Fouquet was bandied about from prison to prison, from Angers to Amboise, Moret, and Vincennes, till he was finally lodged in the Bastile. He bore his misfortune with an unshaken mind. His enemies, meanwhile, were proceeding with the most malignant activity, and with a perfect contempt of justice and decorum. It was the common talk of Paris, that Colbert would be satisfied with nothing less than the execution of the superintendant. He was even plainly charged by Fouquet with having fraudulently made in his papers a multitude of alterations. Le Tellier, though less openly violent than Colbert, was equally hostile. For the trial of the prisoner twenty-two commissioners were picked out from the French parliaments; nearly all—if not all—of them were notoriously inimical to him, or connected with persons who were known to be so, and at their head was the chancellor Seguier, one of his most deadly enemies. One benefit the fallen minister derived from this injustice, and from the protracted trial which ensued; public opinion, which at first had been adverse to him, gradually grew more and more favourable. Fouquet the peculator, brought to judgment before an honest and impartial tribunal, would have excited no sympathy; Fouquet, persecuted by his rivals for power, and destined to be legally assassinated, could not fail to excite a warm interest in the mind of every one who was not destitute of honourable feelings. Those who were in habits of intimacy with Fouquet needed no other stimulus than the benefits or the winning courtesies, which they had experienced from him. He had on his side all who loved or practised literature, all who could be captivated by prepossessing manners and boundless generosity. “Never,” says Voltaire, “did a placeman have more personal friends, never was a persecuted man better served in his misfortunes.” Many men of letters wielded the pen in his behalf, with a courage which deserves no small praise, when we consider that the Bastile was staring them in the face. Pelisson in his dungeon tasked all his powers to defend his ruined master; La Fontaine, in a touching elegy, vainly strove to awake the clemency of Louis; Loret eulogized Fouquet in his “Mercure Burlesque,” and was punished by the loss of his pension; Hesnault, the translator of Lucretius, attacked Colbert in the bitterest and boldest of sonnets; and a crowd of other assailants showered epigrams and lampoons on the vindictive minister. The authors were, in general, lucky enough to find impunity; but numbers of newswriters, printers, and hawkers, were seized, all of whom were imprisoned, and some were sent from prison to the galleys.