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.