The Cardinal's Musketeer by Mary Imlay Taylor

BEFORE daybreak, Péron was forced to provide a meal for Monsieur, who, finding himself in an uncomfortable situation, was disposed to be as peevish and refractory as possible. Without a single trait of his great father, Henri Quatre, Gaston de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and of Orleans, inherited all the deceit, the petty ambition, and the vindictiveness of his mother, Marie de' Medici, lacking however her tenacity of purpose. While the Thirteenth Louis inherited the sternness of the great Henri, the younger brother was as unstable as water. Shut up, against his will, in the house at Poissy, and knowing himself to be once more in the clutches of the cardinal, whose distrust of him was only equalled by his contempt, Monsieur had but one thought, and that was of the safest way to desert his fellow-conspirators.

He demanded food and wine to keep up his failing spirits, and when both were brought from the Golden Pigeon, he ate voraciously and drank deeply, gaining in courage at every potation. He had no fear of the king, his brother, Louis had always forgiven him, although it was with the indifference of disdain; but of Richelieu he had a wholesome dread, and he knew that monsignor, despising and suspecting him, knowing him to have been many times guilty, desired above all else to cut him off from the line of succession. The more wine he drank the more determined he became to extricate himself from this difficulty, as he had extricated himself from many others. To a man who had but little shame, it mattered not how much had been revealed by M. de Nancay or by others. Monsieur seldom stopped for a lie, and never for a prevarication.