Reine des cœurs, objet délicieux,
Que suit l’enfant qu’on adore en des lieux
Nommés Paphos, Amathonte et Cythère,
Vous qui charmez les hommes et les dieux,
En puissiez-vous dans cent ans autant faire.
We have seen Madame Foucquet as Charity; now we see her as Venus. But it was only to poets that she was a goddess; in reality she was a good woman whose mental qualities were lacking in charm; she was sympathetic only in misfortune.
La Fontaine, in this poem, asks Madame Foucquet whether “one of the Smiles” whom she “has for secretary” will send him a glorious acquittal. Now, the Smile who was Madame la Surintendante’s secretary was Pellisson. As we have said, he was a wit. It delighted him to think himself a Smile hovering round the Venus of Vaux. As for the acknowledgment he was asked for, he composed two, one in his own name, and the other in that of his divine Surintendante. Here is the first, which is called the Public Acknowledgment:
Par devant moi sur Parnasse notaire,
Se présenta la reine des beautés,
Et des vertus le parfait exemplaire,
Qui lut ces vers, puis les ayant comptés,
Pesés, revus, approuvés et vantés,
Pour le passé voulut s’en satisfaire,
Se réservant le tribut ordinaire,
Pour l’avenir aux termes arrêtés.
Muses de Vaux et vous, leur secrétaire,
Voilà l’acquit tel que vous souhaitez.
En puissiez-vous dans cent ans autant faire.
Here is the second, under private seal, in the name of the Surintendante:
De mes deux yeux, ou de mes deux soleils
J’ai lu vos vers qu’on trouve sans pareils,
Et qui n’ont rien qui ne me doive plaire.
Je vous tiens quitte et promets vous fournir
De quoi par tout vous le faire tenir,
Pour le passé, mais non pour l’avenir.
En puissiez-vous dans cent ans autant faire.
But Jean could not lay restraint upon himself. As he himself ingenuously admits, he divided his life into two parts: one he passed in sleeping, the other in doing nothing. For writing verse was doing nothing for him, it came to him so naturally. But he could not do it if he were obliged. In October, the second quarter, when his second receipt fell due, we find the poet very much embarrassed. He sends a poem, the refrain of which betrays this embarrassment:
To promise is one thing, to keep one’s promise is another.
In the first quarter of 1660, all he produced was a dizaine for Madame Foucquet. Foucquet, not unnaturally, mildly objected; and the poet replied:
Bien vous dirai qu’au nombre s’arrêter
N’est pas le mieux, seigneur....
Foucquet was content and did not trouble his poetic debtor any further. The latter thought that he would pay his debt by a descriptive poem of some length, but this poem, Le Songe de Faux, was never finished. The terrible awakening was near at hand.
We have already seen La Fontaine in the gallery at Saint-Mandé. Whilst he was waiting Foucquet was busy, whether with an affair of State or of the heart is doubtful, for he burnt the candle at both ends. “He took everything upon himself,” says the Abbé de Choisy, “he aspired to be the first Minister, without losing a single moment of his pleasures. He would pretend to be working alone in his study at Saint-Mandé; and the whole Court, anticipating his future greatness, would wait in his antechamber, loudly praising the indefatigable industry of this great man, while he himself would go down the private staircase into a garden, where his nymphs, whose names I might mention if I chose, and they were not among the least distinguished, awaited him, and for no small reward. He would send sometimes three, sometimes four thousand pistoles to the ladies of his heart, and some of the most charming sought to please him.
Would it be true, however, to say with Nicolas:
Never did a Superintendent meet with a cruel lady.
Madame de Sévigné was wooed by Foucquet, and yet she had no difficulty in escaping from him. She made him understand that she would give nothing and accept nothing. She was reasonable; he became so. “Reduced to friendship, he transformed his love,” says Bussy, “into an esteem for a virtue hitherto unknown to him.” Madame de Sévigné was not alone obdurate.
Madame Scarron, beautiful and prudish, found a way to obtain great benefits from Foucquet without involving her reputation. When the Superintendent granted her a favour, it was Madame Foucquet whom she thanked. Thus, for the privilege which we have mentioned: “Madame,” she writes to Madame la Surintendante, “I will not trouble you further about the matter of the unloaders. It is happily terminated through the intervention of that hero to whom we all owe everything, and whom you have the pleasure of loving. The provost of the merchants listened to reason as soon as he heard the great name of M. Foucquet. I entreat of you, Madame, to allow me to come and thank you at Vaux. Madame de Vassé has assured me that you continue to regard me kindly, and that you will not consider me an intruder in those alleys where one may reflect with so much reason, and jest with so much grace.”
Madame Foucquet, who was a kind woman, wished to keep Madame Scarron about her; but the cunning fly would not allow itself to be caught. She wrote to her indiscreet benefactress: “Madame, my obligation towards you did not permit me to hesitate concerning the proposition which Madame Bonneau made me on your behalf. It was so flattering to me, I am so disgusted with my present circumstances, and I have so much respect for you, that I should not have wavered for a moment, even if the gratitude which I owe you had not influenced me; but, Madame, M. Scarron, although your indebted and very humble servant, cannot give his consent. My entreaties have failed to move him, my reasons to persuade him. He implores you to love me less, or at any rate to display your affection in a way which would be less costly to him. Read his request, Madame, and pardon the ardour of a husband who has no other resource against tedium, no other consolation in all his misfortunes than the wife whom he loves. I told Madame Bonneau that if you shorten the term I might, perhaps, obtain his consent, but I see that it is useless thus to flatter myself, and that I had too far presumed upon my power. I entreat of you, Madame, to continue your kindness towards me. No one is more attached to you than I am, and my gratitude will cease only with my life.
Mademoiselle du Fouilloux was no prude; quite the contrary. She appeared at Court in 1652; she showed herself and she pleased.
Une fleur fraîche et printanière,
Un nouvel astre, une lumière,
Savoir l’aimable du Fouilloux,
Dont plusieurs beaux yeux sont jaloux,
D’autant que cette demoiselle
Est charmante, brillante et belle,
Ayant pour escorte l’Amour,
A fait son entrée à la Cour
Et pris le nom, cette semaine,
De fille d’honneur de la reine.
She figured in all the ballets in which the King danced, and Loret sings that in 1658:
Fouilloux, l’une des trois pucelles,
Comme elle est belle entre les belles,
Par ses attraits toujours vainqueurs,
Y faisait des rafles de cœurs.
Foucquet lost his heart to her. He spoke; he gained a hearing. Mademoiselle du Fouilloux, frivolous and calculating, was doubly made for him. Their liaison was intimate and political. Fouilloux was absolutely self-interested; she did not ask for what was her due, being too great a lady for that, but she demanded it by means of a third person, and even insisted upon advances. “I will tell you,” wrote this go-between, “that I have seen Fouilloux prepared to entreat me to find a way to inform you, as if on my own account, that I knew you would please her if you would advance one hundred pistoles on this year’s pension.”
We know also, from the same source, that the beauty asked for money to pay her debts, and did not pay them. Here is the end of the note; “Mademoiselle du Fouilloux has assured me that, of all the
money that you have given her, she has not paid a halfpenny. She has gambled it all away.” We must do justice to Foucquet, and to Fouilloux; they were very reasonable. Fouilloux’s one thought was to have her own establishment, and she had her eye on an honest man, something of a simpleton, but of good family, whom she had watched by the Superintendent’s police.
In those days the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting were flattered in song. Fouilloux had verses addressed to her:
Foilloux sans songer à plaire
Plaît pourtant infiniment
Par un air libre et charmant.
C’est un dessein téméraire
Que d’attaquer sa rigueur.
Si j’eusse été sans affaires
La belle aurait eu mon cœur.
Other verses celebrate Menneville:
Toute la Cour est éprise
De ces attraits glorieux
Dont vous enchantez les yeux,
Menneville; ma franchise
S’y devrait bien engager;
Mais mon cœur est place prise
Et vous n’y sauriez loger.
This Menneville, celebrated in such bad verse, was, with Fouilloux, the prettiest woman at Court. On this matter we have the testimony of Jean Racine, who, banished to the depths of the provinces, wrote to his friend La Fontaine, citing Fouilloux and Menneville as examples of beauty. “I cannot refrain from saying a word as to the beauties of this province.... There is not a village maiden, nor a cobbler’s wife, who might not vie in beauty with the Fouilloux and the Mennevilles.... All the women here are dazzling, and they deck themselves out in a manner which is to them the most natural fashion in the world, and as for the attractions of their person, Colors verm, corpus solidum et succi plenum.
Of the two, Menneville is thought to have been the more beautiful. A song says of her:
Cachez-vous, filles de la reine,
Petites,
Car Menneville est de retour,
M’amour.
She sold herself to the Superintendent. As she did not equal Fouilloux in her genius for intrigue, Foucquet used her more kindly. While this lady-in-waiting was yielding to the suit of the seigneur of Vaux, she was trying to force the Duc de Damville to marry her, as he had promised. Like Fouilloux, she begged the Superintendent to help her to get settled. He did so with a good grace, and sent the fair lady fifteen thousand crowns, which ought to have decided Damville. The latter hesitated. An accident decided for him: he died.
There were no pleasures, no distractions — if we employ the word in the strict sense which Pascal then gave it — there were no means of enjoyment and oblivion for which Foucquet had not the most tremendous capacity. Business and building were not enough to absorb his vast energies. He was a gambler. The stakes at his tables were terribly high. So they were at Madame Foucquet’s. In one day Gourville won eighteen thousand livres from the Comte d’Avaux. No money was laid on the table, but at the end of the game the players settled their accounts. They played not only for money, but for gems, ornaments, lace, collars, valued at seventy to eighty pistoles each.
Foucquet, playing against Gourville, in one day lost sixty thousand livres. “He played,” said Gourville, “with cut cards which were worth ten or twenty pistoles each. I put one thousand pistoles before me almost desiring that he should win back something, which did happen. Nevertheless, he was not pleased to see I was leaving the game.”
This wild play was not altogether to the Superintendent’s disadvantage. In the end his intimate friends, who were great personages, were ruined, and came to him for mercy. Thus, for instance, he held in his power Hugues de Lyonne — the great Lyonne. But he himself was at his last gasp, and overwhelmed with anxiety.
Sole Superintendent of Finance since Servien’s death, on the 17th February, 1659, Foucquet had filled Mazarin’s crop without having won him, for Mazarin loved and served only himself, his own people and the State. As a private individual he was self-interested, covetous and miserly. As a public man he desired the good of the kingdom, the greatness of France. He was never grateful to his public servants for anything they did for his own person. Foucquet felt this; he perceived that he had no hold over this man, and that Mazarin, when dying, might ruin him, having no further need of him.
For Mazarin was dying; he was dying with all the heartrending regret of a Magnifico who feels that he is being torn from his jewels, his tapestries and his books — beautifully bound in morocco, delicately tooled — and also, by a curious inconsistency, with the serenity of a great statesman, of another Richelieu, full of a generous grief that he could no longer play his part in those great affairs which had rendered his life illustrious. He was anxious to assure the prosperity of the kingdom after his death. “Sire,” he said to the young Louis XIV, “I owe you everything, but I think I can in a manner discharge my debt by giving you Colbert.”
At the very point of death he was conferring with the King in secret conversations, which caused Foucquet great anxiety, precisely because they were concealed from him. Then, at length, the light of eyes which had so long sought for gold and sumptuous draperies, and pierced the hearts of men, was finally extinguished.
On the 9th March, 1661, as Foucquet, leaving his house of Saint-Mandé, was crossing the Gardens on foot to go to Vincennes, he met young Brienne, who was getting out of his couch, and learned from him the great news.
“He is dead, then!” murmured Foucquet. “Henceforth I shall not know in whom to confide. People always do things by halves. Oh, how distressing! The King is waiting for me, and I ought to be there among the first! My God! Monsieur de Brienne, tell me what is happening, so that I may not commit any indiscretion through ignorance.”
The day after Mazarin’s death the King of twenty-three summoned Foucquet, with the Chancellor, Seguier, the Ministers and Secretaries of State, and addressed them in these words: “Hitherto I have been content to leave my affairs in the hands of the late Cardinal. It is time for me to control them myself. You will help me with your counsels when I ask you for them. Gentlemen, I forbid you to sign anything, not even a safe conduct, or a passport, without my command. I request you to give me personally an account of everything every day, to favour no one in your lists of the month. And you, Monsieur le Surintendant, I have explained to you my wishes; I request you to employ M. Colbert, whom the late Cardinal has recommended to me.” Foucquet thought that the King was not speaking seriously. That error ruined him.
He believed that it would be easy to amuse and deceive the youthful mind of the King, and he set to work to do so with all the ardour, all the grace and all the frivolity of his nature. He determined to govern the kingdom and the King. Foucquet did not know Louis XIV, and Louis XVI did know Foucquet. Warned by Mazarin, the King knew that Foucquet was engaged in dubious proceedings, and was ready to resort to any expedient. He knew, also, that he was a man of resource and of talent. He took him apart and told him that he was determined to be King, and to have a precise and complete knowledge of State affairs; that he would begin with finance; it was the most important part of his administration, and that he was determined to restore order and regularity to that department. He asked the Superintendent to instruct him minutely in every detail, and he bade him conceal nothing, declaring that he would always employ him, provided that he found him sincere. As for the past, he was prepared to forget that, but he wished that in future the Superintendent would let him know the true state of the finances.
In speaking thus, Louis XIV told the truth. He has explained himself in his Mémoires. “It may be a cause of astonishment,” he says, “that I was willing to employ him at a time when his peculations were known to me, but I knew that he was intelligent and thoroughly acquainted with all the most intimate affairs of State, and this made me think that, provided he would confess his past faults and promise to correct them, he might render me good service.”
No one could speak more wisely, more kindly; but the audacious Foucquet did not realize that there was something menacing i
n this wisdom and this kindness. He was possessed of a spirit of imprudence and error. He was labouring blindly to bring about his own fall. Day by day, despite the advice of his best friends, he presented the King with false accounts of his expenditure and revenue. For five months he believed that he was deceiving Louis XIV, but every evening the King placed his accounts in the hands of Colbert, whom he had nominated Intendant of Finance, with the special duty of watching Foucquet. Colbert showed the King the falsifications in these accounts. On the following day the King would patiently seek to draw some confession from the guilty Minister, who, with false security, persisted in his lies.
Henceforth Foucquet was a ruined man. From the month of April, 1661, Colbert’s clerks did not hesitate to announce his fall. He began to be afraid, but it was too late. He went and threw himself at the King’s feet — it was at Fontainebleau — he reminded him that Cardinal Mazarin had regulated finance with absolute authority, without observing any formality, and had constrained him, the Superintendent, to do many things which might expose him to prosecution. He did not deny his own personal faults, and admitted that his expenditure had been excessive. He entreated the King to pardon him for the past, and promised to serve him faithfully in the future. The King listened to his Minister with apparent goodwill; his lips murmured words of pardon, but in his heart he had already passed sentence on Foucquet.
Is it true that some private jealousy inspired the King’s vengeance? Foucquet, according to the Abbé de Choisy, had sent Madame de Plessis-Bellière to tell Mademoiselle de Lavallière that the Superintendent had twenty thousand pistoles at her service. The lady had replied that twenty million would not induce her to take a false step. “Which astonished the worthy intermediary, who was little used to such replies,” adds the Abbé. However this may be, Foucquet soon perceived that the fortress was taken, and that it was dangerous to tread upon the heels of the royal occupant. But in order to repair his fault he committed a second, worse than the first. Again it is Choisy who tells us. “Wishing to justify himself to her, and to her secret lover, he himself undertook the mission of go-between, and, taking her apart in Madame’s antechamber, he sought to tell her that the King was the greatest prince in the world, the best looking, and other little matters. But the lady, proud of her heart’s secret, cut him short, and that very evening complained of him to the King.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 351