in the Palais Royal, almost in the royal presence.  In 1652 he had been compelled to exile Mazarin again; and it was not until 1658 that Turenne finally defeated Conde and Don John of Austria, and opened the way to the Peace of the Pyrenees, and the marriage with the Infanta.  Oliver Cromwell aided the King with six thousand of his soldiers in this battle, and seized upon Dunkirk to repay himself,—­only three years before.  No wonder Louis was anxious to place the throne beyond the reach of danger and insult, and to crush the only man who seemed to have the power to rekindle a civil war.

A stronger and a meaner motive he kept to himself.  He was small-minded enough to think that a subject overshadowed him, nec pluribus impar.  He hated Fouquet because he was so much admired,—­because he was called the Magnificent,—­because his chateaux and gardens were incomparably finer than St. Germain or Fontainebleau,—­because he was surrounded by the first wits and artists,—­no trifling matter in that bright morning of French literature, when every gentleman of station in Paris aspired to be a bel-esprit, or, if that was impossible, to keep one in his employ. “Le Roi s’abaissa jusqu’a se croire humilie par un sujet.”  His “gloire” as he called it, was his passion, not only in war and in government, where it meant something, but in buildings and furniture, dress and dinners, madrigals and bon-mots.  The monopoly of gloire he must and would have,—­nobly, if possible, but at any rate, and in every kind, gloire.

And the unlucky Surintendant had sinned against the royal feelings in a still more unpardonable way.  The King was in love with La Valliere.  He had surrounded his attachment with the mystery the young and sentimental delight in.  Fouquet, quite unconscious of the royal fancy, had cast eyes of favor upon the same lady.  Proceeding according to the custom of men of middle age and of abundant means, he had wasted no time in petits soins and sighs, but, Jupiter-like, had offered to shower two hundred thousand livres upon the fair one.  This proposition was reported to the King, and was the cause of the acharnement, the relentless fury, he showed in persecuting Fouquet.  He would have dealt with him as Queen Christina had dealt with Monaldeschi, if he had dared.  The hatred survived long after he had dismissed the fair cause of it from his affections, and from his palace.

Such was the Surintendant’s position when he issued his invitation to the King, Court, and bel-air for the seventeenth of August, 1661,—­the fete de Vaux, which fills a paragraph in every history of France.  In June, he had entertained the Queen of England in a style which made Mazarin’s pageants for the Infanta Queen seem tasteless and old-fashioned.  The present festival cast the preceding one into the shade.  It began in the early afternoon, like a dejeuner of our day.  The King was