The king is said to have been grievously disappointed by this sentence. Colbert was furious. In one of her letters, written at the moment, Madame de Sévigné, who had a warm esteem for Fouquet, says, “Colbert is so exceedingly enraged, that we may expect from him something unjust and atrocious enough to drive us all to despair again.” In another letter, she hints her fears that poison may be employed; Guy Patin was also of the same opinion. Neither poison nor steel was, however, resorted to; it was probably thought that to render the life of Fouquet a burthen to him, would be a more exquisite gratification than taking of it away. To grant mercy has always been regarded as the noblest prerogative of a monarch; to refuse it was more to the taste of Louis. He altered the sentence of Fouquet from banishment to endless imprisonment in a remote fortress, and this was in mockery called a commutation of the penalty. Fouquet was immediately sent off to Pignerol, and the members of his family, who were doomed to suffer for his errors, were scattered in various directions. His judges did not wholly escape without marks of the king’s anger. M. de Roquesante, a native of the sunny Provence, who had spoken in favour of the prisoner, was banished, in the depth of winter, to the distant and imperfectly civilised province of Lower Britanny. On his way to Pignerol, and during his captivity there, Fouquet was treated with great harshness. About six months after his arrival, he was placed in imminent danger. The lightning fell on the citadel where he was confined, and blew up the powder magazine. Numbers of persons were buried under the ruins, but he stood in the recess of a window and remained unhurt. There is a singular veil of mystery hanging over his last days. He is generally said to have died at Pignerol, in 1680; yet Gourville, his friend, positively states him to have been set at liberty before his decease, and he adds, that he received a letter from him. Voltaire, too, declares that the fact of the liberation was confirmed to him by the Countess de Vaux, the daughter-in-law of Fouquet; but here all clue to the subject is lost. It has recently been suggested that Fouquet may have again been arrested, and that he was the individual who is known by the appellation of the Man in the Iron Mask.