These are decisive and material considerations, the value of which cannot be destroyed by that crowd of secondary arguments which M. Lacroix has gathered up into a heap, and put forward with very great skill. But will even these resist a strict investigation? Can one be astonished that the accounts of Fouquet’s death furnished by his friends, separated from him for so long a time,[471] should differ from one another? Is it astonishing that some should attribute his death to suffocation, others to a fit, when we know that pulmonary apoplexy is always accompanied by suffocation? Must we consider as significant the uselessness of the researches made at Pignerol by a learned Piedmontese,[472] when he himself explains it by the suppression of the convent of Sainte-Claire, in which the body of Fouquet was placed for the time being, by the alterations which have taken place in the church,[473] and the dispersion of papers[474] belonging to this monastery? Lastly, is there anything strange in the silence of La Fontaine, in the laconism with which the _Gazette_ and _Le Mercure_ announce Fouquet’s death, and in the absence of an ostentatious inscription in the chapel of the Convent des Filles de la Visitation, to which his body was carried? Twenty years had passed away since the fall of the Surintendant. But in how much shorter space of time are services forgotten! In the especially fruitful period from 1660 to 1680, other and more illustrious names had filled the world’s stage and usurped fame. In that court which he had dazzled with his splendour, Fouquet had long since been forgotten, and only a few friends sympathized with his misfortunes. If he who has lent such touching language to the nymphs of Vaux was silent, if the death of his benefactor inspired him with no theme, it was not because he declined to believe in it. But rather than suppose him insensible to it, will it not be better to explain his silence as the result of indolence, and abandon the thought that La Fontaine was indifferent to Fouquet’s death? If the real sentiments experienced under these circumstances by the fabulist are unknown to us, if the end of him who for so long kept a portion of the court at his feet occurred almost unperceived, he had at least the honour of being mourned by Madame de Sévigné, who was always faithful,[475] and the consolation of being surrounded by his family on his death-bed; while even Saint-Mars himself must have regretted this inoffensive and resigned prisoner. A short time after Fouquet’s death Lauzun was liberated.