The lavish extravagance of Fouquet was almost beyond the bounds of credibility. He stopped before no expenditure for indulgence of his own pleasure, and in fairness it must be added, for that of others. Courteous and kindly, intellectually gifted, his open-handed generosity to men of letters and of talent generally was boundless. Like our own “great lord cardinal,” “though he was unsatisfied in getting, yet in bestowing he was most generous,” and again and again he aided the State with money from his own private means. It is said that at the fateful entertainment at Vaux, to which Louis XIV. was invited, each of the nobles found a purse of gold in his bedchamber, “and,” adds the same writer, “the nobles did not forget to take it away.” When his disgrace came, it was the great who deserted him; the people of talent clung throughout to their friend and benefactor. Colbert, his deadliest foe, artfully instilled into Louis that it was the ambition of Fouquet to be prime-minister. There is little doubt that this was true. Colbert’s ambition for the post was not less. On his arrest, Fouquet was first sent to the castle of Angers, thence to Amboise, thence to Moret and Vincennes, then he was lodged in the Bastille, and finally, on his condemnation, to the fortress of Pignerol. After a three years’ trial, the advocate-general demanded that he should be hanged on a gallows purposely erected in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, but the votes for his death were far in the minority, greatly to the fury of Louis and of Colbert. While abuse, however, and charges of maladministration of the finances were brought against him, peculation could not in any way be established. In a generation of time-serving and venality, the staunch devotion and affection of Fouquet’s friends remained unchangeable. “Never,” wrote Voltaire, “did a placeman have more personal friends; never was persecuted man better served in his misfortunes.” Madame de Sévigné, who had a warm regard for Fouquet, expresses her fear in more than one of her letters, that he may be secretly done to death by poison or by some other means of Colbert’s devising. His friends suffered cruelly, in many cases, for their loyalty to him. The gentleman, Monsieur de Roquesante, who had spoken in favour of him—a Provençal—was banished in the depths of winter to the chills of Lower Brittany, and the members of Fouquet’s family were scattered, to find shelter where they could.