[Illustration:  Fouquet——­404]

Fouquet, who was born in 1615, and had been superintendent of finance in conjunction with Servien since 1655, had been in sole possession of that office since the death of his colleague in 1659.  He had faithfully served Cardinal Mazarin through the troubles of the Fronde.  The latter had kept him in power in spite of numerous accusations of malversation and extravagance.  Fouquet, however, was not certain of the cardinal’s good faith; he bought Belle-Ile to secure for himself a retreat, and prepared, for his personal defence, a mad project which was destined subsequently to be his ruin.  From the commencement of his reign, the counsels of Mazarin on his death-bed, the suggestions of Colbert, the first observations made by the king himself, irrevocably ruined Fouquet in the mind of the young monarch.  Whilst the superintendent was dreaming of the ministry and his friends calling him the Future, when he was preparing, in his castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte, an entertainment in the king’s honor at a cost of forty thousand crowns, Louis XIV., in concert with Colbert, had resolved upon his ruin.  The form of trial was decided upon.  The king did not want to have any trouble with the Parliament; and Colbert suggested to Fouquet the idea of ridding himself of his office of attorney-general.  Achille de Harlay bought it for fourteen hundred thousand livres; a million in ready money was remitted to the king for his Majesty’s urgent necessities; the superintendent was buying up everybody, even the king.

[Illustration:  Colbert——­405]

On the 17th of August, 1661, the whole court thronged the gardens of Vaux, designed by Le Netre; the king, whilst admiring the pictures of Le Brun, the Facheux of Moliere represented that day for the first time, and the gold and silver plate which encumbered the tables, felt his inward wrath redoubled.  “Ah!  Madame,” he said to the queen his mother, “shall not we make all these fellows disgorge?” He would have had the superintendent arrested in the very midst of those festivities, the very splendor of which was an accusation against him.  Anne of Austria, inclined in her heart to be indulgent towards Fouquet, restrained him.  “Such a deed would scarcely be to your honor, my son,” she said; “everybody can see that this poor man is ruining himself to give you good cheer, and you would have him arrested in his own house!”

[Illustration:  Vaux le Vicomte——­405a]

“I put off the execution of my design,” says Louis XIV. in his Memoires, “which caused me incredible pain, for I saw that during that time he was practising new devices to rob me.  You can imagine that at the age I then was it required my reason to make a great effort against my feelings in order to act with so much self-control.  All France commended especially the secrecy with which I had for three or four months kept a resolution of that sort, particularly as it concerned a man who had