There had been a prodigious yield of brains in France. A host of clever men developed the new ideas in every direction. Philosophy and science, literature and language, manners, habits, dress, assumed the forms with which we are so familiar. Then commenced the grand siècle, the era Frenchmen date from. They look upon those gallant ancestors almost as contemporaries, and still admire their feats in war, and laugh over their strokes of wit. The books they wrote became classics, and were in all hands until within the last twenty or thirty years. Latterly, indeed, they have been less read, for thought is turning to fresh fields, and society seems to be entering upon a new era.
No man more fully recognized the great change that was going on, or did more to help it forward, than Nicolas Fouquet, Vicomte de Vaux, and Marquis de Belleîle,—but better known as the Surintendant. In the pleasant social annals of France, Fouquet is the type of splendor, and of sudden, hopeless ruin. "There was never a man so magnificent, there was never a man so unfortunate," say the lively gentlemen and ladies in their Mémoires. His story is told to point the old and dreary moral of the instability of human prosperity. It is, indeed, like a tale of the "Arabian Nights." The Dervish is made Grand Vizier. He marries the Sultan's daughter. His palace owes its magical beauty to the Genies. The pillars are of jasper, the bases and capitals of massive gold. The Sultan frowns, waves his hand, and the crowd, who kissed the favorite's slipper yesterday, hoot and jeer as they see him pass by to his dungeon, disgraced, stripped, and beaten, Fouquet was of good family, the son of a Councillor of State in Louis XIII.'s time. Educated for the magistracy, he became a Maître des Requétes (say Master in Chancery) at twenty, and at thirty-five Procureur-Général (or Attorney-General) of the Parliament of Paris, which was only a court of justice, although it frequently attempted to usurp legislative, and even executive functions. During the rebellious troubles of the Fronde, the Procureur and his brother, the Abbé Fouquet, remained faithful to Mazarin and to the throne. The Abbé, in the ardor of his zeal, once offered the Queen his services to kill De Retz and salt him, if she would give her consent. It was at the request of the Queen that the Cardinal made the trusty Procureur Surintendant des Finances, the first position in France after the throne and the prime-ministership.
Pensions, and the promise of comfortable places, had collected about the Surintendant talent, fashion, and beauty. Some of the ablest men in the kingdom were in his employ. Pellisson, famous for ugliness and for wit, the Acanthe of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the beloved of Sappho Scudéry, was his chief clerk. Pellisson was then a Protestant; but Fouquet's disgrace, and four years in the Bastille, led him to reëxamine the grounds of his religious faith. He became, luckily, enlightened on the subject of his heresies at a time when the renunciation of Protestantism led to honors and wealth. Change of condition followed change of doctrine. The King attached him to his person as Secretary and Historiographer, and gave him the management of the fund for the conversion of Huguenots. Gourville, whom Charles II., an excellent judge, called the wisest of Frenchmen, belonged to Fouquet, as a receiver-general of taxes. Molière wrote two of his earlier plays for the Surintendant. La Fontaine was an especial favorite. He bound himself to pay for his quarterly allowance in quarterly madrigals, ballads, or sonnets. If he failed, a bailiff was to be sent to levy on his stanzas. He paid pretty regularly, but in a depreciated currency. The verses have not the golden ring of the "Contes" and the "Fables."
"Le Roi, l'État, la Patrie,
Partagent toute votre vie."
That is a sample of their value. Quack-medicine poets often do as well. He wrote "Adonis" for Fouquet, and had worked three years at the "Songe de Vaux," when the ruin of his patron caused him to lay it aside. It is a dull piece. Four fairies, Palatiane, Hortésie, Apellanire, and Calliopée, make long speeches about their specialty in Art, as seen at Vaux. Their names sufficiently denote it. A fish comes as ambassador from Neptune to Vaux, the glory of the universe, where Oronte (Fouquet's alias, in the affected jargon of the period)
"fait bâtir un palais magnifique,
Où règne l'ordre Ionique
Avec beaucoup d'agrément."
Apollo comes and promises to take charge of the live-stock, and of the picture-gallery. The Muses, too, are busy.
"Pour lui Melpomène médite,
Thalie en est jalouse,"—
and soon—
Fouquet's physician, Pecquet, is well known to physiologists by his treatise, "De Motu Chyli," and by "Pecquet's reservoir." His patron was warmly interested in the new discoveries in circulation, which were then, and so long after, violently opposed by the Purgons and the Diafoirus of the old school. The Surintendant's judgment was equally good in Art. Le Brun, the painter, owed fame and fortune to him. He gave him twelve thousand livres a year, besides paying a fixed price for each of his works. With the exception of Renaudot's journal, Loret's weekly gazette, published in the shape of a versified letter to Mademoiselle de Longueville, was the only newspaper in France. Fouquet furnished the editor with money and with items. He allowed Scarron sixteen hundred livres a year, when Mazarin struck his name from the pension-list, as punishment for a "Mazarinade," the only squib of the kind the Cardinal had ever noticed. Poor Scarron was hopelessly paralyzed, and bedridden. He had been a comely, robust fellow in his youth, given to dissipated courses. In a Carnival frolic, he appeared in the streets with two companions in the character of bipeds with feathers,—a scanty addition to Plato's definition of man. This airy costume was too much for French modesty, proverbially shrinking and sensitive. The mob hooted and gave chase. The maskers fled from the town and hid themselves in a marsh to evade pursuit. The result of this venturesome travestissement was the death of both his friends, and an attack of inflammatory rheumatism which twisted Scarron for life into the shape of the letter Z.