expense of Mazarin and the Paix des Pyrenees, St. Evremond was a soldier, a wit, and the leader of fashion; Colbert hated him, and magnified a jeu d’esprit into a State-crime.  He was exiled, and spent the rest of his long life in England.  Of the baser sort, hundreds were turned out of their places and thrown penniless upon the world.  It was a coup d’etat, a revolution, and most people were against Fouquet.  It is such a consolation for the little to see the mighty fall!

The instinct which impels friends and servants to fly from sinking fortunes is a well-established fact in human natural history; but Fouquet’s hold upon his followers was extraordinary:  it resisted the shock of ruin.  They risked court-favor, purse, and person, to help him.  Gourville, before he thought of his own safety, carried a hundred thousand livres to Madame Fouquet, to be used in defending the Surintendant, or in bribing a judge or a jailer.  The rest of his property he divided, intrusting one half to a devout friend, the other to a sinful beauty, Ninon de l’Enclos, and fled the country.  The “professor” absorbed all that was left in his hands; Ninon returned her trust intact.  This little incident was made much use of at a later day by the Philosophes, and Voltaire worked it up into “Le Depositaire.”  From the Bastille, Pellisson addressed to the King three papers in defence of his chief:  “masterpieces of prose, worthy of Cicero,” Voltaire says,—­“ce que l’eloquence a produit de plus beau.”  And Sainte-Beuve thinks that Louis must have yielded to them, if he had heard them spoken, instead of reading them in his closet.  The faithful La Fontaine fearlessly sang the sorrows of his patron, and accustomed “chacun a plaindre ses malheurs.”  He begged to the King for mercy, in an ode full of feeling, if not of poetry.  “Has not Oronte been sufficiently punished by the withdrawal of thy favor?  Attack Rome, Vienna, but be merciful to us. La Clemence est fille des Dieux.”  A copy of this ode found its way to the prisoner.  He protested against these lines:—­

  “Mais, si tu crois qu’il est coupable,
  Il ne veut point etre innocent.”

Two years of prison had not broken him down to this point of self-abasement.  Could any Sultan, or even the “Oriental Despot” of a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms?  Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend.  Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief.  Hesnault, author of the “Avorton,” a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with approval into English verse, as,

  “Frail spawn of nought and of existence mixed,”

eased his feelings by insulting Colbert in another sonnet, beginning thus:—­

  “Ministre avare et lache, esclave malheureux.”