A _Lettre 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. A _lettre de
cachet_ had 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 letter of 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 old _réunions_, 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.”
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 he could 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 throughout to 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 of Fouquet’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 the _loups_ and 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 of distinction,
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.
The _liaison_ of 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 lover _Deodatus_. 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 her movements,
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,
the _fiancée_ of 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 the earth 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.