The Most Remarkable River Voyage on Record

Pascal, a noted French writer (1623-1662), once said: "Une fleuve, c'est une route qui marche" (a river is a road that moves), and compared it with human life, that carries the traveler along with it.

In ancient times rivers were the only highways, and they are still the great natural boundaries of nations. It is along the banks of these "moving roads" that the progress of the world's civilization may be traced. And what singular love and veneration men have shown for certain rivers: the Hindoos for the Ganges, the Hebrews for the Jordan, the Egyptians for the Nile, the Romans for the Tiber, the Germans for the Rhine, and the French for the Rhone. To follow the subject of historic rivers would be to write the history of many nations. Thus the civilization of ancient Gaul traveled up the banks of the Rhone from the Mediterranean, and that river is strongly characteristic of the French people. The Rhone is the most vehement of all navigable rivers; it is the bluest, brightest, swiftest, most joyous river in Europe. It rises in the Swiss mountains, flows through Lake Leman, or Lake Geneva, in the Alpine range, and it becomes at times an irresistible torrent, as other rivers of that great mountain range flow into it. No man can stay the "blue rushing Rhone;" but science has grappled with it, and has made it subservient to the needs of men. The tugs that now take the barges of freight up the river are furnished with a great wheel, with steel teeth shaped like the claws of a lion; this wheel turns on the bed of the river, rising and falling with the depth and clutching the stones below. It was before the days of steam tugs that Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) made one of the most remarkable river voyages on record.

In the evening of his days, after he had made France the first nation of Europe, when he felt his political power, like his life, ebbing away, Richelieu loved to devise new schemes, in order to prove to the world that his will was still the master of his body and of France. He ordered a stately barge prepared, to carry him and his suite against the current of the Rhone from Tarascon to Lyons. He left Tarascon on the 17th of August, 1642, and reached Lyons on the 3d of September. The body of the dying Cardinal-king lay in a floating-palace cabin hung with crimson velvet, feeling the bitterness of physical decline, but rejoicing that his feeble fingers still grasped the throne; he took delight in listening to the swift waters of the Rhone that made his slow progress by the toil of other men a proof of his autocratic power. To the stern of his barge was attached a boat containing his doomed political prisoners, De Thou and Cinq Mars; three other barges followed, containing all things necessary for the pomp and magnificence of a royal voyage--gold and silver plate, and luxurious furniture, and tapes-try to embellish his temporary resting-places by the way. On each side of the river rode companies of light cavalry, his military escort and guards, with trumpeters, whose bugle blasts enlivened this silent journey. The journey ended at Lyons, where Cinq Mars and his friend De Thou perished on the scaffold, having in 1642 been detected in a conspiracy against Richelieu, which but gave expression to the old and undying hatred of the Court for the Cardinal.

The death of these two statesmen left the power of Richelieu supreme. But he did not long enjoy the success which his cold heart and strong hand had won; his river voyage ended his career; he died three months later, in December, 1642.