This it is which redeems and exalts this man. He was liberal, he loved to give, and he knew how to give, and let it not be said in the name of any morbid and morose morality that, even if he had taken the State's money without retaining it, he was only the more guilty, uniting prodigality to unscrupulousness. No, his liberality remains honourable; it showed that the principle which prompted his embezzlements was not a vile one, that, if this man was ruined, the cause of his ruin was not natural baseness, but the blind impulse of a naturally magnificent temperament. Thus Foucquet will live in history as the consoler of the aged Corneille, and the tactful patron of La Fontaine.
No one will deny his faults, the crimes he committed against the State, but for a moment one may forget them, and say that what was truly noble, and even nobly foolish in his temperament, half atones for the evil which has been only too thoroughly proved.
[1] Cf. Les amateurs de l'ancienne France: Le surintendant Foucquet, by Edmond Bonnaffé. Librairie de l'Art, 1882. The book contains particulars drawn from Peiresc's unpublished manuscript. During the course of this work we shall have frequent occasion to quote from this excellent study of an accomplished connoisseur.
[2] Mémoires de Choisy, Ed. Petitot et Monmerqué, p. 262.
[3] Journal d'Olivier d'Ormesson, Vol. II, p. 60. The unknown author of the dialogues attributed to Molière by M. Louis Auguste Ménard brings Mme. Foucquet on to the stage and makes her utter words in keeping with those pious sentiments which were well known to her contemporaries. The fictitious scene which confronts her with Anne of Austria is a paraphrase of the words I have quoted in my text from the Mémoires de Choisy.
[4] Histoire du Dauphiné, by M. le baron de Chapuys-Montlaville. Paris, Dupont, 1828, 2 vols. Vol. II, pp. 460 et seq.
[5] Cf. Les premiers intendants de justice, by S. Hanotaux, in La Revue Historique, 1882 and 1883.
[6] Of Fronde.—Trans.
[7] Mazarin's note-book, XI, fol. 85, Biblioth. Nat.