ALettre de Cachet—Mazarin’s dying Counsel—Madame Scarron continues to Receive—Fouquet’s intentions and what came of them—The Squirrel and the Snake—The Man in the Iron Mask—An Incommoding Admirer—“Calice cher, ou le parfum n’est plus”—The Roses’ Sepulchre.
It was in the very presence of the dead Scarron that Ninon was informed of the danger threatening St Evrémond. Alettre de cachethad been issued for conveying him to the Bastille, for the offence he had given in writing some satirical verses on the Peace of the Pyrenees. St Evrémond was very far from standing alone in his opinions on this treaty carried through by Mazarin; but he was unapproachable in the expression of them. Biting invective and caustic wit at the cardinal’s expense were graven in every line of his couplets, addressed to the Marquis de Créqui. Nor did the mockery cease at that point; it ridiculed the royal marriage itself, and the king was furious. This was the second time that St Evrémond had incurred the displeasure of Mazarin; on the first occasion, a reconciliation had been patched up, after a three months’ sojourn for St Evrémond in the Bastille, but this time he was past forgiveness—possibly, as it has been surmised, that in addition to the verses, he had given secret offence to the Court—and it was now but a matter of tracking St Evrémond to his hiding-place; for he had been warned of the letterof arrest for shutting him up in the Bastille, probably this time for the rest of his life. He had found refuge in the convent of the Capucins du Roule; but already his goods and money were confiscated, and it was Ninon who carried him, from her own resources, the necessary notes and gold for his getting away under cover of the night to Havre, where he arrived safely, and took ship for Dover, never to return to France.
The Majesty of Louis XIV. was as a thing divine; and the faintest shadow could not be permitted to cross the glory of that sun he chose for his double-mottoed device. Cardinal Mazarin, now at the point of death, renewed his counsel to the young king never to let will thwart his, but ever to bear the sceptre in his hand—in his own hand alone. So Mazarin, dealing his parting thrust of revenge on the queen-regent, died in the castle of Vincennes, unregretted by any, tolerated of later years, but despised by all. Someone made his epitaph, whose concluding lines were to the effect that having cheated and deceived through life, he ended with cheating the devil himself, since, when he came to fetch away his soul, he found he had not one.
Madame Scarron, after her husband’s death, decided to live in the same apartments, in preference to the home which Ninon offered her in her own house. The widow’s friends obtained for her a pension of two thousand livres, and she continued the oldréunions, and soon recovered from the loss she had sustained; for Françoise d’Aubigné was ever distinguished by her calm, equable temperament.
After the fête at Vaux, Monsieur Fouquet, continuing his attentions to Mademoiselle de la Baume, finally asked her hand in marriage of her parents. They were well pleased, especially her father. Madame de la Baume would have seemed more to favour another destiny for her daughter. The king was enraged on learning the superintendent’s proposal, but Fouquet braved the royal displeasure, and intended to take his bride to Holland. So the man proposed; but the Fates had otherwise disposed. Within a few hours, a letter was brought him; he broke the seal hurriedly, recognising the beloved handwriting, and when he had read the letter—but two lines long—he sank back in his chair as if a thunder-stroke had smitten him.
“Renounce me. Think of me no more. I am not worthy to be the wife of an honest man.Louise.”
“Renounce me. Think of me no more. I am not worthy to be the wife of an honest man.
Louise.”
It needed no more. Fouquet divined the truth, and he broke into a storm of invective, and abuse of the king. To silence him, to warn him of the perils surrounding him, of his many bitter and jealous enemies, of the clouds of witnesses, false and true, ready and waiting to bring charges of peculation and misappropriation of finances against him, was of no avail. The fire of disappointed love consumed him, and he raged against the despoiler of his happiness. The jealous king, informed by those who had heard Fouquet’s wild words, had waited not an instant, and thirty soldiers of the Guard were on the way to the Hôtel of the Superintendence to arrest him; but warned of their coming, he made his escape from the house. Too late. Before hecould reach the frontier he was taken; and in the fortress of Pignerol he spent nineteen years a prisoner, after a protracted trial before a packed tribunal, and nobly defended by Advocate Pelisson, his devoted friend, a devotion for which Pelisson suffered long imprisonment in the Bastille.
The jealousy of Louis in regard to Mademoiselle la Vallière, however, probably only hastened the fall of the man on whose ruin Colbert, comptroller-general of finances, and his successor, had long been determined. On the walls of that magnificent Vaux mansion of Fouquet’s was painted and carved his crest—a squirrel with the device, “Quo non ascendam?” This squirrel was pursued by a snake, and on the arms of Colbert was also a snake.
The lavish extravagance of Fouquet was almost beyond the bounds of credibility. He stopped before no expenditure for indulgence of his own pleasure, and in fairness it must be added, for that of others. Courteous and kindly, intellectually gifted, his open-handed generosity to men of letters and of talent generally was boundless. Like our own “great lord cardinal,” “though he was unsatisfied in getting, yet in bestowing he was most generous,” and again and again he aided the State with money from his own private means. It is said that at the fateful entertainment at Vaux, to which Louis XIV. was invited, each of the nobles found a purse of gold in his bedchamber, “and,” adds the same writer, “the nobles did not forget to take it away.” When his disgrace came, it was the great who deserted him; the people of talent clung throughoutto their friend and benefactor. Colbert, his deadliest foe, artfully instilled into Louis that it was the ambition of Fouquet to be prime-minister. There is little doubt that this was true. Colbert’s ambition for the post was not less.
On his arrest, Fouquet was first sent to the castle of Angers, thence to Amboise, thence to Moret and Vincennes, then he was lodged in the Bastille, and finally, on his condemnation, to the fortress of Pignerol. After a three years’ trial, the advocate-general demanded that he should be hanged on a gallows purposely erected in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, but the votes for his death were far in the minority, greatly to the fury of Louis and of Colbert. While abuse, however, and charges of maladministration of the finances were brought against him, peculation could not in any way be established. In a generation of time-serving and venality, the staunch devotion and affection of Fouquet’s friends remained unchangeable. “Never,” wrote Voltaire, “did a placeman have more personal friends; never was persecuted man better served in his misfortunes.”
Madame de Sévigné, who had a warm regard for Fouquet, expresses her fear in more than one of her letters, that he may be secretly done to death by poison or by some other means of Colbert’s devising. His friends suffered cruelly, in many cases, for their loyalty to him. The gentleman, Monsieur de Roquesante, who had spoken in favour of him—a Provençal—was banished in the depths of winter to the chills of Lower Brittany, and the members ofFouquet’s family were scattered, to find shelter where they could.
At Pignerol, Fouquet was treated with great rigour. Some few months after his arrival there, a peril of another kind came very near to him. The lightning of a heavy thunderstorm struck the powder-magazine of the fortress, and it exploded, burying many in its ruins. Fouquet, who was standing at the moment in the recess of a window, remained unhurt. Mystery hangs over the last days of his life; for while it is said that he died in his captivity at Pignerol, his friend Gourville states that he was set at liberty before his death. Voltaire also declares that Fouquet’s daughter-in-law, the Comtesse de Vaux, confirmed the fact of this to him. Another surmise, and one that found wide acceptance, is that although he was liberated for a while, he was rearrested, and that it was he who was the mysterious individual known as the Man in the Iron Mask.
Human Nature loves a mystery, and would resent being deprived of this most memorable enigma in modern history, by any reasonable and certain solution of it, could it be beyond all doubt and question established. Again and again it has been explained and explained away, but it is, as Galileo declared of the earth and the sun:e pur se muove. The Man in the Iron Mask stands the Man in the Iron Mask—which was, in fact, not of iron, at all, but of stoutly-lined velvet, as theloupsand masks of the time nearly always were made. Probably this mask was secured by extra strong springs and fastenings, as mostly was the case for prisoners ofdistinction, when they were being conveyed from one place of captivity to another.
Such kind of explanation was afforded to Ninon by the governor of the Bastille when she discussed the point with him. There was, he said, no mystery at all in it. Yet the possibility remains that it did not suit the governor of the grim old prison-house absolutely to lift the veil covering its secrets, even to Ninon.
It has been contended that it could not have been Fouquet; since the Iron Mask’s death is recorded in the register of the Bastille, where he was confined for the last five years of his life in November 1703, and Fouquet, at that date, would have been in extreme old age, which this prisoner was still short of. Not being Fouquet, was it Count Matthioli accused of betraying the French Government, in the matter of putting a French garrison into Casale to defend it against Spain? Was it the Duke of Monmouth, after all not beheaded in England? Was it the child of Buckingham, the bitter fruit of his intrigue with Anne of Austria? Was it the twin brother she was said to have borne with Louis XIV., as Dumas tells—he who was taken by d’Artagnan from the Bastille, and placed on the throne of France, while the other Louis was shut up in his stead, the substitution remaining undiscovered, so great was the resemblance between the two—undetected by the queen, Maria Théresa, herself. The romance is well founded, but even for the great master of romance it goes far. Was it—No; the mystery, like Sheridan’s quarrel, is “a very pretty mystery as it stands. We should only spoil it by trying to explain it.”
Ninon was troubled at this time with an unsatisfactory, rather casual admirer, Monsieur le Comte de Choiseul, an individual of whom it was difficult for her to decide whether his pertinacity or his supreme self-conceit predominated. Monsieur Précourt, the celebrated dancer, an intimate acquaintance of hers, whom she one morning invited to breakfast with her, did her the good service of finally relieving her of de Choiseul’s incommoding presence. The breakfast was laid for two, and Choiseul, entering, was about to seat himself, whereupon Précourt claimed the place at table, and Choiseul, declining to stir, Précourt invited him to adjourn to the neighbouring boulevard with him, and settle the matter at the sword’s point. Choiseul replied that he did not fight with mountebanks. That was as well, Précourt retorted, since they might make him dance; and the unwelcome one took his hat, went out from the house, and did not return.
Theliaisonof Louis with Mademoiselle de la Vallière was now generally known; and notwithstanding the warning of the disgrace and banishment of St Evrémond, satirical rhymes began to circulate at the expense of the royal favourite and her loverDeodatus. How fortunate he was, said Bussy Rabutin, “in pressing his lips on that wide beak, which stretched from ear to ear”; and forthwith the poet found himself lodged in the Bastille.
Physically, the beauty of La Vallière was not flawless. Her mouth was somewhat large; but it has frequently been said, that somehow the defect of her lameness only added to the grace of hermovements, which were at once so gentle and dignified, while her magnificent, dark dreamy eyes and her soft winning smile rendered her singularly charming; and if Louis ever loved any but himself, it was Louise de la Vallière, who so passionately loved, not Louis the king, but the ardent wooer and winner of her heart. There is a story of the rose-tree from which Louis plucked the rose which he offered her on that ball night in the Louvre. It had been cultivated by le Nôtre, the famous gardener of Versailles, and was an object of his tenderest care; so much cherished, that he was far from pleased when he saw the king pluck its loveliest blossom for la Vallière. She regarded the rose-tree which had borne it with the tenderness one feels for some beloved sentient thing, enlisting le Nôtre’s interest in it, which in its way was as great as her own; and wherever she went to spend any length of days, the rose-tree was transported in its box of earth to the gardens of the palace—Versailles or the Louvre, as it might be—and for two years the beautiful bush flourished under the joint care of le Nôtre, and of the king’s beloved mistress. And in her gentle confidences with Mademoiselle Athénais de Mortemar, thefiancéeof Monsieur le Marquis de Montespan, with whom she was great friends, she told her the romance of her rose, and how it was her belief, her superstition—call it what you will—that while it flourished, Louis’s love would be hers.
And then all at once the rose-tree began to fade. Slowly but surely, despite all the skill of le Nôtre, rapidly it withered, and he carried a handful of theearth of the new box, into which he had transplanted the tree, as a last resource, to a chemist for analysation. Nothing more simple: vitriol had been poured on the earth, a drop or two at a time, and the root was corroded to dry threads. And for la Vallière, it was only left to make a little mausoleum for her rose-tree in the shadow of a retired thicket round the bosquets of Versailles—a little crystal globe upon a low marble stand; and within it, in a box exquisitely enriched with gold filigree, the withered rose-tree, to one of whose branches was fastened the faded rose, whose petals still hung together; and thither to the secluded spot every day came la Vallière to kneel at the tomb of her rose-tree, and kiss the shadowy souvenir of the love that had faded for ever. Just a few petals left of its countless leaves, so sweet and glowing once in their crimson beauty.
And Mademoiselle Athénais de Mortemar’s nuptials with Monsieur le Marquis de Montespan having been solemnised, the wife was left by the complaisant husband to become the second mistress of Louis XIV., and this ere the first was discarded, and Maria Théresa still a youthful wife. The two children of la Vallière the king legitimised by Act of Parliament; but soon Louise was seen no more at Court. She found refuge and rest for weariness and regrets of heart and spirit within convent walls.
And now Anne of Austria succumbed to the fell disease which had insidiously attacked her, and she died, and was borne to St Dénis with great pomp, followed by Louis the king, clad in deepest mourning.