After the fête at Vaux, Monsieur Fouquet, continuing his attentions to Mademoiselle de la Baume, finally asked her hand in marriage of her parents. They were well pleased, especially her father. Madame de la Baume would have seemed more to favour another destiny for her daughter. The king was enraged on learning the superintendent’s proposal, but Fouquet braved the royal displeasure, and intended to take his bride to Holland. So the man proposed; but the Fates had otherwise disposed. Within a few hours, a letter was brought him; he broke the seal hurriedly, recognising the beloved handwriting, and when he had read the letter—but two lines long—he sank back in his chair as if a thunder-stroke had smitten him. “Renounce me. Think of me no more. I am not worthy to be the wife of an honest man. LOUISE.” It needed no more. Fouquet divined the truth, and he broke into a storm of invective, and abuse of the king. To silence him, to warn him of the perils surrounding him, of his many bitter and jealous enemies, of the clouds of witnesses, false and true, ready and waiting to bring charges of peculation and misappropriation of finances against him, was of no avail. The fire of disappointed love consumed him, and he raged against the despoiler of his happiness. The jealous king, informed by those who had heard Fouquet’s wild words, had waited not an instant, and thirty soldiers of the Guard were on the way to the Hôtel of the Superintendence to arrest him; but warned of their coming, he made his escape from the house. Too late. Before he could reach the frontier he was taken; and in the fortress of Pignerol he spent nineteen years a prisoner, after a protracted trial before a packed tribunal, and nobly defended by Advocate Pelisson, his devoted friend, a devotion for which Pelisson suffered long imprisonment in the Bastille. The jealousy of Louis in regard to Mademoiselle la Vallière, however, probably only hastened the fall of the man on whose ruin Colbert, comptroller-general of finances, and his successor, had long been determined. On the walls of that magnificent Vaux mansion of Fouquet’s was painted and carved his crest—a squirrel with the device, “_Quo non ascendam?_” This squirrel was pursued by a snake, and on the arms of Colbert was also a snake.