of Versailles to leave him completely at liberty in this respect.[523] The Minister’s refusal was formal, and tinged both with pride and bitterness. “It is not his Majesty’s intention,” writes Pomponne to D’Estrades, August 4, 1679, “to follow the course you propose in this affair, nor to commit so great an enterprise to the measures you might be able to take. If he ever forms the design of pursuing it, _you may be assured that those of which he may make use will not fail him_. So you need not venture to attempt anything in this matter.”[524] No doubt the Court of Savoy was fully aware of the intrigue, but Louis XIV. was master at Turin. No doubt Matthioly’s voice had made itself heard at Venice and Milan, but it was now stifled for ever; and with the recollection of his warnings was to be mingled that of his mysterious disappearance, and a salutary fear caused by the strangeness of his fate. Moreover, however humiliated Louis XIV. may have been, he still employed most haughty language towards Madrid. He exacted and obtained from Spain the immediate release of Baron d’Asfeld, who was a prisoner at Milan, and also a formal disavowal of the governor who had ordered his arrest. For Louis XIV. it was then a check, but a check in part repaired by the prompt abandonment of his projects, and compensated for by the satisfaction of having rendered powerless and carried off, as it were, from the world, of having extinguished the only being who could bear witness to the first humiliation of a great King. The report was spread abroad that Matthioly had died, the victim of an accident encountered on a journey. Those who were most entitled to doubt this appeared to believe in it. Charles IV., suspected, if not convicted, by the other princes of having wished to sell one of the keys of Italy to Louis XIV., sought to forget in fresh pleasures the shame of the enterprise. Matthioly’s family, silent and overwhelmed, became dispersed. Did it believe in his death? No one knows. On its genealogical tree the date of Ercole Matthioly’s end has been left blank.[525] His wife, the widow of a husband who was to survive her, shut herself up with her sorrow in the convent of the Filles de Saint-Louis at Bologna, the same place whither, seventeen years previously, Matthioly had come to espouse her.[526] His father, who received no further intelligence after the letter brought by Giuliani, dragged on his unhappy existence for some time yet at Padua, ignorant whether he ought to lament the death of a beloved son, or to flatter himself that he was still alive. Among the members of this family, thus plunged in the most cruel uncertainty, no one dared to use any exertions, which, however, would have been useless, in order to endeavour to clear it up. Feeling themselves menaced by the mysterious blow which had fallen upon one of them, they were silent and submissive, assured of their want of power, and certain that their