Antoine de Fouquet

“ But when his visitor, continuing his confidences, [410] enumerates his titles, and proclaims himself Count de Lauzun, Duke de Montpensier, Dauphin of Auvergne, Sovereign of Dombes, Count d’Eu and de Mortaing, and, finally, husband of the Grande Mademoiselle and cousin-german of Louis XIV., Fouquet ceases to feel surprised. Everything is explained; the speaker is mad; the tortures of a prolonged confinement have unsettled his mind, [Pg 221] and led him to take all these fancies for real. Every one would have thought as Fouquet did, and this supposition was certainly the most probable one. ”

“ They really brought me from Vaux to the Louvre in an hour and a half, so your majesty sees I have not been cheated.” The queen-mother smiled with something like secret envy. But Fouquet caught her thought. “Thus, madame,” he promptly said, “such horses are made for kings, not for subjects; for kings ought never to yield to any one in anything.”
The king looked up.
“And yet,” interrupted Anne of Austria, “you are not a king, that I know of, M. Fouquet.” ”

“ Fouquet started, for these words recalled all the anxieties connected with his office of superintendent—he who, for the last few minutes, had indulged in all the wild aspirations of the lover. “I unhappy?” he said, endeavoring to smile: “indeed, marquise, you will almost make me believe I am so, judging from your own sadness. Are your beautiful eyes raised upon me merely in pity? I was looking for another expression from them.”
“It is not I who am sad, monsieur; look in the mirror, there—it is yourself.” ”

“ Furthermore, his majesty has asked my opinion, I have given it; if his majesty ask my concurrence, it will be the same.”
“Nonsense! accept, my son, accept,” said Anne of Austria. “You are above reports and interpretations.”
“Refuse, sire,” said Fouquet. “As long as a king lives, he has no other measure but his conscience,—no other judge than his own desires; but when dead, he has posterity, which applauds or accuses.”
“Thank you, mother,” replied Louis, bowing respectfully to the queen. “Thank you Monsieur, Fouquet,” said he, dismissing the superintendent civilly. ”

“ Prove that, if you please."
"Let the circumstance arise, monseigneur, and you will be very glad to have these bandits under your hand."
"You advise me, then, to be reconciled to the abbe?" said Fouquet, ironically.
"I advise you, monseigneur, not to quarrel with a hundred or a hundred and twenty loose fellows, who, by putting their rapiers end to end, would form a cordon of steel capable of surrounding three thousand men."
Fouquet darted a searching glance at Gourville, and passing before him,--"That is all very well; let M. l'Abbe Fouquet be introduced," said he to the footman. ”

“ Fouquet had originally been a cook in the service of Madame Catherine, and was famous for his talent for larding poultry, but he had subsequently entered the household of Henry, where he had been employed in the most degrading service which one man can render to another. ”

“ Fouquet looked at him with an air of surprise.
"But with friends; but in your own carriage as far as Orleans; in your barge as far as Nantes; always ready to defend yourself, if you are attacked; to escape, if you are threatened. In fact, you will carry your money against all chances; and, while flying, you will only have obeyed the king; then, reaching the sea when you like, you will embark for Belle-Isle, and from Belle-Isle you will shoot out whenever it may please you, like the eagle which rushes into space when it has been driven from its eyrie." ”

“ Latterly, indeed, they have been less read, for thought is turning to fresh fields, and society seems to be entering upon a new era.
No man more fully recognized the great change that was going on, or did more to help it forward, than Nicolas Fouquet, Vicomte de Vaux, and Marquis de Belleîle,—but better known as the Surintendant. In the pleasant social annals of France, Fouquet is the type of splendor, and of sudden, hopeless ruin. "There was never a man so magnificent, there was never a man so unfortunate," say the lively gentlemen and ladies in their Mémoires. ”

“ If they concealed a smile it was with a great effort, for they knew that the prince, brought up in absolute ignorance of business, by this took upon himself a burden much too heavy for his strength. Fouquet took leave of his colleagues upon the stairs, saying:--"Messieurs! there will be so much the less labor for us."
And he gayly climbed into his carriage. The others, a little uneasy at the turn things had taken, went back to Paris together. Towards ten o'clock the king repaired to the apartment of his mother, with whom he had a long and private conversation. ”

“ The maddened horse gained twenty toises, and came up within pistol-shot of Fouquet.
"Courage!" said the musketeer to himself, "courage; the white horse will perhaps grow weaker, and if the horse does not fall, the master must fall at last." But horse and rider remained upright together, and gaining ground by degrees. D'Artagnan uttered a wild cry, which made Fouquet turn round, and added speed to the white horse.
"A famous horse! a mad rider!" growled the captain. "Hola! mordioux! Monsieur Fouquet! stop! in the king's name!" Fouquet made no reply. ”

“ In August 1661 Louis XIV., already set upon his destruction, was entertained at Vaux with a fête rivalled in magnificence by only one or two in French history, at which Molière’s Les Fâcheux was produced for the first time. The splendour of the entertainment sealed Fouquet’s fate. The king, however, was afraid to act openly against so powerful a minister. By crafty devices Fouquet was induced to sell his office of procureur général, thus losing the protection of its privileges, and he paid the price of it into the treasury. ”

“ The Surintendant had twice wounded the vanity of his King. He had presumed to have a more beautiful château than his master, and had unluckily fancied the same woman. Louis revenged himself by burying his rival alive for twenty years. That Fouquet had plotted rebellion nobody believed. He was too wise a politician not to know that the French were weary of civil war and could not be tempted to exchange one master for half a dozen military tyrants. ”

“ You will have no difficulty in believing that there have been many people placed in a great fix; but I am very glad for them to see that I am not such a dupe as they supposed, and that the best plan is to hold to me.”
Three years were to roll by before the end of Fouquet’s trial. In vain had one of the superintendent’s valets, getting the start of all the king’s couriers, shown sense enough to give timely warning to his distracted friends; Fouquet’s papers were seized, and very compromising they were for him as well as for a great number of court-personages, of both sexes. ”

“ One day in the early part of the year 1672, Fouquet hears one of the articles of furniture in his room suddenly thrown down, and perceives a man of short stature and slender figure creep through a narrow opening and advance smiling towards him. ”

“ However, as he might represent the king—and, after the conversation we have recorded, it was very likely—she glanced at her mirror, drew out still more the ringlets of her hair, and desired him to be admitted. La Valliere could not, however, refrain from a certain feeling of uneasiness. A visit from the superintendent was not an ordinary event in the life of any woman attached to the court. Fouquet, so notorious for his generosity, his gallantry, and his sensitive delicacy of feeling with regard to women generally, had received more invitations than he had requested audiences. ”

“ Fouquet was gone to bed, like a man who clings to life, and who economizes as much as possible that slender tissue of existence of which the shocks and angles of this world so quickly wear out the irreparable tenuity. D'Artagnan appeared at the door of this chamber, and was saluted by the surintendant with a very affable "good day." ”

“ To deliver up to death (for not a doubt existed that Louis hated Fouquet mortally) the man who had just shown himself so delightful and charming a host in every way, was a real case of conscience.
"It almost seems," said D'Artagnan to himself, "that if I am not a poor, mean, miserable fellow, I should let M. Fouquet know the opinion the king has about him. ”

“ The king, who was accustomed to hear M. Colbert speak in not over-scrupulous terms of M. Fouquet, allowed this remark to pass unanswered, and merely listened. Colbert noticed the effect it had produced, and hastened to back out, saying that M. Fouquet was not on all occasions as blamable as at the first glance might seem to be the case, inasmuch as at that moment he was greatly occupied. The king looked up. “What do you allude to?” he said.
“Sire, men are but men, and M. Fouquet has his defects as well as his great qualities.” ”

“ The instinct which impels friends and servants to fly from sinking fortunes is a well-established fact in human natural history; but Fouquet's hold upon his followers was extraordinary: it resisted the shock of ruin. They risked court-favor, purse, and person, to help him. Gourville, before he thought of his own safety, carried a hundred thousand livres to Madame Fouquet, to be used in defending the Surintendant, or in bribing a judge or a jailer. ”

“ Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Napoleon 219 tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. ”

“ Aramis smiled.
“But,” inquired Fouquet, with some remaining uneasiness, “how is it that while you are now squandering millions in this manner, a few days ago you did not pay the fifty thousand francs to Baisemeaux out of your own pocket?”
“Because a few days ago I was as poor as Job.”
“And to-day?”
“To-day I am wealthier than the king himself.”
“Very well,” said Fouquet; “I understand men pretty well; I know you are incapable of forfeiting your word; I do not wish to wrest your secret from you, and so let us talk no more about it.” ”

“ Do as I do, Monsieur Fouquet, you will not find yourself the worse for it; a fall happens only once in a lifetime to men like yourself, and the chief thing is, to take it gracefully when the chance presents itself. There is a Latin proverb—the words have escaped me, but I remember the sense of it very well, for I have thought over it more than once—which says, ‘The end crowns the work!’”
Fouquet rose from his seat, passed his arm round D’Artagnan’s neck, and clasped him in a close embrace, whilst with the other hand he pressed his hand. ”

“ Most realistically conceived are the crowd of onlookers, some of whom, pushing forward, are being vigorously repressed by the guards. The Chronique de France (MS. Français 6465 Bibl. Nat.) , in which fifty-five illustrations record events in the Life of Philippe Augustus, one of them showing the Coronation of Charlemagne in the old Basilica of St. Peter at Rome, is another work by Fouquet which is full of points of interest. His illustrations to the French translation of the Antiquitates Judæorum of Josephus—now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris—are usually reckoned as his chef d’œuvre. ”

“ There had thus been nothing ignored or left in obscurity. There is nothing imaginary or hypothetical in the account of what preceded and brought about Fouquet’s imprisonment. It is essential to establish this first of all. Let us now see if, during his stay at Pignerol, any event occurred which, sixteen years after his condemnation, could all at once have determined Louis XIV. to simulate Fouquet’s death, and to make of a captive, long since inoffensive and forgotten, that mysterious and nameless prisoner who is to come from the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to die obscurely in the Bastille. ”

“ He could have done it later still more easily through the medium either of Lauzun or of all those who came to visit him. One must therefore reject the idea that [Pg 239] Fouquet was the possessor of a dangerous State secret, and moreover, necessarily conclude from the much more humane conduct of Louis XIV. towards the Surintendant, that the King’s former resentment had disappeared, and that in 1680 he no longer saw in the prisoner anything but an old man, very interesting both by his misfortunes and his resignation. ”

“ Fouquet hastened to the brink of the river, dipped some water in his hat, with which he bathed the temples of the musketeer, and introduced a few drop between his lips. D’Artagnan raised himself with difficulty, and looked about him with a wandering eye. He beheld Fouquet on his knees, with his wet hat in his hand, smiling upon him with ineffable sweetness. “You are not off, then?” cried he. “Oh, monsieur! the true king of royalty, in heart, in soul, is not Louis of the Louvre, or Philippe of Sainte-Marguerite; it is you, proscribed, condemned!” ”

“ Fouquet did not even take the trouble to reflect, and resumed his walk. “I beg your pardon, monseigneur!” said Gourville, “but I have remembered, this brave man has quitted the king’s service, and probably comes to receive an installment of some pension or other.”
“Devil take him!” said Fouquet, “why does he choose his opportunity so ill?”
“Permit me then, monseigneur, to announce your refusal to him; for he is one of my acquaintance, and is a man whom, in our present circumstances, it would be better to have as a friend than an enemy.” ”