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 Belleile,—­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 Memoires.  His story is told to point the old and dreary moral of the instability of human prosperity.  It is, indeed, like a tale of the “Arabian Nights.”  The Dervish is made Grand Vizier.  He marries the Sultan’s daughter.  His palace owes its magical beauty to the Genies.  The pillars are of jasper, the bases and capitals of massive gold.  The Sultan frowns, waves his hand, and the crowd, who kissed the favorite’s slipper yesterday, hoot and jeer as they see him pass by to his dungeon, disgraced, stripped, and beaten, Fouquet was of good family, the son of a Councillor of State in Louis XIII.’s time.  Educated for the magistracy, he became a Maitre des Requetes (say Master in Chancery) at twenty, and at thirty-five Procureur-General (or Attorney-General) of the Parliament of Paris, which was only a court of justice, although it frequently attempted to usurp legislative, and even executive functions.  During the rebellious troubles of the Fronde, the Procureur and his brother, the Abbe Fouquet, remained faithful to Mazarin and to the throne.  The Abbe, in the ardor of his zeal, once offered the Queen his services to kill De Retz and salt him, if she would give her consent.  It was at the request of the Queen that the Cardinal made the trusty Procureur Surintendant des Finances, the first position in France after the throne and the prime-ministership.

Pensions, and the promise of comfortable places, had collected about the Surintendant talent, fashion, and beauty.  Some of the ablest men in the kingdom were in his employ.  Pellisson, famous for ugliness and for wit, the Acanthe of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the beloved of Sappho Scudery, was his chief clerk.  Pellisson was then a Protestant; but Fouquet’s disgrace, and four years in the Bastille, led him to reexamine the grounds of his religious faith.  He became, luckily, enlightened on the subject of his heresies at a time when the renunciation of Protestantism led to honors and wealth.  Change of condition followed change of doctrine.  The King attached him to his person as Secretary and Historiographer, and gave him the management of the fund for the conversion of Huguenots.  Gourville, whom Charles II., an excellent judge, called the wisest of Frenchmen, belonged to Fouquet, as a receiver-general of taxes.  Moliere wrote two of his earlier plays for the Surintendant.  La Fontaine was an especial favorite.  He bound himself to pay for his quarterly allowance in quarterly madrigals, ballads, or sonnets.  If he failed, a bailiff was to be sent to levy on his stanzas.  He paid pretty regularly, but in a depreciated currency.  The verses have not the golden ring of the “Contes” and the “Fables.”