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Updated: June 2, 2025
"If these twenty years I have been in servitude, I can scarcely emancipate myself in a day. However, since the great king deigns to hold parley with his ministers, I am Pomponne let us argue." "Ah, well! you know as well as I that I have a real friendship for Camille, as the playmate of my childhood. I remember him when he was ever so small, and he remembers me, too, when I was a tiny creature.
Without him everything will be prison to me; I shall be free wherever I see him." At last he had the joy of recovering his well-beloved master, strictly watched and still deprived of the sacraments. Like Luther at Wartburg, he was finishing the revisal of his translation of the Bible, when his cousins, MM. de Pomponne and Arnauld, entered his room on the 31st of October, 1668.
The French plenipotentiaries, Pomponne de Bellievre and Brulart de Silleri, had instructions to obtain the restoration to the king of all towns and places taken by the Spaniards from France since the treaty of peace of Cateau-Cambresis, and to have the Queen of England and the United Provinces, if they testified a desire for it, included in the treaty, or, at any rate, to secure for them a truce.
"I remarked," says a letter in 1669, from M. de Pomponne, French ambassador at the Hague, "that it seemed to me a strange thing that, whereas this republic had two kings for its associates in the triple alliance, it affected in some sort to put itself at their head so as to do all the speaking, and that it was willing to become the seat of all the manoeuvres that were going on against France, which was very likely to render it suspected of some prepossession in favor of Spain."
Colbert made great efforts to develop the French navy, both the fighting and the merchant. "The sea-traffic of all the world," he wrote in 1669 to M. de Pomponne, then ambassador to Holland, "is done with twenty thousand vessels or thereabouts. In the natural order of things, each nation should have its own share thereof in proportion to its power, population, and seaboard.
Pomponne and Torcy accordingly repaired to the English embassy; and there opened one of the most remarkable negotiations recorded in the annals of European diplomacy. The two French statesmen professed in their master's name the most earnest desire, not only that the peace might remain unbroken, but that there might be a close union between the Courts of Versailles and Kensington.
This was the case whenever I questioned M. de Beauvilliers or M. de Pontchartrain, and I knew from their most intimate friends that nothing more could ever be obtained from M. de Pomponne or M. de Torcy. As for the farrier himself, he was equally reserved. He was a simple, honest, and modest man, about fifty years of age.
In two days from that time he presented himself, at Aix, to the Intendant of the province, who, without a moment's hesitation, urged him to pursue his journey, and gave him sufficient money to travel by a public conveyance. Nothing more of the story was ever known. The farrier had three interviews with M. de Pomponne, each of two hours' length.
M. de Pomponne rendered, in private, an account of these to the King, who desired him to speak more fully upon the point in a council composed of the Ducs de Beauvilliers, Pontchartrain, Torcy, and Pomponne himself; Monseigneur to be excluded. This council sat very long, perhaps because other things were spoken of.
This passage was suppressed, no doubt, because it occurred to Pomponne and Torcy that, with whatever approbation the English might listen to such language when uttered by a demagogue of their own race, they might be very differently affected by hearing it from a French diplomatist, and might think that there could not be a better reason for arming, than that Lewis and his emissaries earnestly wished them to disarm.
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