Extreme reserve towards the Surintendant, and affectionate gratitude towards Madame Fouquet, such were, we see, the sentiments of Scarron’s widow; and far from having to cause a weakness to be forgotten, Madame de Maintenon had, on the contrary, to remember the kindnesses of this family, and for her part to contribute to the alleviation of the prisoner’s lot.
Afterwards, in a very vague manner, and without furnishing any positive proofs, M. Lacroix reminds us that Fouquet was mixed up in those famous poisoning trials which revealed so many monstrous scandals and implicated certain great personages of the court, in which, too, we see the audacity of the crimes still further increased by the revolting cynicism of the avowals, and which produced a profound commotion throughout the whole of France and even abroad.
That Fouquet’s name may have been pronounced during the discussions, one is not prepared either to contest or feel surprised at. As his enemy, Colbert, was one of the appointed victims, and as a conspiracy seemed to have been formed to poison him, it is very natural that the accused persons should have invoked the recollection of the Surintendant. But how many other names, such as those of La Fontaine and Racine, were indicated to the lieutenant of police without their reputations being tarnished by it! M. Lacroix, with reason, regrets that most of the papers relating to this dark business have not been published. They are about to be, and not one of the innumerable documents relating to these various trials authorises us to accuse the Surintendant.[462] As for those which have already been published, and which include some declarations concerning Fouquet, an attentive examination of the period at which they have been made proves that they could have exercised no influence upon the fate of the prisoner of Pignerol. “The woman Filastre said at the torture, that she had written a contract by which the Duchess de Vivonne desired the restoration of M. Fouquet and the death of M. Colbert.” But this declaration was made some months after the Surintendant’s death.[463] We have a letter from Louvois to the lieutenant of police, La Reynie, in which the latter is thanked for having informed the King “what one named Debray has said of the solicitation that was made to him by a man dependent on Fouquet;”[464] but this letter is dated June 17, 1681, fifteen months after the death, or, if it is preferred, the period at which Louis XIV. had determined upon causing the Surintendant to disappear. Would the revelations of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers be relied upon by preference? But her trial dates from 1676, and if Fouquet had been seriously compromised at that time, wherefore those successive alleviations of his punishment during a period of four years?
In any case, if on such interested and doubtful depositions it be admitted that Fouquet’s friends were the counsellors and accomplices of a crime,[465] I can understand that, struck with the coincidence,—not precisely exact, as we have just seen—between these accusations and the Surintendant’s death, the suspicion might arise that the latter was not a natural one. M. Pierre Clement, in his work, La Police sous Louis XIV., has expressed this idea with extreme circumspection, and has contented himself with uttering a doubt. He accuses no one, as he is especially careful to declare. But he observes that the period at which Fouquet’s death occurred rendered it an untoward[466] event. He succumbed to an attack of apoplexy, and the nature of this complaint would go far to accredit the theory of poison; but there conjectures ought to stop. Let people hesitate to believe that he was really seized with an attack of this nature: I can conceive their doing so, although numerous reasons combine to make us place credence in it. But everything is entirely opposed to the hypothesis of his death[467] being simulated by Louis XIV.’s orders; and whether it was natural, or whether it was hastened by a crime, it is unquestionably true that it really took place in the month of March of the year 1680.
Was it, in truth, a man in a good state of health who suddenly succumbed? It was an old man, who had been ailing for the last sixteen years—a man unsettled by excess of blood[468]—a man whom the absence of every kind of exercise had rendered plethoric, and who, from a busy life and one given up for a long time to pleasure, had suddenly passed to the privations and the inaction of captivity.
Was it a prisoner, malignant and full of strong resentment, who was suspected of having instigated his friends to poison Colbert? No, indeed. It was the most patient and the most resigned of captives, who had expiated his faults by the most admirable behaviour, who had pardoned his enemies, and whose mind, detached from the good things of the world, was raised to the contemplation of things divine, and who, offering his own life as an example, had devoted his long leisure to erecting a monument of his piety for the edification of his fellow-creatures.
Did he die mysteriously, without witnesses, save a gaoler capable of a crime? It was in the presence of the Count de Vaux, his son, and of his daughter,[469]—it was in their arms that he yielded up his breath. Saint-Mars, whom all his contemporaries represent to us as a perfectly upright man, was the sole intermediary between the King and his prisoners. Lastly, when the news of his death arrives at the court, Louis XIV. immediately causes an order to be transmitted to his representatives at Pignerol “to give up Fouquet’s corpse to his family, in order that they may have it transported whither it may seem good to them.”[470]
These are decisive and material considerations, the value of which cannot be destroyed by that crowd of secondary arguments which M. Lacroix has gathered up into a heap, and put forward with very great skill. But will even these resist a strict investigation? Can one be astonished that the accounts of Fouquet’s death furnished by his friends, separated from him for so long a time,[471] should differ from one another? Is it astonishing that some should attribute his death to suffocation, others to a fit, when we know that pulmonary apoplexy is always accompanied by suffocation? Must we consider as significant the uselessness of the researches made at Pignerol by a learned Piedmontese,[472] when he himself explains it by the suppression of the convent of Sainte-Claire, in which the body of Fouquet was placed for the time being, by the alterations which have taken place in the church,[473] and the dispersion of papers[474] belonging to this monastery? Lastly, is there anything strange in the silence of La Fontaine, in the laconism with which the Gazette and Le Mercure announce Fouquet’s death, and in the absence of an ostentatious inscription in the chapel of the Convent des Filles de la Visitation, to which his body was carried? Twenty years had passed away since the fall of the Surintendant. But in how much shorter space of time are services forgotten! In the especially fruitful period from 1660 to 1680, other and more illustrious names had filled the world’s stage and usurped fame. In that court which he had dazzled with his splendour, Fouquet had long since been forgotten, and only a few friends sympathized with his misfortunes. If he who has lent such touching language to the nymphs of Vaux was silent, if the death of his benefactor inspired him with no theme, it was not because he declined to believe in it. But rather than suppose him insensible to it, will it not be better to explain his silence as the result of indolence, and abandon the thought that La Fontaine was indifferent to Fouquet’s death?
If the real sentiments experienced under these circumstances by the fabulist are unknown to us, if the end of him who for so long kept a portion of the court at his feet occurred almost unperceived, he had at least the honour of being mourned by Madame de Sévigné, who was always faithful,[475] and the consolation of being surrounded by his family on his death-bed; while even Saint-Mars himself must have regretted this inoffensive and resigned prisoner. A short time after Fouquet’s death Lauzun was liberated.
But a year previous to this a few dragoons, commanded by an officer mysteriously despatched to Pignerol, had left the citadel during the night and taken the road to Turin. Halting at an isolated inn, far from any other habitation, and situated a short distance from the little river Chisola, they penetrated inside the house and concealed themselves with such care that their presence could not be detected. Very early the next morning a carriage containing three persons, two of whom were priests, hastily set out from Turin. Arrived at the banks of the stream, which was swollen by the rains, the travellers were obliged to dismount and traverse the torrent by means of some planks hurriedly put together. They then entered a room of the inn. Not long afterwards the armed dragoons made their way into this room and seized one of the travellers. An hour subsequently a carriage, surrounded by a cavalry escort, quitted the inn and conducted the prisoner to Pignerol. Three days later another stranger arrived in his turn at this fatal house. Immediately surrounded and seized by the same dragoons, posted in the same spot, he was also thrown into a carriage and rapidly whirled off to Pignerol.