his nod and laid their offerings at his feet.  A judicious mixture of presents and promises had given him the control of judges enough in the different Parliaments to fortify his views of the public business by legal decisions.  In his own Parliament he was supreme.  Clever agents, stationed in important places, both at home and abroad, watched over his interests, and kept him informed of all that transpired, by faithful couriers.  But he misunderstood his position, and was mistaken in his King.  Louis XIV. had, indeed, little talent and less education.  He could never learn Latin, at that time as much a part of a gentleman’s training as French is now with us; but he had what for want of a more distinctive word we may call character,—­that well-proportioned mixture of sense, energy, and self-reliance which obtains for its possessor more success in life, and more respect from those about him, than brilliant mental endowments.  It was the moral side of his nature which was deficient.  He was selfish, envious, and cruel; and he had not that noble hatred of the crooked, the mean, and the dishonorable which becomes a gentleman.  Mazarin once said,—­“There is stuff enough in him to make four kings and one worthy man.”  Divide this favorable opinion by four, and the result will be an approximation to the value of Louis XIV. as a monarch and a man.  There was a king in him,—­a determination to be master, and to bear no rival near the throne, no matter of how secondary or trifling a nature the rivalry might be.

Fouquet had been deep in Mazarin’s confidence, his agent and partner in those sharp financial operations which had brought so much profit to the Cardinal and so little to the Crown.  One of their jobs was to buy up, at an enormous discount, old and discredited claims against the Treasury, dating from the Fronde, which, when held by the right parties, were paid in full,—­a species of fraud known by various euphemisms in the purest of republics.  All the checks and balances of our enlightened system of administration, whether federal, state, or municipal, do not prevent skilful officials from perverting vast sums of money to their own uses.  In France, demoralized by years of civil war, the official facilities for plundering were concentrated in the hands of one clever man.  We can easily understand that his wealth was enormous, and his power correspondingly great.

When the late Cardinal, surfeited with spoils, was drawing near his end, scruples of conscience, never felt before, led him to advise the King to keep a strict watch upon the Surintendant.  He recommended for that purpose his steward, Colbert, of whose integrity and knowledge of business he had the highest opinion.  Colbert was made Under-Secretary of State, and Fouquet’s dismissal from office determined upon from that time.