Foucquet's defenie, which disdained petty expedients, was powerful and adroit. He confessed irregularities, but he held that the disorders of the administration in a time of public disturbance were responsible for them. According to him, the payments levied on the tax-farmers were merely the repayment of his advances, and that the imposts which he had appropriated were the same. As for the loans which he had made to the State, they were an absolute necessity. To the insidious and insulting questions of the Chancellor he replied with the greatest adroitness. He was as bold as he was prudent. Only once he lost patience, and replied with an arrogance likely to do him harm. He certainly interested society. Ladies, in order to watch him as he was being reconducted to the Bastille, used to repair, masked, to a house which looked on to the Arsenal. Madame de Sévigné was there. "When I saw him," she said, "my legs trembled, and my heart beat so loud that I thought I should faint. As he approached us to return to his gaol, M. d'Artagnan nudged him, and called his attention to the fact that we were there. He thereupon saluted us, and assumed that laughing expression which you know so well. I do not think he recognized me, but I confess to you that I felt strangely moved when I saw him enter that little door. If you knew how unhappy one is when one has a heart fashioned as mine is fashioned, I am sure you would take pity on me."[91] All that was known about his attitude intensified public sympathy. The judges themselves recognized that he was incomparable; that he had never spoken so well in Parliament, and that he had never shown so much self-possession.[92] The last Interrogatory, that of the 4th December, turned on the scheme found at Saint-Mandé, and was particularly favourable to the accused. Foucquet replied that it was nothing but an extravagant idea which had remained unfinished, and was repudiated as soon as conceived. It was an absurd document, which could only serve to make him ashamed and confused, but it could not be made the ground of an accusation against him. As the Chancellor pressed him and said, "You cannot deny that it is a crime against the State," he replied, "I confess, sir, that it is an extravagance, but it is not a crime against the State. I entreat these gentlemen," he added, turning towards the judges, "to permit me to explain what is a crime against the State. It is when a man holds a great office; when he is in the secret confidence of his Sovereign, and suddenly takes his place among that Sovereign's enemies; when he engages his whole family in the cause; when he induces his son-in-law[93] to surrender the passes and to open the gates to a foreign army of intruders in order to admit it to the interior of the kingdom. Gentlemen, that is what is called a crime against the State."