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. Colbert prosecuted the matter with a rigorous justice that looked very like hate; the king’s self-esteem was personally involved in procuring the condemnation of a minister guilty of great extravagances and much irregularity rather than of intentional want of integrity. Public feeling was at first so greatly against the superintendent that the peasants shouted to the musketeers told off to escort him from Angers to the Bastille, “No fear of his escaping; we would hang him with our own hands.” But the length and the harshness of the proceedings, the efforts of Fouquet’s family and friends, the wrath of the Parliament, out of whose hands the case had been taken in favor of carefully chosen commissioners, brought about a great change; of the two prosecuting counsel (conseillers rapporteurs), one, M. de Sainte-Helene, was inclined towards severity; the other, Oliver d’Ormesson, a man of integrity and courage, thought of nothing but justice, and treated with contempt the hints that reached him from the court. Colbert took the trouble one day to go and call upon old M. d’Ormesson, the counsel’s father, to complain of the delays that the son, as he said, was causing in the trial: “It is very extraordinary,” said the minister, “that a great king, feared throughout Europe, cannot finish a case against one of his own subjects.” “I am sorry,” answered the old gentleman, “that the king is not satisfied with my son’s conduct; I know that he practises what I have always taught him,—to fear God, serve the king, and render justice without respect of persons. The delay in the matter does not depend upon him; he works at it night and day, without wasting a moment.” Oliver d’Ormesson lost the stewardship of Soissonness, to which he had the titular right, but he did not allow himself to be diverted from his scrupulous integrity. Nay, he grew wroth at the continual attacks of Chancellor Seguier, more of a courtier than ever in his old age, and anxious to finish the matter to the satisfaction of the court. “I told many of the Chamber,” he writes, “that I did not like to have the whip applied to me every morning, and that the chancellor was a sort of chastiser I would not put up with.” [Journal d’ Oliver d’ Ormesson, t. ii. p. 88.]