Part 3

— No: I heard a great noise, I went to the window; I saw, at the foot of the steps, a kind of marble horseman; I went down, he held out the letter to me, and his horse fell dead.

— But he?

— He fell with the horse; he was lifted up to be carried into the rooms; the letter read, I wanted to go up to him to get fuller news: but he was asleep in such a fashion that it was impossible to wake him. I took pity on him, and ordered that his boots be taken off and that he be left in peace.

— Good; now, here is what it is about, my lord. You saw M. d’Artagnan in Paris, did you not?

— Certainly, and he is a man of wit and even a man of heart, though he had our dear friends Lyodot and d’Emerys killed.

— Alas! yes, I know; I met at Tours the courier who was bringing me Gourville’s letter and Pellisson’s dispatches. Have you well reflected on this event, sir?

— Yes.

— And you understood that it was a direct attack on your sovereignty?

— Do you think so?

— Oh! yes, I think so.

— Well! I will confess it to you, that dark idea came to me too.

— Do not blind yourself, sir, for Heaven’s sake, listen well… I return to d’Artagnan.

— I am listening.

— Under what circumstances did you see him?

— He came to get money.

— With what warrant?

— With a royal order.

— Direct?

— Signed by His Majesty.

— You see! Well! d’Artagnan came to Belle-Île; he was disguised, he passed for some intendant charged by his master to buy saltworks. Now, d’Artagnan has no other master than the king; he therefore came as the king’s envoy. He saw Porthos.

— What is Porthos?

— Pardon, I am mistaken. He saw M. du Vallon at Belle-Île, and he knows, as you and I do, that Belle-Île is fortified.

— And you believe the king would have sent him? said Fouquet, thoughtful.

— Assuredly.

— And d’Artagnan in the king’s hands is a dangerous instrument?

— The most dangerous of all.

— I judged him well at first glance, then.

— How so?

— I wanted to attach him to myself.

— If you judged him to be the bravest, shrewdest, and most skillful man in France, you judged well.

— He must be had at any price, then!

— D’Artagnan?

— Is that not your opinion?

— It is my opinion; but you will not have him.

— Why?

— Because we have let the time pass. He was at odds with the court, we should have profited from that discord; since then he went to England, since then he powerfully contributed to the restoration, since then he has gained a fortune, since finally he has returned to the king’s service. Well! if he has returned to the king’s service, it is because that service was well paid.

— We will pay more, that is all.

— Oh! sir, allow me; d’Artagnan has his word, and, once engaged, that word stays where it is.

— What do you conclude from that? said Fouquet anxiously.

— That for the moment it is a matter of parrying a terrible blow.

— And how do you parry it?

— Wait… d’Artagnan is going to come render account to the king of his mission.

— Oh! we have time to think about it.

— How so?

— You have a good lead on him, I presume?

— About ten hours.

— Well! in ten hours…

Aramis shook his pale head.

— See those clouds racing across the sky, those swallows cleaving the air: d’Artagnan goes faster than the cloud and the bird; d’Artagnan is the wind that carries them off.

— Come now!

— I tell you that man is something superhuman, sir; he is of my age, and I have known him for thirty-five years.

— Well?

— Well! listen to my reckoning, sir: I sent M. du Vallon off at two in the morning; M. du Vallon had eight hours’ lead on me. When did M. du Vallon arrive?

— About four hours ago.

— You see, I gained four hours on him, and yet Porthos is a rough rider, and yet he killed eight horses on the road whose carcasses I found. I rode post fifty leagues, but I have the gout, the gravel, who knows what? so that fatigue is killing me. I had to stop at Tours; since then, rolling in a carriage half dead, half overturned, often dragged on its sides, sometimes on the roof of the vehicle, always at the gallop of four furious horses, I arrived, arrived gaining four hours on Porthos; but, you see, d’Artagnan does not weigh three hundred pounds like Porthos, d’Artagnan does not have the gout and the gravel like me: he is not a rider, he is a centaur; d’Artagnan, you see, having left for Belle-Île when I left for Paris, d’Artagnan, despite the ten hours’ lead I have on him, d’Artagnan will arrive two hours after me.

— But finally, accidents?

— There are no accidents for him.

— If the horses fail?

— He will run faster than the horses.

— What a man, good God!

— Yes, he is a man I love and admire; I love him, because he is good, great, loyal; I admire him, because he represents for me the culminating point of human power; but, while loving him, while admiring him, I fear him and foresee him. So, to sum up, sir: in two hours, d’Artagnan will be here; get ahead of him, run to the Louvre, see the king before he sees d’Artagnan.

— What shall I say to the king?

— Nothing; give him Belle-Île.

— Oh! M. d’Herblay, M. d’Herblay! cried Fouquet, what suddenly thwarted projects!

— After a miscarried project, there is always another project that one may bring to success! Let us never despair, and go, sir, go quickly.

— But this garrison so carefully selected, the king will have it changed at once.

— This garrison, sir, was the king’s when it entered Belle-Île; it is yours today: it will be the same for all garrisons after fifteen days of occupation. Let it be, sir. Do you see any disadvantage in having an army of your own at the end of a year instead of one or two regiments? Do you not see that your garrison of today will make you partisans at La Rochelle, at Nantes, at Bordeaux, at Toulouse, everywhere it is sent?

“Go to the king, sir, go, time is slipping away, and d’Artagnan, while we lose our time, flies like an arrow on the high road.

— M. d’Herblay, you know that every word of yours is a seed that bears fruit in my thought; I am going to the Louvre.

— This instant, is it not?

— I only ask for time to change my clothes.

— Remember that d’Artagnan need not pass by Saint-Mandé, he, but will go straight to the Louvre; that is an hour to deduct from the lead we have left.

— D’Artagnan may have anything except my English horses; I shall be at the Louvre in twenty-five minutes.

And, without losing a second, Fouquet ordered the departure.

Aramis only had time to say to him:

— Come back as quickly as you go, for I await you with impatience.

Five minutes later, the superintendent was flying toward Paris.

Meanwhile Aramis had himself shown the room where Porthos was resting.

At the door of Fouquet’s study, he was clasped in the arms of Pellisson, who had just learned of his arrival and was leaving the offices to see him.

Aramis received, with that friendly dignity he knew so well how to assume, these caresses as respectful as they were eager; but suddenly, stopping on the landing:

— What do I hear up there? he asked.

One did indeed hear a hollow rasping like that of a starving tiger or an impatient lion.

— Oh! it is nothing, said Pellisson smiling.

— But finally?…

— It is M. du Vallon snoring.

— Indeed, said Aramis, there was none but he capable of making such a noise. Do you permit me, Pellisson, to inquire whether he lacks for anything?

— And do you permit me to accompany you?

— But of course!

Both entered the room.

Porthos was stretched upon a bed, his face violet rather than red, his eyes swollen, his mouth agape. That roar escaping from the deep cavities of his chest made the windowpanes vibrate.

From his muscles taut and sculpted in relief upon his face, from his hair stuck with sweat, from the energetic heavings of his chin and shoulders, one could not refuse a certain admiration: strength pushed to that point is almost divinity.

The herculean legs and feet of Porthos, in swelling, had cracked his leather boots; all the force of his enormous body had converted into a rigidity of stone.

Porthos moved no more than the granite giant lying in the plain of Agrigento. At Pellisson’s order, a valet occupied himself with cutting Porthos’s boots, for no power on earth could have pulled them off him.

Four lackeys had tried in vain, pulling at them like capstans.

They had not even succeeded in waking Porthos. His boots were removed in strips, and his legs fell back on the bed; the rest of his clothes were cut off, he was carried into a bath, left there an hour, then clad in white linen and put into a warmed bed, all with efforts and troubles that would have incommoded a dead man, but which did not even make Porthos open an eye and did not interrupt for a second the formidable organ of his snorings.

Aramis, for his part, of dry and nervous nature, armed with exquisite courage, wished also to brave fatigue and work with Gourville and Pellisson; but he fainted on the chair where he had obstinately stayed. He was lifted to be carried into a neighboring room, where the rest of the bed soon provoked calm in his head.

Chapter LXXV — Where M. Fouquet Acts

Meanwhile Fouquet was running toward the Louvre at the full gallop of his English team.

The king was working with Colbert. Suddenly the king remained thoughtful. Those two death sentences he had signed on mounting the throne sometimes came back to his memory. They were two mourning stains he saw with open eyes; two blood stains he saw with closed eyes.

— Sir, he said suddenly to the intendant, it sometimes seems to me that those two men you had condemned were not very great culprits.

— Sire, they had been chosen from the flock of the tax-farmers, which needed to be decimated.

— Chosen by whom?

— By necessity, Sire, replied Colbert coldly.

— Necessity! big word! murmured the young king.

— Great goddess, Sire.

— They were friends much devoted to the superintendent, were they not?

— Yes, Sire, friends who would have given their life for M. Fouquet.

— They gave it, sir, said the king.

— That is true, but uselessly, happily, which was not their intention.

— How much money had these men misappropriated?

— Ten millions perhaps, of which six were confiscated from them.

— And that money is in my coffers? asked the king with a certain feeling of repugnance.

— It is, Sire; but this confiscation, while threatening M. Fouquet, did not reach him.

— You conclude, M. Colbert?…

— That if M. Fouquet has stirred up against Your Majesty a troop of factious men to tear his friends from punishment, he will stir up an army when it is a matter of withdrawing himself from chastisement.

The king cast upon his confidant one of those glances that resemble the dark fire of a storm flash; one of those glances that illuminate the darkness of the deepest consciences.

— I am astonished, he said, that, thinking such things of M. Fouquet, you do not come give me counsel.

— What counsel, Sire?

— Tell me first, clearly and precisely, what you think, M. Colbert.

— Of what?

— Of M. Fouquet’s conduct.

— I think, Sire, that M. Fouquet, not content with attracting money to himself, as M. de Mazarin did, and thereby depriving Your Majesty of part of his power, still wishes to attract to himself all the friends of the easy life and of pleasures, so that finally the idle call poetry, and politicians corruption; I think that in bribing Your Majesty’s subjects he encroaches upon the royal prerogative, and cannot, if this continues, delay relegating Your Majesty among the weak and the obscure.

— How are all these projects qualified, M. Colbert?

— The projects of M. Fouquet, Sire?

— Yes.

— They are named crimes of lèse-majesté.

— And what is done to criminals of lèse-majesté?

— They are arrested, judged, punished.

— Are you quite sure M. Fouquet conceived the thought of the crime you impute to him?

— I will say more, Sire, there was in him a beginning of execution.

— Well! I return to what I was saying, M. Colbert.

— And you were saying, Sire?

— Give me advice.

— Pardon, Sire, but beforehand I have still something to add.

— Say it.

— An evident, palpable, material proof of treason.

— Which?

— I have just learned that M. Fouquet is fortifying Belle-Île-en-Mer.

— Ah! indeed!

— Yes, Sire.

— Are you sure of it?

— Perfectly; do you know, Sire, how many soldiers there are at Belle-Île?

— No, faith; and you?

— I am ignorant of it, Sire, I therefore wished to propose to Your Majesty to send someone to Belle-Île.

— Who?

— Myself, for example.

— What would you go do at Belle-Île?

— To inform myself whether it is true that, after the example of the ancient feudal lords, M. Fouquet is having his walls crenellated.

— And to what end would he do that?

— To the end of defending himself one day against his king.

— But if it is so, M. Colbert, said Louis, one must do at once as you said: one must arrest M. Fouquet.

— Impossible!

— I thought I had already told you, sir, that I suppress that word in my service.

— The service of Your Majesty cannot prevent M. Fouquet from being superintendent general.

— Well?

— And that consequently, by that office, he has all the Parliament for him, as he has all the army by his largesses, all literature by his graces, all the nobility by his gifts.

— That is to say then that I can do nothing against M. Fouquet?

— Nothing at all, at least at this hour, Sire.

— You are a sterile counselor, M. Colbert.

— Oh! not so, Sire, for I shall no longer confine myself to showing the peril to Your Majesty.

— Come then! By what can one sap the colossus? Let us see!

And the king began to laugh with bitterness.

— He has grown by money, kill him by money, Sire.

— If I took his office from him?

— Bad means.

— The good, the good then?

— Ruin him, Sire, I tell you.

— How so?

— Occasions will not fail you, profit by all occasions.

— Point them out to me.

— Here is one first. His Royal Highness Monsieur is to be married, his nuptials must be magnificent. It is a fine occasion for Your Majesty to ask a million of M. Fouquet; M. Fouquet, who pays twenty thousand livres at a stroke when he owes but five, will easily find this million when Your Majesty asks it.

— That is well, I will ask it of him, said Louis XIV.

— If Your Majesty will sign the order, I will have the money taken myself.

And Colbert pushed a paper before the king and presented him a pen.

At this moment, the usher half-opened the door and announced the superintendent.

Louis paled.

Colbert let the pen fall and drew back from the king over whom he was spreading his black wings of an evil angel.

The superintendent made his entrance like a man of court, to whom a single glance suffices to appraise a situation.

This situation was not reassuring for Fouquet, whatever the consciousness of his strength. The little black eye of Colbert, dilated by envy, and the limpid eye of Louis XIV, inflamed by anger, signaled a pressing danger.

Courtiers are, for the noises of the court, like old soldiers who distinguish, through the murmurs of wind and leaves, the distant reverberation of the steps of an armed troop; they can, after listening, say about how many men march, how many arms ring, how many cannons roll. Fouquet therefore had only to question the silence that had fallen at his arrival: he found it big with threatening revelations. The king left him all the time to advance to the middle of the chamber.

His adolescent modesty commanded him that abstention of the moment.

Fouquet boldly seized the occasion.

— Sire, he said, I was impatient to see Your Majesty.

— And why? asked Louis.

— To announce good news to him.

Colbert, less the greatness of person, less the largeness of heart, resembled Fouquet in many points. Same penetration, same habit of men. Moreover, that great force of contraction, which gives hypocrites time to reflect and gather themselves for spring.

He guessed that Fouquet was marching to meet the blow he was about to deal him.

His eyes shone.

— What news? asked the king.

Fouquet deposited a roll of paper on the table.

— That Your Majesty deign to cast the eyes on this work, said he.

The king slowly unrolled the roll.

— Plans? said he.

— Yes, Sire.

— And what are these plans?

— A new fortification, Sire.

— Ah! ah! said the king, you occupy yourself then with tactics and strategy, M. Fouquet.

— I occupy myself with all that can be useful to the reign of Your Majesty, replied Fouquet.

— Fine designs! said the king looking at the drawing.

— Your Majesty understands no doubt, said Fouquet leaning over the paper: here is the girdle of walls, there the forts, there the advanced works.

— And what do I see there, sir?

— The sea.

— The sea all around?

— Yes, Sire.

— And what is this place of which you show me the plan?

— Sire, it is Belle-Île-en-Mer, answered Fouquet with simplicity.

At this word, at this name, Colbert made so marked a movement that the king turned to recommend reserve to him. Fouquet did not appear at all moved by Colbert’s movement, nor by the king’s sign.

— Sir, continued Louis, you have then had Belle-Île fortified?

— Yes, Sire, and I bring the estimates and accounts to Your Majesty, replied Fouquet; I have spent sixteen hundred thousand livres on this operation.

— To what end? replied coldly Louis, who had drawn initiative from a hateful glance of the intendant.

— For a purpose rather easy to grasp, answered Fouquet, Your Majesty was on cool terms with Great Britain.

— Yes; but since the restoration of King Charles II, I have made alliance with it.

— For a month, Sire, Your Majesty has said it well; but it is near six months since the fortifications of Belle-Île were begun.

— Then they have become useless.

— Sire, fortifications are never useless. I had fortified Belle-Île against MM. Monck and Lambert and all those London burghers who played at soldier. Belle-Île will find itself wholly fortified against the Dutch, to whom either England or Your Majesty cannot fail to make war.

The king was silent again and looked askance at Colbert.

— Belle-Île, I believe, added Louis, is yours, M. Fouquet?

— No, Sire.

— Whose then?

— Your Majesty’s.

Colbert was seized with fright as if an abyss had opened beneath his feet.

Louis trembled with admiration, whether for the genius or for the devotion of Fouquet.

— Explain yourself, sir, said he.

— Nothing easier, Sire; Belle-Île is a land of mine; I have fortified it with my own money; but as nothing in the world can oppose a subject making a humble gift to his king, I offer Your Majesty the property of the land of which she will leave me the usufruct. Belle-Île, a place of war, must be occupied by the king; His Majesty, henceforth, will be able to hold a sure garrison there.

Colbert let himself almost entirely down upon the slippery parquet. He needed, to keep from falling, to hold to the columns of the wainscot.

— It is a great skill of man of war that you have testified there, sir, said Louis XIV.

— Sire, the initiative did not come from me, replied Fouquet; many officers inspired it in me; the plans themselves were made by one of the most distinguished engineers.

— His name?

— M. du Vallon.

— M. du Vallon? resumed Louis. I do not know him. It is unfortunate, M. Colbert, he continued, that I do not know the names of the men of talent who honor my reign.

And saying these words, he turned toward Colbert. The latter felt crushed, sweat ran from his brow, no word presented itself to his lips, he suffered an inexpressible martyrdom.

— You will retain that name, added Louis XIV.

Colbert bowed, paler than his Flemish lace cuffs.

Fouquet continued:

— The masonry is of Roman mastic; architects composed it for me after the relations of Antiquity.

— And the cannons? asked Louis.

— Oh! Sire, this concerns Your Majesty, it does not belong to me to put cannons in my house, without Your Majesty having told me that she was at home.

Louis began to waver undecided between the hatred this so powerful man inspired in him and the pity this other abased man inspired in him, who seemed the counterfeit of the first.

But the consciousness of his duty as king prevailed over the feelings of the man.

He extended his finger upon the paper.

— These plans must have cost you much money to execute? said he.

— I thought I had the honor to state the figure to Your Majesty.

— Say again, I forgot it.

— Sixteen hundred thousand livres.

— Sixteen hundred thousand livres! You are enormously rich, M. Fouquet.

— It is Your Majesty who is rich, said the superintendent, since Belle-Île is hers.

— Yes, thank you; but as rich as I am, M. Fouquet…

The king stopped.

— Well! Sire?… asked the superintendent.

— I foresee the moment when I shall lack money.

— You, Sire?

— Yes, I.

— And at what moment then?

— Tomorrow, for example.

— That Your Majesty do me the honor to explain.

— My brother marries Madame of England.

— Well, Sire?

— Well! I must give the young princess a reception worthy of the granddaughter of Henri IV.

— That is but just, Sire.

— I therefore need money.

— Doubtless.

— And I would need…

Louis XIV hesitated. The sum he had to ask was precisely that he had been obliged to refuse Charles II. He turned toward Colbert so that he might strike the blow.

— I would need tomorrow… he repeated looking at Colbert.

— A million, said brutally the latter, enchanted to take his revenge.

Fouquet had his back to the intendant to listen to the king. He did not even turn and waited for the king to repeat or rather murmur:

— A million.

— Oh! Sire, answered Fouquet disdainfully, a million! what will Your Majesty do with a million?

— It seems to me however… said Louis XIV.

— It is what is spent at the nuptials of the least little prince of Germany.

— Sir…

“Stories of the world, in your language.”