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"But what?" replied Vatel. Gourville touched Fouquet's elbow. "Don't be angry, Vatel, I thought my cellar your cellar sufficiently well stocked for us to be able to dispense with recourse to the cellar of L'Image de-Notre-Dame."
Louvois wrote that the King wished to know one thing, before giving Fouquet ampler liberty. Had his valet, Eustache Dauger, told his other valet, La Riviere, what he had done before coming to Pignerol? Moreover, Lauzun was never, said Louvois, to be allowed to enter Fouquet's room when Dauger was present.
"I will admit, for argument's sake, that you obtain the money," he resumed; "you will lose twice as much, having a hundred thousand francs' pension to receive instead of sixty thousand, and that for a period of ten years." "Not so, for I shall only be subjected to this reduction of my income during the period of M. Fouquet's remaining in power, a period which I estimate at two months."
Knowing all that, and holding my tongue, what further would this heart wish in return for a kind action of M. Fouquet's, for an advance of fifteen thousand livres, for a diamond worth a thousand pistoles, for a smile in which there was as much bitterness as kindness? I save his life."
"Do me the pleasure to tell me the name of that gentleman who is walking yonder." "Where, there?" "Behind the soldiers." "Followed by a lackey?" "Exactly." "In company with a mean sort of a fellow, dressed in black?" "Yes, I mean him." "That is M. Getard." "And who is Getard, my friend?" "He is the architect of the house." "Of what house?" "Of M. Fouquet's house."
Colbert's hatred, says he, was the immediate cause of Fouquet's fall; but even if this hatred hastened the catastrophe, are we to suppose that it pursued the delinquent beyond the sentence, through the long years of captivity, and, renewing its energy, infected the minds of the king and his councillors? If that were so, how shall we explain the respect shown by Louvois?
"That man," he used often to say, "is beyond my art; my needle can never dot him down." We need scarcely say that Percerin was M. Fouquet's tailor, and that the superintendent highly esteemed him. M. Percerin was nearly eighty years old, nevertheless still fresh, and at the same time so dry, the courtiers used to say, that he was positively brittle.
The girl's name is Mademoiselle de la Valliere, and she is sufficiently pretty to warrant this caprice becoming a strong attachment. Beware of Mademoiselle de la Valliere." There was not a word about Madame. Aramis slowly folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Fouquet was still delightedly inhaling the perfume of his epistle. "Monseigneur," said Aramis, touching Fouquet's arm.
"I assure you I did not do it on my own account so much as M. Fouquet's." This wonderful conclusion again raised the mirth of all present. "And I have sold the first edition of this little book for eight hundred livres," exclaimed La Fontaine, rubbing his hands together. "Serious and religions books sell at about half that rate."
She was an outsider, a deserted onlooker. She spoke tenderly of the Café du Dôme, of Fouquet's, the Café d'Harcourt, Marigny and the Luxembourg. She inquired sentimentally about the Bal Bullier. She was pretty, after the anæmic French type of beauty, with pink cheeks, pale blue eyes and hair the colour of wet straw. She had the slender, shapely feet of the French cocotte.
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