to contemplate with a melancholy look “_la fillette du Roi_.” This was the name by which they designated an iron cage, in which, according to legend, a queen of Sicily had been shut up by her husband “for having built the church of Saint-Maurice at Angers too magnificently.” This legend was not calculated to reassure the Superintendent. He knew that he was accused precisely of having used the money of the Treasury to build Vaux-le-Vicomte, the magnificence of which had offended the King. If, through misfortune, the thought of keeping him under such good guard, between these bars, had entered the heads of his enemies, of what advantage was the little bit of liberty that he still enjoyed? Moreover, he was not unaware of the refinements of cruelty that had been practiced for the past two centuries upon the prisoners of State. The “_fillette du Roi_,” made at the order of Louis XI., had not been empty at any period. Had not Cardinal Balue, bishop of Angers, known this instrument of torture at the _Château d’Onzain_, near Blois? Fouquet might well be afraid, for there entered perhaps far more passion than justice in his disgrace. They did not go so far, however, as to put him in a cage. The vigilance and the loyalty of d’Artagnan, and the thickness of the walls of the Castle seemed to Fouquet’s enemies, a sufficient safeguard against all danger of his escape. What is then the Castle of Angers? [Illustration: THE CASTLE OF ANGERS, FRANCE.] Péan de la Tuilerie--the _d’Argenville angevin_--comes to tell us. “The Castle is at one of the extremities of the city, on a rock, and surrounded with deep moats, cut in the rock, which is an escarpment on the bank of a river that flows at its base, and from which they lift, by means of a very convenient machine, all the munitions which are necessary. It is of a triangular form, all built of slate and flanked by eighteen round towers and a crescent, which is the gate of the faubourg.”