(1) — A much damaged copy. The face is pale and elongated, the expression melancholy and sanctimonious. It is an oval medallion, 1654, without signature, Paris, chez Daret.
(2) — The same, chez Louis Boissevin, in the Rue Saint-Jacques.
(3) — The same, with this quatrain:
Si sa fidélité parut incomparable En conservant l’Estat, Sa prudence aujourd’huy n’est pas moins admirable D’en augmenter l’éclat.
(4) — Medallion. The picture is much disfigured; the inscription:
Qu’il a de probité, de sçavoir et de zelle, Qu’il paroit généreux, magnanime et prudent, Que son esprit est fort, que son cœur est fidelle, Toutes ces qualités l’on fait Surintendant.
(5) — Medallion, with drapery. Very bad. Signature: “Baltazar Moncornet, excud.”
(6) — The same, with a frame of foliage, 1658.
(7) — A small copy, reversed, executed after Foucquet’s expression which he retained even during his trial. The face is pleasing, but there is something disquieting about it. The costume is rich; not that of a gallant knight, or of a great noble, but of a magistrate. A little cap, a broad collar, a dark robe; the dress of a lawyer, but of a magnificent lawyer; for over the robe is thrown a sort of dalmatic of Genoa velvet, with a large flowered pattern. What this portrait does not reproduce is the charm of the original. Foucquet possessed a sovereign grace; he death, the date of which is indicated, 23rd March, 1680. It is old, hard, dark and damaged. Signature: “Nanteuil, pinxit, Gaillard, sculpt.”
A portrait of Lebrun deserves honourable mention after that of Nanteuil. The features are practically the same as in the engraving by Eugene Reims; but the expression is not so keen, nor so cheerful. The head, three-quarter profile, is turned to the right This picture is the original of the three following engravings:
(1) — A large oval. Signature: “C. Lebrun pinx, F. Poilly sculpt.” Inscription:
Illustrissimus vir Nicolaus Foucquet Generalis in Supremo regii Ærarii Præfectus: V. Comes Melodunensis, etc.
In a later copy, Foucquet’s arms replace the Latin inscription.
(2) — A spoiled and softened copy, very careless workmanship. Signature: “C. Mellan del et F.”
(3) — An imitation. Foucquet, seated in a straight-backed armchair, with large wrought nail-heads, with a casket on knew how to please, to inspire affection. It is true that he possessed a key to all hearts — access to an inexhaustible treasury. He gave much, but it is true also that he gave wisely, and he was naturally the most generous of men.
Poets he succoured with a noble delicacy. Since it is true that he usurped the rights which were then attributed to the Sovereign, his master, by disposing of the public revenue as though it were his own, at least he made a royal use of the King’s treasure by the table beside him. He holds a pen in his right hand, and paper in his left. Inscription:
Magna videt, majora latent; ecce aspids artis
Clarum opus, et virtus clarior arte latet,
Umbra est et fulget, solem miraris in umbra
Quid sol ipse micat, cujus et umbra micat.
Signature: “Œgid. Rousselet, sculpt., 1659.”
(4) — An imitation. Signature: “Larmessin, 1661.” Finally, we must mention a full-length portrait, which seems inspired by the foregoing. The Superintendent is standing, wearing a long robe; he holds in his right hand a small bag, in his left a paper. A raised curtain displays, on the right, a country scene, with a torrent, a rock and a fortified chateau. In the sky, Renown puts a trumpet to her mouth. In her left hand she holds another trumpet with a bannerette on which is written: “Quo non ascendet?” Inscription:
A quel degré d’honneur ne peut-il pas monter
S’il s’élève tousjours par son propre courage?
Son nom et sa vertu lui donnent l’advantage
De pouvoir tout prétendre et de tout mériter.) dispensing some of it to Corneille, to La Fontaine and to Molière. The rest was spent on buildings, furniture, tapestries and so forth; and this, again, when all is said, was a royal habit, if regarded, as it should be, in the light of ancient institutions. If Foucquet cannot be justified — and how can he be, since there were poor in France in those days? — at least his conduct is explained, in some degree excused, by the institutions, and, above all, by the public morality of his period.
While his Château de Vaux was building, Foucquet lived at Saint-Mandé, in a house sumptuously surrounded by beautiful gardens. These gardens adjoined the park where Mazarin used to spend the summer. The financier had only to pass through a door when he wished to visit the Minister. The estate of Saint-Mandé was formed by the union of two estates bought from Mme de Beauvais, Anne of Austria’s first lady-in-waiting. Gradually, Foucquet acquired more land and added wings to the main building, so that the whole construction cost at least 1,100,000 livres; and yet the finest part of it remained unexecuted.”
We may form some idea of the beautiful things which Foucquet had collected in this house by consulting the inventory preserved in the Archives, and published by M. Bonnaffé, “of the statues, busts, scabella, columns, tables and other works in marble and stone at Saint-Mandé.”
Among these things there are many antiques. Most of the modem pieces of sculpture are by Michel Anguier, who passed three years, 1655 — 58, at Saint-Mandé. There he executed the group of La Charité which has already been mentioned, and a Hercules six feet in height, as well as “thirteen statues, life-size, copied from the most beautiful antiques of Rome, notably the Laocoôn, Hercules, Flora, and Juno and Jupiter.” This we are told by Germain Brice, He had seen them in a garden in the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, where they were in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Germain Brice also tells us that in those days eight other statues, by the same sculptor, and also coming from Saint-Mandé, adorned the house of the Marquise de Louvois at Choisy. We learn also, from other sources, that one of the ceilings of Saint-Mandé was painted by Lebrun, Finally, the Abbé de Marolles speaks of the beautiful things which Foucquet had painted at Saint-Mandé, and the Latin inscriptions which were entrusted to Nicolas Gervaise, his physician. We may remark in this connection that Louis XIV, who in art did little more than continue Foucquet’s undertakings, derived from the functions which the Superintendent conferred upon this Nicolas Gervaise the ideas of that little Academy, the Academy of Inscriptions and Medals, which he founded five or six years later.
But the most famous room in the house of which we are now speaking was the library, because the noblest room in any house is that in which books are lodged, and because La Fontaine and Corneille used to linger in the library of Saint-Mandé. It was there that the poets used to wait for the Superintendent. “Every one knows,” said Corneille, “that this great Minister was no less the Superintendent of belles-lettres than of finance; that his house was as open to men of intellect as to men of affairs, and that, whether in Paris or in the country, it is always in his library that one waits for those precious moments which he steals from his overwhelming occupations, in order to gratify those who possess some degree of talent for successful writing.”
It was in this gallery that La Fontaine, as well as Corneille, used to sit waiting until the master of the house had leisure to receive the poet and his verses. One day he waited a whole hour. Monsieur le Surintendant was occupied; whether with finance or with love posterity cannot hope to know. Nevertheless, the good man found the time short: he passed it in his own company. Unfortunately, the suisse unceremoniously dismissed “the lover of the Muses,” who, having returned home, wrote an ep:.e which should assure his being received the next time. “I will not be importunate,” he said:
Je prendrai votre heure et la mienne.
Si je vois qu’on vous entretienne,
J’attendrai fort paisiblement
En ce superbe appartement
Ou l’on a fait d’étrange terre
Depuis peu venir à grand-erre
(Non sans travail et quelques frais)
&nbs
p; Des rois Céphrim et Kiopès
Le cercueil, la tombe ou la bière:
Pour les rois, ils sont en poussière:
C’est là que j’en voulais venir.
Il me fallut entretenir
Avec les monuments antiques,
Pendant qu’aux affaires publiques
Vous donniez tout votre loisir.
(Certes j’y pris un grand plaisir
Vous semble-t-il pas que l’image
D’un assez galant personnage
Sert à ces tombeaux d’ornement).
Pour vous en parler franchement,
Je ne puis m’empêcher d’en rire.
Messire Orus, me mis-je à dire,
Vous nous rendez tous ébahis:
Les enfants de votre pays
Ont, ce me semble, des bavettes
Que je trouve plaisamment faites.
On m’eut expliqué tout cela,
Mais il fallut partir de là
Sans entendre l’allégorie.
Je quittai donc la galerie,
Fort content parmi mon chagrin,
De Kiopès et de Céphrim,
D’Orus et de tout son lignage,
Et de maint autre personnage.
Puissent ceux d’Egypte en ces lieux,
Fussent-ils rois, fussent-ils dieux,
Sans violence et sans contrainte,
Se reposer dessus leur plinthe
Jusques au brut du genre humain!
Ils ont fait assez de chemin
Pour des personnes de leur taille.
Et vous, seigneur, pour qui travaille
Le temps qui peut tout consumer,
Vous, que s’efforce de charmer
L’Antiquité qu’on idolâtre,
Pour qui le dieu de Cléopâtre
Sous nos murs enfin abordé,
Vient de Memphis à Saint-Mandé:
Puissiez vous voir ces belles-choses
Pendant mille moissons de roses....
At once absurd and charming is this song which the Gallic lark composed to the sarcophagi of Africa. It is hardly necessary to say that the coffins, at the strange shape of which La Fontaine wondered, had never enclosed the bodies of “Kiopès and of Céphrim.” Messire Orus had not told his secrets to the most lovable of our poets. We must not forget that the scholars of that time were as ignorant on this point as our friend.
These two mummy-cases were the first which had been brought to Paris from the banks of the Nile. They bore their history written upon them, but no one knew how to read it. The chance guess of some admirer had attributed to them a royal origin, The truth is that they had been discovered twenty-five years earlier in a pyramid by the inhabitants of the province of Saïd; transported to Cairo, then to Alexandria, they were bought by a French trader, who landed them at Marseilles on the 4th September, 1632, where they were acquired, it is believed, by a collector of that town, M. Chemblon.
There was then at Rome a German Jesuit, by name Athanasius Kircher, a man of vivid imagination, very learned, who, having dabbled in physics, chemistry, natural history, theology, antiquities, music, ancient and modern languages, invented the magic lantern. This reverend Father really knew Coptic, and thought he knew something of the language of the ancient Egyptians. To prove this he wrote a large quarto volume entitled Lingua Ægyptiaca restituta, which proves quite the con trary. But it is very easy to deceive oneself, especially when one is a scholar. A brother of his in Jesus, Father Brusset, told him of the arrival of the two ancient coffins, and Father Kircher went to Marseilles to see them. Later he treated of them in his Œdipus Ægyptiacus, a pleasant day-dream in four folio volumes; La Fontaine’s, in the Saint-Mandé library, was at all events shorter.
About the year 1659 the sarcophagi were bought for Foucquet, and taken to the Superintendent’s house. When La Fontaine saw them they no longer contained the bodies which Egyptian piety had destined them to preserve. The two mummies had been unceremoniously relegated to an outhouse.
As for the sarcophagi themselves, Foucquet had intended to send them to his house at Vaux. He had conceived the charming idea of restoring them from the land of exile to the pyramid from which they had been taken. But his days of prosperity were numbered. This project was to be swept away like a drop of water in the great shipwreck. The two sarcophagi, seized at Saint-Mandé, where they had remained, were valued on the 26th of February, 1656, at 800 livres, and were classified as “two ancient mausoleums, representing a king and queen.”
A sculptor, whose name remains unknown, bought them at the public sale which followed Foucquet’s condemnation. He then gave them to Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre, having passed from the service of Foucquet into that of the King, was then living in a little pavilion at the Tuileries, into which the two mausoleums, as the inventory calls them, could not enter. They were therefore highly inconvenient guests. They were placed “in a little garden of the Tuileries, where these rare curiosities remained for a long time exposed to the injurious effect of the atmosphere and greatly neglected.”
Finding that he had no use for them, Le Nôtre presented them to a neighbour and friend, M. d’Ussé, Comptroller of the King’s Household, whose garden adjoined that of the Tuileries. M. d’Ussé had them placed “at the end of a bowered alley.” According to the virtuoso, Germain Brice, the Comptroller, did not realize their value and their rarity. A Flora or a Pomona, smiling on her marble pedestal, would have been more to his liking. Nevertheless he had them taken to his estate of Ussé, in Touraine, which shows that he did not disdain them. Thus the repose which La Fontaine desired for these worshippers of Messire Orus was denied them. Even yet they had not made their last journey. M. d’Ussé had married a child of twelve, who was the daughter of a great man. Her name was Jeanne-Françoise de Vauban. Her father, then Commissary-General of Fortifications, paid a visit of some length to his son-in-law. He could not resist the temptation of shifting the soil, and he made a terrace; at the foot of this terrace he constructed a niche for the two “mausoleums.” Now, half a century later there lived at a distance of five miles from Ussé an antiquarian called La Sauvagère, who went up and down the country examining ancient stones, for stones had voices before to-day. He did not fail to go to Ussé. He saw the sarcophagi, and marvelled at them. He wrote about them to Court de Géblin, who replied to his letter. Court de Géblin was investigating the origin of the world. This time he thought he had found it.
La Sauvagère published plates of the sarcophagi and of the hieroglyphics which covered them. Here was a fine subject for conjecture. After thirty years, La Sauvagère’s enthusiasm had not cooled. To the Prince de Montbazon, who had just bought the château, and the Egyptians with it, he ordained fervently:— “Prince, there you have something which is by itself worth the whole of your estate.”
In 1807 the Egyptians were still in the niche where Vauban had installed them. The Marquis de Chalabre then sold the estate of Ussé, which he had inherited from his father, but he kept the sarcophagi and took them to Paris to his apartment.
Then they disappeared, and, in 1843, no one knew what had become of them. M. Bonardot, the archaeologist, who displayed so much care in the preservation of old engravings, visited that year the cemetery of the old Abbey of Longchamps. By the edge of a path he discovered two stones sticking out of the ground. Having poked about with his stick, he saw that these stones were in the form of heads, and by the hair-dressing he recognized two Egyptians. He made inquiries, and learned that they were the two sarcophagi, sent there by M. de Chalabre’s son, and forgotten. M. de Chalabre was then dying; his heirs had the Egyptians disinterred and gave them to the Louvre Museum, and there they are to-day. Their names have been deciphered. They are not royal names. One is called Hor-Kheb, the other Ank-Mer.
They wear their beards in beard-cases, according to the custom of their time and country, and it was these beard-cases that La Fontaine took for bibs.
The gallery of Saint-Mandé, which contained these two monuments that we have followed so
far afield, was magnificently decorated with thirteen ancient gods in marble, life-size, and thirty-three busts in bronze or marble, placed on pedestals. Among these busts were those of Socrates and Seneca. Imagine these faces, brown or luminous, ranged about the chamber, where the books displayed the sombre resplendence of their brown and gilt backs. Imagine the pictures, the cabinets of medals, the tables of porphyry, the mosaics; imagine a thousand precious curiosities, and you will have some idea of this gallery, the rich treasures of which were to be dispersed almost as soon as they had been collected.
The Superintendent had little time for reading, but he loved to turn over the pages of his books, for he was a well-read man. He promised himself the pleasures of learned, leisurely study in his old age, when he would no longer read a welcome in ladies’ eyes. Meanwhile, he had had twenty-seven thousand volumes arranged on the shelves of his gallery, around those two sarcophagi the story of which had carried us so far afield from Saint-Mandé and the last days of Mazarin. These twenty-seven thousand volumes comprised seven thousand in folio, twelve thousand in quarto and eight thousand in octavo. They were not all in the gallery. There was, in particular, a room for the “Alcorans, the Talmuds and some old Bible commentaries.”
The rich collection of printed books which he had gathered together embraced universal history, medicine, law, natural history, mathematics, oratory, theology and philosophy, as well as the fine arts, represented by illustrated volumes.
These books, of which it would not be possible to compile a catalogue to-day, were not, it would seem, contained in beautiful morocco bindings, finely gilt and richly adorned with coats of arms, like those which honoured Mazarin’s library. The financier had bought hastily, in a wholesale fashion, books already bound, so that we cannot rank him among the great bibliophiles, although he may be numbered among the lovers of books.
That Foucquet loved books, as he loved gardens, as he loved everything flattering to the taste of a well-bred man, that he even preferred books to anything else, there is no doubt, for we have irrefutable testimony of the fact. In the Conseils de la Sagesse, which he wrote in prison, may be found this beau tiful phrase: “You know that formerly I used to find convention in my books.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 349