Gaudais, in compliance with the demands of Colbert, gives his statement in a long memorial, Le Sieur Gaudais Dupont à Monseigneur de Colbert, 1664.
Dumesnil, in his principal memorial, gives a list of the alleged defaulters, with the special charges against each, and the amounts for which he reckons them liable. The accusations cover a period of ten or twelve years, and sometimes more. Some of them are curiously suggestive of more recent “rings.” Thus Jean Gloria makes a charge of thirty-one hundred livres (francs) for fireworks to celebrate the king’s marriage, when the actual cost is said to have been about forty livres. Others are alleged to have embezzled the funds of the company, under cover of pretended payments to imaginary creditors; and Argenson himself is said to have eked out his miserable salary by drawing on the company for the pay of soldiers who did not exist.
The records of the Council preserve a guarded silence about this affair. I find, however, under date 20 Sept., 1663, “Pouvoir â M. de Villeray de faire recherche dans la maison d’un nommé du Mesnil des papiers appartenants au Conseil concernant Sa Majesté;” and under date 18 March, 1664, “Ordre pour l’ouverture du coffre contenant les papiers de Dumesnil,” and also an “Ordre pour mettre l’Inventaire des biens du Sr. Dumesnil entre les mains du Sr. Fillion.”
CHAPTER VIII. 1657-1665. LAVAL AND MÉZY.
The Bishop’s Choice.—A Military Zealot.—Hopeful Beginnings.—Signs of Storm.—The Quarrel.—Distress of Mézy.—He Refuses to Yield.—His Defeat and Death.
We have seen that Laval, when at court, had been invited to choose a governor to his liking. He soon made his selection. There was a pious officer, Saffray de Mézy, major of the town and citadel of Caen, whom he had well known during his long stay with Bernières at the Hermitage. Mézy was the principal member of the company of devotees formed at Caen under the influence of Bernières and his disciples. In his youth he had been headstrong and dissolute. Worse still, he had been, it is said, a Huguenot; but both in life and doctrine his conversion had been complete, and the fervid mysticism of Bernières acting on his vehement nature had transformed him into a red-hot zealot. Towards the hermits and their chief he showed a docility in strange contrast with his past history, and followed their inspirations with an ardor which sometimes overleaped its mark.
Thus a Jacobin monk, a doctor of divinity, once came to preach at the church of St. Paul at Caen; on which, according to their custom, the brotherhood of the Hermitage sent two persons to make report concerning his orthodoxy. Mézy and another military zealot, “who,” says the narrator, “hardly know how to read, and assuredly do not know their catechism,” were deputed to hear his first sermon; wherein this Jacobin, having spoken of the necessity of the grace of Jesus Christ in order to the doing of good deeds, these two wiseacres thought that he was preaching Jansenism; and thereupon, after the sermon, the Sieur de Mézy went to the proctor of the ecclesiastical court and denounced him. *