"Or the purple fever," said the King.
"It is the air of Vincennes," observed Richelieu, "that marvellous air which seems fatal to all who do not love his Majesty."
Ministers themselves were apt to fall by the weapon of their own employment. A minister of Louis XIV., who had chosen for his proud device the motto, Quò non ascendam?—What place too high for me?—and whom chroniclers have suspected of pretensions to the gallant crown of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, fell one day from a too giddy pinnacle plump into the dungeon of Vincennes. It was Fouquet the magnificent.
Up to a point, Fouquet was the best courtier in France. The King's passion was for pomp and glitter; the minister cultivated a taste for the dazzling. Louis was prodigal to extravagance; Fouquet became lavish jusqu'à la folie. The King dipped both hands into the public moneys; the minister plunged elbow-deep into the coffers of the State. The King offered to his servitors fêtes the most sumptuous; the minister regaled his friends with spectacles beyond compare. Then Louis wearied of this too splendid emulation, and Fouquet the magnificent was attached. He all but sacrificed his head to his lust of rivalry; but Louis relented, and took from him only his goods and his freedom. Despoiled and dishonoured, the ex-minister fared from prison to prison,—Vincennes, Angers, Amboise, Moret, the Bastille, and Pignerol. Quò non ascendam?—Whither may I not mount? The unfortunate minister, who had thought to climb to the sun of Louis XIV., sank to his death in a cachot.
The contrasts presented by the diverse fates of certain prisoners are sufficiently striking. Fouquet was preceded at Vincennes by Cardinal de Retz, the last prisoner of distinction whom Anne of Austria sent to the dungeon. The Cardinal's was a gilt-edged captivity. He lived en prince at Vincennes; he had valets, money, and a good table; great ladies came to distract him, friends to flatter him, and players to divert him. Literature, politics, gallantry, and the theatre—the Cardinal found all of these at Vincennes. When he chanced to remember his priestly quality, he obtained leave to say mass in the chapel of the château, "carefully concealing the end of his chain under the richest of vestments." But the chain was there, and the lightest of fetters grows heavy in prison;—the Cardinal resolved on flight.
It was a clever and most original plan. On a certain day, a party of the Cardinal's friends, mounted as for a desperate ride, were to assemble under the walls of the keep, and at a given signal were to whirl away in their midst a man attired at all points like the Cardinal himself. A rope hanging from a severed bar in the window of the cell was to give his guards to suppose that the prisoner had escaped that way; but all this while the Cardinal was to lie perdu in a hole which he had discovered on the upper terrace of the prison. When the excitement over the imaginary flight had subsided, and the vigilance of the sentries was relaxed, the Cardinal was to issue from his hiding-place, disguised as a kitchen-man, and walk out of the dungeon. It might have succeeded, but the elements played into the hands of Anne d'Autriche. A storm blew up on the night that the Cardinal was to have quitted his chamber, and the wind closed a heavy door on the staircase that led to the terrace. All the Cardinal's efforts to wrest it open were unavailing, and he was forced to return to his cell. He was removed to the château of Nantes, and the imaginative daring of his flight from that place has ranked it high in the annals of prison-breaking.
One echo more shall reach us from these lugubrious caverns. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, a young man, Du Puits by name (victimised by an Italian Abbé into forging orders on the King's treasury), received as cell-companion the Marquis de la Baldonnière, a reputed or suspected alchemist. Du Puits, a laughing philosopher now on the verge of tears, recovered his spirits when he learned the new-comer's name.