Cinq Mars — Volume 6

The final volume of Alfred de Vigny's masterpiece concludes the tragic tale of Henri d'Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, the young nobleman whose beauty, ambition, and doomed conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu would shatter the old France of knights and honor. Louis XIII, consumed by love, guilt, and hatred for his favorite, watches as the conspiracy collapses. Richelieu descends the Rhône in his crimson velvet barge, trailing behind it the boat carrying Cinq-Mars and de Thou in chains, bound for the scaffold. Their deaths will signal the end of the old nobility crushed beneath the weight of reason of state. Written in the wake of Walter Scott and before Dumas, Cinq-Mars stands as the first, most dramatic, and arguably most successful French historical novel, a Romantic meditation on the collision between individual will and the machinery of power.