With many instructions to Nanon Balbien, the maid-servant, to take good care of her master, and to keep a close eye on him at meal-time, Madame Scarron drove away in the coach with Ninon to Vaux, where they duly arrived. Le Nôtre, the royal gardener, had received orders to construct a splendid ballroom in the middle of the park, and, in the depths of winter though it was, he achieved a triumph of gorgeous magnificence. Orange trees were massed within the huge tent, and flowers of every hue were brought together from every hothouse and possible quarter, to render the scene a veritable fairyland, glowing in the thousand lamps depending from the gilded chains winding amid the sheeny foliage. But who has not heard of that fête, the ill-omened thing that brought its lavish giver disaster? Among the guests—named indeed first on the list of the invited—was she whom Fouquet sought to honour, perhaps even for whom he organised the entertainment—Louise de la Vallière; and among the male masquers dancing _vis-à-vis_ to her, murmuring low as they met, was one habited as an old man in a dressing-gown, domino sort of cloak, who was, in sooth, but a young man, the king, Louis XIV. It was not the first dawning of their love that night at Vaux. Already, at a ball at the Louvre, Louis had given her a rose, one that was incomparable for sweet perfume and loveliness. Innocent or politically guilty, it was all one for the great superintendent of finance. He had dared to love the woman Louis loved, and the doom of Fouquet was sealed. And the merry going out of Ninon and her friend also found a mournful coming in; for when they arrived in Paris next morning and Françoise alighted from the coach, Nanon hurried to the door to meet her. “Ah, mademoiselle—madame!” she cried, with a face wild with distress and terror, “he is dying! he is dying!—my poor master!” “_Bonte divine!_ how did it come about?” asked the two ladies in a breath. Nothing more simple. The master, to begin with, immediately on the departure of Ninon and his wife for Vaux, had despatched Nanon with a note to his good-for-nothing brother-in-law. D’Aubigné, having read the note, said that it was all right, and he would come and pass the evening with Monsieur Scarron. Nanon, thus feeling herself free also to enjoy an evening out like the rest, spent it with Jean Claude, a young man cousin of hers; but when at a fairly decent hour she returned home, an appalling picture met her eyes. On the table prepared for supper, lay, or stood as might be, seven empty bottles, the bones of a capon on the empty plates, with the crumbs of two Chartres pasties, and an empty Strasburg goose pot, also well cleared, madame’s brother under the table, and Monsieur Scarron lying back in his wheel-chair, waxen-white, speechless, but convulsed with a hiccough, a terrible hiccough that had never ceased all night, Nanon said. “Fly for a doctor!” cried Ninon.