rs have been able to do. Colbert was a
man in whom the historian and the moralist have an equal right.

He was thirteen years older than Louis XIV., his future master. Of
middle height, rather lean than otherwise, he had deep-set eyes, a
mean appearance, his hair was coarse, black and thin, which, say the
biographers of his time, made him take early to the skull-cap. A look of
severity, of harshness even, a sort of stiffness, which, with inferiors,
was pride, with superiors an affectation of superior virtue; a surly
cast of countenance upon all occasions, even when looking at himself in
a glass alone--such is the exterior of his personage. As to the moral
part of his character, the depth of his talent for accounts, and his
ingenuity in making sterility itself productive, were much boasted of.
Colbert had formed the idea of forcing governors of frontier places to
feed the garrisons without pay, with what they drew from contributions.
Such a valuable quality made Mazarin think of replacing Joubert, his
intendant, who had recently died, by M. Colbert, who had such skill
in nibbling down allowances. Colbert by degrees crept into court,
notwithstanding his lowly birth, for he was the son of a man who sold
wine as his father had done, but who afterwards sold cloth, and then
silk stuffs. Colbert, destined for trade, had been clerk in Lyons to
a merchant, whom he had quitted to come to Paris in the office of a
Chatlet procureur named Biterne. It was here he learned the art of
drawing up an account, and the much more valuable one of complicating
it.

This stiffness of manner in Colbert had been of great service to him; it
is so true that Fortune, when she has a caprice, resembles those women
of antiquity, who, when they had a fancy, were disgusted by no physical
or moral defects in either men or things. Colbert, placed with Michel
Letellier, secretary of state in 1648, by his cousin Colbert, Seigneur
de Saint-Penange, who protected him, received one day from the minister
a commission for Cardinal Mazarin. His eminence was then in the
enjoyment of flourishing health, and the bad years of the Fronde had
not yet counted triple and quadruple for him. He was at Sedan, very much
annoyed at a court intrigue in which Anne of Austria seemed inclined to
desert his cause.

Of this intrigue Letellier held the thread. He had just received a
letter from Anne of Austria, a letter very valuable to him, and strongly
compromising Mazarin; but,