Note 259 — Chapter VIII
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The persevering disaffection of M. de Nevers occasioned the disgrace of Du Vair, who betrayed an indisposition to proceed against him which so irritated Marie de Medicis that she induced the King to deprive him of the seals, and to bestow them upon Mangot, making Richelieu Secretary of State in his place; that wily prelate having already, by his great talent and ready expedients, rendered himself almost indispensable to his royal patroness. The arrest of the Prince de Condé had restored the self-confidence of Concini, who shortly afterwards returned to Court and resumed his position with an arrogance and pretension more undisguised than ever. The Maréchale, however, had never recovered from the successive shocks to which she had been subjected by the death of her child and the destruction of her house; but had fallen into a state of discouragement and melancholy which threatened her reason.[259] For days she shut herself up in her apartments, refusing to receive the most intimate of her friends, and complaining that she was bewitched by those who looked at her.[260] Her domestic misery was, moreover, embittered by the public hatred, of which, in conjunction with her husband, she had become more than ever the object. It would appear that the injury already inflicted upon the Italian favourites had stimulated rather than satiated the detestation of the people for both of them. Every grievance under which the lower orders groaned was attributed to the influence of Concini and his wife; they were accused of inciting the Queen-mother to the acts of profusion by which the nation was impoverished; while every disappointment, misfortune, or act of oppression was traced to the same cause. Many affected to believe that Marie was the victim of sorcery, and that such was the real source of the influence of Leonora; and thus the heart-broken mother and unhappy wife, whose morbid imagination had caused her to consider her trials as the result of magical arts, was herself accused of having employed them against her royal benefactress.[261]