my reason to make a great effort against my feelings in
order to act with so much self-control. All France commended especially
the secrecy with which I had for three or four months kept a resolution
of that sort, particularly as it concerned a man who had such special
access to me, who had dealings with all that approached me, who received
information from within and from without the kingdom, and who, of
himself, must have been led by the voice of his own conscience to
apprehend everything." Fouquet apprehended and became reassured by
turns; the king, he said, had forgiven him all the disorder which the
troubles of the times and the absolute will of Mazarin had possibly
caused in the finances. However, he was anxious when he followed Louis
XIV. to Nantes, the king being about to hold an assembly of the states of
Brittany. "Nantes, Belle-Ile! Nantes, Belle-Ile!" he kept repeating.
On arriving, Fouquet was ill and trembled as if he had the ague; he did
not present himself to the king.

On the 5th of September, in the evening, the king himself wrote to the
queen-mother: "My dear mother, I wrote you word this morning about the
execution of the orders I had given to have the superintendent arrested;
you know that I have had this matter for a long while on my mind, but it
was impossible to act sooner, because I wanted him first of all to have
thirty thousand crowns paid in for the marine, and because, moreover, it
was necessary to see to various matters which could not be done in a day;
and you cannot imagine the difficulty I had in merely finding means of
speaking in private to D'Artagnan. I felt the greatest impatience in the
world to get it over, there being nothing else to detain me in this
district.

[Illustration: Louis XIV. dismissing Fouquet----407]

At last, this morning, the superintendent having come to work with me as
usual, I talked to him first of one matter and then of another, and made
a show of searching for papers, until, out of the window of my closet, I
saw D'Artagnan in the castle-yard; and then I dismissed the
superintendent, who, after chatting a little while at the bottom of the
staircase with La Feuillade, disappeared during the time he was paying
his respects to M. Le Tellier, so that poor D'Artagnan thought he had
missed him, and sent me word by Maupertuis that he suspected that
somebody had given him warning to look to his safety; but he caught him
again in the place where the great church