Bassompierre, chief of the “dix-sept seigneurs,” leaders of fashion, to whose exclusive ranks Henry de Richelieu also belonged, was nearly killed in one of these encounters in the paved court of the Louvre.
Hardouin de Péréfixe, tutor to Louis XIV and afterwards Archbishop of Paris, wrote for his pupil’s instruction a history of his royal grandfather, Henry the Great. Drawing on his own memory, or something very near it, he sketched the state of society at the beginning of the century. While the King and his ministers were working hard in lifting their country out of the slough of war and abject misery, most of the nobles were finding mischief for their idle hands to do. The Memoirs of Bassompierre and others prove that Péréfixe told less than the truth: he was too courtier-like, too careful of offending young royal ears, to give much idea of the brutality of manners which existed in the society of Henry IV. and Marie de Médicis; but he describes vividly the temper of the men among whom Armand de Richelieu, clever, poor, observant, shielded by his elder brother’s popularity, was growing into manhood.
“The French noblesse,” says Péréfixe, “being at peace, could not be doing nothing; some spent their time in hunting; some in the company of ladies; some studied belles lettres and mathematics; others travelled in foreign lands; others kept up the exercise of war under Prince Maurice in Holland. But many, with itching hands, eager to show off their courage without leaving home, became punctilious, and at the least word, or at crossing glances, had their swords in their hands. Thus a mania for duels seized on the minds of gentlemen. And these encounters were so frequent that the nobles shed nearly as much blood between themselves as their enemies had made them lose in battle.”
Royal edicts, one after another, had little effect in cooling these hot spirits; especially as Henry usually forgave a crime which his laws threatened with forfeiture of life and goods. In the following reign such laws were less of a mockery, as the nobles found to their cost. Louis XIII. was made of harder stuff; and Richelieu had learnt by personal experience—his brother’s death in a duel with the Marquis de Thémines—the need of a strong hand.
There was not much personal distinction, at this time, among the grandees of France. Henry de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, nearest in blood to the throne, was a shy, gloomy youth, mean in looks and character, and though really clever and ambitious, eccentric to the
verge of madness. “Monsieur le Prince,” says Brunet, “père du grand Condé, s’imaginoit être quelque fois oiseau et d’autres fois sanglier, et se cachoit sous les lits et sous les tables comme s’il avoit été dans les forêts.” It was not till 1609, after Richelieu had retired to his diocese, that King Henry, for his own ends, married this young man to the marvellously beautiful Mademoiselle de Montmorency. Then, to the King’s rage and disgust, Condé proved that he had some individuality, and ran away with his wife to Flanders. But for the dagger of Ravaillac, a European war might have followed on this elopement.
François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, the King’s first cousin, uncle of Condé, brother of Henry’s old companion-in-arms and once himself a fighter, was elderly, deaf, and incapable. He appeared little at Court, but lived in Paris on the revenues of the Abbey of SaintGermain-des-Prés. His wife, Louise Marguerite de Lorraine, a brilliant mischief-maker, with her mother, the lively old Duchesse de Guise, widow of Henry le Balafré, was among the few really intimate friends of Queen Marie de Médicis. Henry IV., who had once thought of marrying her, ended by disliking her, resenting her influence over his wife. But she kept her place at Court, and after the Prince de Conti’s death she is said to have secretly married Bassompierre, first of courtiers and her lover of many years.
Charles de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons, usually known as Monsieur le Comte, was the Prince de Conti’s half-brother, his mother, Françoise d’Orléans-Longueville, having been the second wife of Louis I., Prince de Condé. Though outwardly loyal to Henry IV., he was perhaps the most dangerous enemy the King had in his own immediate circle. Ambitious, proud and violent, he never forgave Henry for breaking an early promise of marrying him to his sister, Catherine of Navarre. Jealous of his own position, he resented every mark of favour shown by the King, especially the honours showered on the young Duc de Vendôme, Henry’s eldest legitimised son. If a fit of the sulks had not kept Monsieur le Comte out of Paris at the time of Henry’s death, he would have disputed the regency with the Queen. Not being on the spot, he was neither clever, strong, nor popular enough to disturb the appointed order of things.
Henry de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier—familiar to the Richelieu family as lord of Champigny—was of no account at all, in court or camp, during his later years. But he had been an heroic soldier. Son of that Montpensier, the leader and patron of “the Monk” Richelieu and his brother, who swept Poitou with fire and sword in the religious wars, and of his furious Duchess, the soul of the League, the sister of Henry le Balafré, who brought about the murder of Henry III., he, with so many other Catholic princes and nobles, fought his uncles and the League under the banner of Henry of Navarre. A terrible wound in the face received at Dreux, where he commanded a regiment of cavalry, brought Henry de Montpensier’s public career to an end at twenty-seven. His life, after this, was one of more or less suffering. He fell out of favour for some time with the King, being suspected of sympathy with the Biron conspiracy. He married, in middle life, his cousin Henriette Catherine de Joyeuse, another of the Queen’s intimate friends, and they had one daughter, born in 1605, the heiress of all the immense Montpensier possessions; by her marriage with Gaston of France the mother of the famous Anne Marie d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier, commonly known as La Grande Mademoiselle.
M. de Montpensier appears to have lived a great deal at Champigny, a favourite among his many châteaux. Thirty years after his death, on her way to visit the new splendours of Richelieu, his granddaughter found that he was still beloved there, although the almighty Cardinal, levelling his house with the ground, would gladly have destroyed his memory
The Duke died at his hôtel in Paris on the last day of February 1608, wasted by a long decline, and devotedly nursed to the end by his eccentric Capuchin father-in-law, Père Ange, in the world Duc de Joyeuse. “Bon prince,” l’Estoile says of Montpensier, “and as such regretted and mourned by the King, the nobility and all the people.” The usual amusements of the Carnival were stopped; even the little Dauphin was not allowed to dance his ballet before the King. Three weeks later a funeral service was held at Notre Dame, with an oration by the popular preacher M. Fenouillet, Bishop of Montpellier. The ceremony, which was simple, derived dignity from the presence
of one hundred and twenty poor men in long robes, carrying torches. Another and grander service was held in April. Between these two occasions, the last male descendant of Robert, son of Saint Louis, was conveyed with an escort of three hundred horse to Champigny, and was buried in the chapel which still exists there.
The Duc de Montpensier’s widow married Charles, Duc de Guise, who, with his brothers, represented the princely House of Lorraine at the French Court. By birth and position, of course, he was one of the first men in France; personally he was of little account, and hardly a worthy descendant of the great Dukes of the sixteenth century. He had not even their looks, being short and snub-nosed. He was witty, agreeable and generous, very frivolous and a great flirt. Richelieu, in the first volume of his Memoirs, gives Henry IV.’s own estimate of this head of the Guise family: “Plus de montre que d’effet”; rather brilliant in company, and judged capable of great things by those who did not know him; but so slothful and lazy that he cared for nothing but pleasure, “et qu’en effet son esprit n’était pas plus grand que son nez.”
CLOISTER AT CHAMPIGNY
Among the more conspicuous nobles, the Duc de Bouillon, the malcontent leader of the Protestants, was a constant thorn in the King’s side. The Duc d’Épernon, an ambitious, adventurous courtier of Gascon origin, had been a favourite of Henry III., and was not much loved by Henry IV., who did not trust him. His son, Bernard, married Gabrielle-Angélique de Bourbon, the King’s daughter by the Marquise de Verneuil. This alliance was roughly declined by the old Duc de Montmorency, Constable of France, to whom Henry proposed it for his splendid young son, that Henry de Montmorency, last of the direct line, whose high head was among those to be mown down, at a future day, by the implacable Cardinal.
Among left-hand Royalties, the oldest was Charles de Valois, Comte d’Auvergne, afterwards Duc d’Angoulême, a man of a certain courage and humorous charm, but foolish, dishonest, and unlucky. He was the son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, who married the Comte d’Entraigues after the King’s death, and became the mother of Henriette d’Entraigues, Marquise de Verneuil, Henry IV.’s passion and the special abhorrence of Marie de Médicis. In a fit of jealous fury, and in the supposed interest of her children, Madame de Verneuil intrigued with Spain against Henry. It was only the King’s enduring infatuation which saved her half-brother, the Comte d’Auvergne, from losing his head. As it was, he spent ten of his best years, from 1606 to 1616, shut up in the Bastille.
Henry’s own son by Gabrielle d’Estrées, Duchesse de Beaufort, the legitimised prince who was first known as César-Monsieur, then created Duc de Vendôme, was the spoilt favourite among his children. No more odious young fellow was to be found in France. Spiteful, of vicious tendencies, “c’est un mauvais drôle, violent, moqueur, brutal.” There was every probability that César, whom the King openly preferred to his little lawful son, the future Louis XIII., would one day be the most powerful of all the princes. Henry had already arranged a marriage for him with a rich heiress of royal blood, Françoise de Lorraine, only daughter of the Duc de Mercœur.
Such were the bearers of some of the grandest old names in France, during the last years of Henry IV.’s reign. Hardly one of these men had any influence on affairs, either of the court or the nation. Concini and his wife, the Queen’s Italian favourites, were powerful at the Louvre and lived splendidly, though they worked chiefly behind the scenes as long as Henry lived. The Duc de Sully, with his royal friend and master, governed the kingdom. His wise white beard, his strict and careful management of the finances, demanded and obtained respect. This clever and obstinate Huguenot was certainly the best-feared man in France. He was also cordially hated for his grim, uncompromising manners, his impatient scorn of all courtly weaknesses and extravagances. But he was the one great statesman in France, beside whom the other ministers were of no account, and he would have laughed aloud, in the year 1608, if any one had prophesied coming disgrace in his ears: an honourable disgrace, it is true, but never to be retrieved; while, equally incredible, the young bishop of an obscure diocese was to wield a power beyond his own most ambitious dreams.
Paris was an unpleasant place of abode in the winter of 1607-8, when Armand de Richelieu was engaged in making his way at Court. According to L’Estoile, the weather was extremely indisposed, “nebulous, damp and unhealthy.” Great and small alike suffered from “force cathairres, avec force petites véroles, rougeoles, et pourpre:” from which many died, among others the Duc de Bouillon’s daughter. People died suddenly of suffocation on the chest, the season being “tellement desreiglée” that it rained perpetually day and night. The terrible gloom was made responsible for horrid crimes of all sorts. The new year brought so severe a frost that men, women, cattle and birds died of cold in the fields about the city, or were partially frozen and maimed for life.
Evidently the Bishop of Luçon was among the sufferers from this abnormal season. He was obliged to excuse himself, on account of illness, from obeying the King’s command to preach before the Court at Easter. After this disappointment, he was ill in bed for about four months, as we know from his letters to M. d’Alincourt, son of the Duc de Villeroy, Henry’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had actively
befriended him as ambassador in Rome. Richelieu was not ungrateful, and there is something more than worldly politeness in these graceful, sincere letters, written from his sick room to welcome M. and Mme. d’Alincourt back to Paris and to lament that his “fascheuse maladie” hinders him from hastening to kiss their hands.
In the late autumn of the same year the claims and grumblings of Richelieu’s far-off diocese at last made themselves effectively heard. There may have been other reasons for his rather hasty departure in dark December days. The doctors may have advised country air as a help towards shaking off an almost chronic state of fever. Or possibly, after so long an absence from Court, his place in the royal favour may have seemed less secure, and he was not rich enough to buy influential friends. Or Henry, who liked men to do their duty, may have given a hint too plain to be neglected.
In any case, having borrowed four horses and a coachman, the Bishop of Luçon left Paris behind him, and started on his long unpleasant journey to the dreary marshes of Lower Poitou.
CHAPTER II
1608-1610
Richelieu arrives at Luçon—His palace and household—His work in the diocese—His friends and neighbours.
While his coach rumbled and jolted through miry ways towards the south-west, Armand de Richelieu had time to consider what he had done and hoped to do. The objects of his ambition were always the same: political power and the command of men. His career might seem to have met with a sharp check in these long months of illness, followed by banishment to remote wilds, so far from the sources of light and of favour, Paris and the King. But if he felt this, he was not the man to be seriously disheartened.
A diocese, after all, is not a bad school for governing one’s fellowcreatures. Some of Richelieu’s biographers think that he deliberately took up the work of a resident bishop with the idea of gaining experience for the larger career on which his heart was set: some, that in his state of chronic poverty he found the provinces a more honourable abode than the capital. In any case, he threw himself with eager energy into work which was difficult enough; the province of Poitou, and especially Lower Poitou, being desolated and devoured by war and by taxes, torn to pieces by schism, unhealthy, dismal, neglected, its old traditions, both of Church and State, fallen into ruin and forgetfulness. And Luçon itself, with its fine old cathedral lifted proudly and sadly above the mouldy roofs of the bourg, neither town nor village, seemed to lie at the other end of the world, near upon the sea, beyond leagues of wide wet marsh scattered with miserable little farms and cottages and crossed by half-drained roads and stagnant canals, the few wretched peasants shivering with fever.
The occasional visits of Jacques du Plessis de Richelieu, who had now been dead sixteen years, were Luçon’s latest experience of
episcopal care
Certainly the diocese owed nothing to the Richelieu family, which had swallowed its revenues and let its cathedral tumble down; but with a touching faith in the future not unjustified, it offered a hearty welcome to young Armand de Richelieu. He entered his territory at Fontenay-le-Comte, a cheerful little town which prided itself, like the rest of Poitou, on having produced many great men. The Bishop was received here, not only by the inhabitants, but by a deputation from the Chapter of Luçon, and they harangued each other with various flattering remarks. But through the formalities of the time there pierces that clear decided meaning which is never absent from any utterance of Richelieu’s, even as a young man of three-and-twenty. His speeches were never written for him. There were anger and injury in the minds of the Luçon Chapter, and he knew it. “I am not happy enough,” he said, “to have all your hearts.” But now that he and they were to live together, things would be very different. They would learn to know him, and to wish him well. For his part, he was ready to forget the past, highly esteeming the law which the ancients called “amnistie d’oubliance.” Possibly there was a wry face here and there among the old canons at this touch of generosity, and it was not very long, in fact, before they began to quarrel with their new Bishop; but he had brought with him from Paris the fame of a preacher and a theologian, and the dull little town was en fête on that saint’s day in December when Richelieu first said mass and preached in his own cathedral.
All, indeed, seemed peace and harmony. Even the Protestants, who were rather numerous in the diocese and in all that part of France, had a friendly word from the new Bishop on his arrival. One of the speeches which has been preserved was addressed to the crowd in the street. After telling them how much he valued their joyful faces and cries of welcome, he added, “I know there are those in this company who are divided from us as to belief; in spite of which, I hope we may be united in affection, and I will do all that is possible to bring this to pass.”
Here one seems to see the germ of that idea of religious toleration which influenced Richelieu’s policy in later years. If he could persuade the Huguenots to be “Frenchmen first and Protestants
afterwards,” he was always willing to give them liberty of worship. If he crushed them, it was because they were a fighting faction which endangered, in his view, the unity of France and the power of the monarchy.
From his dilapidated palace, the heavy old buildings of which leaned up against cathedral walls battered by wars and by weather, Richelieu wrote in the spring of 1609 to a certain Madame de Bourges, who lived in Paris, in the Rue des Blanc-manteaux, near the newly fashionable Place Royale. This lady seems to have been a friend of his mother’s family, and to have been married to one of a succession of distinguished physicians who practised in Paris during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was certainly an obliging person. Possibly her husband or son had attended the young Bishop in his four months’ illness.
He begins his letter by thanking Madame de Bourges for a million kindnesses, and especially for some ecclesiastical vestments she had sent him. He found himself badly off for many necessary ornaments, former bishops of Luçon having left little behind them. And no wonder: they had not made it their residence for sixty years, we are told, and fighting Huguenots had stormed and devastated the place.
“... I am now in my barony,” he writes, “beloved of everybody, so they tell me, and I can only repeat it; but you know all beginnings are good. I shall have no lack of occupation here, I assure you, for everything is in such ruins that repairing will be hard work. I am extremely ill-lodged, for I have no fire anywhere, because of the smoke ... no remedy but patience. I assure you that I have the most horrid bishopric in France, the most muddy and the most disagreeable.... There is no place to walk, no garden, no alley, no anything, so that I am imprisoned in my house....”
He is immensely interested in his furniture and his household, showing in these young days all the taste for careful detail, all the love of magnificence and show, which was to characterise the great Minister, the man with millions to spend where a poor little Bishop of Luçon had only hundreds.
