“Patience, monseigneur, for you do not know what Colbert is—study him quickly; it is with this dark financier as it is with meteors, which the eye never sees completely before their disastrous invasion; when we feel them we are dead.”
“Oh! Gourville, this is going too far,” replied Fouquet, smiling; “allow me, my friend, not to be so easily frightened; M. Colbert a meteor! Corbleu, we confront the meteor. Let us see acts, and not words. What has he done?”
“He has ordered two gibbets of the executioner of Paris,” answered Gourville.
Fouquet raised his head, and a flash gleamed from his eyes. “Are you sure of what you say?” cried he.
“Here is the proof, monseigneur.” And Gourville held out to the superintendent a note communicated by a certain secretary of the Hotel de Ville, who was one of Fouquet’s creatures.
“Yes, that is true,” murmured the minister; “the scaffold may be prepared, but the king has not signed; Gourville, the king will not sign.”
“I shall soon know,” said Gourville.
“How?”
“If the king has signed, the gibbets will be sent this evening to the Hotel de Ville, in order to be got up and ready by to-morrow morning.”
“Oh! no, no!” cried the superintendent once again; “you are all deceived, and deceive me in my turn; Lyodot came to see me only the day before yesterday; only three days ago I received a present of some Syracuse wine from poor D’Eymeris.”