Note 146 — LOUIS XIII. (1610-1643.)

Richelieu, if you examine him by Philippe de Champagne’s splendid triple portrait of him, hanging in our Gallery, may be read as if in life by any physiognomist who pleases to devote the time to it. I have gazed many a time, through long years, with gifted friends and others, and oftener still alone, into those heartless eyes, attracted irresistibly (I only now see why) by the vast discrepancy between the world-wide renown of this French Minister, and his cynically petty face—sly, vulpine, unfeeling, unprincipled, spiteful, a coxcomb of feminine manners, of an egotism and paltry vanity inordinate, but of a refinement, showing the highest social culture, a tongue that could gloze with ladies; he might, by lettre de cachet, have shut up a French Walsingham in the Bastille to prevent his own overthrow; but as to coping with him or a Burleigh as a statesman, as an equal in any powerful cabinet in Europe, by force of character, he could not have done it. Artifice, backed by the force of France, then rising into unity of action, or helped by circumstances that tied the hands of his antagonist, he might even throw a giant unawares. Richelieu was an artificial contriver, not a born ruler, if a mature face of fifty be any index to the volume or memoir of a man’s life.