The young Queen was ill at the time. Foucquet's mother sent her one of the plasters she was in the habit of making for the poor, and she was so fortunate as to save the wife of him who was seeking to ruin her son. At least, the Queen's recovery is generally attributed to Madame Foucquet's remedy. We shall see later that the cure did not produce any change of heart in the King. This incident, however, refers to the downfall of a fortune of which we must first explain the beginnings, and the progressive stages. This I shall do without entering into details of administration or business. I am not writing an essay on the politics or finances of the days of Mazarin. My sole endeavour will be to depict the tastes, the manners and the mind of the creator and the host of Vaux. Vaux is the centre of my design. In 1635, Nicolas Foucquet, at the age of twenty, entered the magistry as Master of Requests. The Masters of Requests were regarded as forming part of the Parliament, where they sat above the Councillors. From among those officers the Kings had long been accustomed to choose the commissaries whom they despatched into the provinces, to superintend the administration of justice and finance, or to the armies, when they were charged with all that concerned the policing and the maintenance of the troops. Their journeys were known as the circuits of the Masters of Requests. They gave rise, at a date unknown, to a new office, that of Intendant, which grew in importance with the increase of the royal power. The young Foucquet, in 1636, was sent as Intendant of justice to the district of Grenoble. The difficulties attending such a mission were great; and Richelieu could not have been ignorant of them. He had, however, diminished them somewhat by suspending the sittings of the provincial parliament which was the Intendant's natural enemy. But Foucquet found the people of Le Dauphiné agitated by the memory of the religious wars and ardently engaging in new disputes in respect of certain taxes levied on the goods of the third estate from which the nobility and the clergy were exempt. The decree of the Royal Council which abolished the citizens' grievances remained a dead letter.[4] Feeling ran high. Foucquet did not succeed in alleviating it. After a revolt which he had been unable either to prevent or to repress he was recalled to Paris. From an inexperienced youth of twenty-one Richelieu could not have expected services which could only have been rendered by an old hand, experienced in negotiation, such, for example, as the Intendant of Guyenne, the skilful and resolute Servien. The opinion is seldom held to-day that the great Minister employed the system of Intendants[5] as a regular instrument of his policy; which may explain how he came to confide to an apprentice a mission which is regarded as of secondary importance. The office of Intendant was not a permanent one, so that Foucquet's recall was doubtless not regarded as an absolute disgrace.