quet. "How is it that that name rises
upon all occasions to torment my ears, during the last two or three
days? You make so trifling a subject of too much importance, Gourville.
Let M. Colbert appear, I will face him; let him raise his head, I will
crush him; but you understand, there must be an outline upon which
my look may fall, there must be a surface upon which my feet may be
placed."

"Patience, monseigneur; for you do not know what Colbert is--study him
quickly; it is with this dark financier as it is with meteors, which the
eye never sees completely before their disastrous invasion; when we feel
them we are dead."

"Oh! Gourville, this is going too far," replied Fouquet, smiling; "allow
me, my friend, not to be so easily frightened; M. Colbert a meteor!
_Corbleu_, we confront the meteor. Let us see acts, and not words. What
has he done?"

"He has ordered two gibbets of the executioner of Paris," answered
Gourville.

Fouquet raised his head, and a flash gleamed from his eyes. "Are you
sure of what you say?" cried he.

"Here is the proof, monseigneur." And Gourville held out to the
superintendent a note communicated by a certain secretary of the Hotel
de Ville, who was one of Fouquet's creatures.

"Yes, that is true," murmured the minister; "the scaffold may be
prepared, but the king has not signed; Gourville, the king will not
sign."

"I shall soon know," said Gourville.

"How?"

"If the king has signed, the gibbets will be sent this evening to the
Hotel de Ville, in order to be got up and ready by to-morrow morning."

"Oh! no, no!" cried the superintendent, once again; "you are all
deceived, and deceive me in my turn; Lyodot came to see me only the
day before yesterday; only three days ago I received a present of some
Syracuse wine from poor D'Eymeris."

"What does that prove?" replied Gourville, "except that the chamber of
justice has been secretly assembled, has deliberated in the absence of
the accused, and that the whole proceeding was complete when they were
arrested."

"What! are they, then, arrested?"

"No doubt they are."

"But where, when, and how have they been arrested?"

"Lyodot, yesterday at daybreak; D'Eymeris, the day before yesterday, in
the evening, as he was returning from the house of his mistress; their
disappearances had disturbed nobody; but at length M. Colbert all at
once raised the mask, and caused the affair to be published; it is
being cried by sound of trumpet, a