On the 31st December, Foucquet reached Vincennes. As he passed he caught sight of his house at Saint-Mandé, in which he had collected all that can flatter and adorn life, and which he was never again to inhabit. He was, indeed, to remain in the Bastille until after his condemnation; that is to say, for more than three years; and he left that fortress only to suffer an imprisonment of which the protracted severity has become a legend. The public anger was now loosed upon the stricken financier. The people whose poverty had been insulted by his ostentatious display wished to snatch him from his guards and tear him to pieces in the streets. Several times during the journey from Nantes, D'Artagnan had been obliged to protect his prisoner from riotous mobs of peasants. In the higher classes of society the indignation was fully as bitter, although it was only expressed in words. Society never forgave Foucquet for having allowed his love-letters to be seized. It was considered that to keep and classify women's letters in this manner was not the act of a gallant gentleman. Such was the opinion of Chapelain, who wrote to Madame de Sévigné: "Was it not enough to ruin the State, and to render the King odious to his people by the enormous burdens which he imposed upon them, and to employ the public finances in impudent expenditure and insolent acquisitions, which were compatible neither with his honour nor with his office, and which, on the other hand, rather tended to turn his subjects and his servants against him, and to corrupt them? Was it necessary to crown his irregularities and his crimes, by erecting in his own honour a trophy of favours, either real or apparent, of the modesty of so many ladies of rank, and by keeping a shameful record of his commerce with them in order that the shipwreck of his fortunes should also be that of their reputations? "Is this consistent with being, I do not say an upright man, in which capacity, his flatterers, the Scarrons, Pellissons and Sapphos, and the whole of that self-interested scum have so greatly extolled him, but a man merely, a man with a spark of enlightenment, who professes to be something better than a brute? I cannot excuse such scandalous, dastardly behaviour, and I should be hardly less enraged with this wretch if your name had not been found among his papers."[74] We can admire such generous indignation, but it is hard to be called "self-interested scum" when one is merely faithful in misfortune. The truth is that Foucquet still had friends; the women and the poets did not abandon him. Hesnault, to whom he had given a pension, was not a favourite of the Muses, but he showed himself a man of feeling, and his courageous fidelity did him credit. He attacked Colbert in an eloquent sonnet, which was circulated everywhere by the prisoner's friends: