I do not live,
exist even, isolated from others; I am nothing when left to myself.
Understand that throughout my whole life I have passed every moment of
my time in making friends, whom I hoped to render my stay and support.
In times of prosperity, all these cheerful, happy voices--and rendered
so through and by my means--formed in my honor a concert of praises and
kindly actions. In the least disfavor, these humbler voices accompanied
in harmonious accents the murmur of my own heart. Isolation I have never
yet known. Poverty (a phantom I have sometimes beheld, clad in rags,
awaiting me at the end of my journey through life)--this poverty has
been the specter with which many of my own friends have trifled for
years past, which they poetize and caress, and which has attracted me
toward them. Poverty! I accept it, acknowledge it, receive it, as a
disinherited sister; for poverty is not solitude, nor exile, nor
imprisonment. Is it likely I shall ever be poor, with such friends as
Pellisson, as La Fontaine, as Moliere; with such a mistress as--Oh! if
you knew how utterly lonely and desolate I feel at this moment, and how
you, who separate me from all I love, seem to resemble the image of
solitude, of annihilation, and of death itself."

"But I have already told you, Monsieur Fouquet," replied D'Artagnan,
moved to the depths of his soul, "that you exaggerate matters a great
deal too much. The king likes you."

"No, no," said Fouquet, shaking his head.

"M. de Colbert hates you."

"M. de Colbert! What does that matter to me?"

"He will ruin you."

"Oh! I defy him to do that, for I am ruined already."

At this singular confession of the surintendant, D'Artagnan cast his
glance all round the room; and although he did not open his lips,
Fouquet understood him so thoroughly, that he added, "What can be done
with such wealth of substance as surrounds us, when a man can no longer
cultivate his taste for the magnificent? Do you know what good the
greater part of the wealth and the possessions which we rich enjoy
confer upon us? merely to disgust us, by their very splendor even, with
everything which does not equal this splendor. Vaux! you will say, and
the wonders of Vaux! What then? What boot these wonders? If I am ruined,
how shall I fill with water the urns which my Naiads bear in their arms,
or force the air into the lungs of my Tritons? To be rich enough,
Monsieur d'Artagnan, a man must be too rich."

D'Artagnan shook