Our task is ended. Can it be a matter for regret that the chief and necessary consequence of our researches has been to annihilate a creature of fantasy with a particularly handsome countenance, of lofty birth, and with an affecting destiny? Is not the charm of truth superior to all others, and if it has been vouchsafed to us to introduce it into these pages, if, into a question where, as we have seen, everything was uncertainty, we have succeeded in throwing a little fresh light, why should we fear to have finished by dissipating that creation of popular imagination, that dubious and fanciful being, who, it seems to us, ought not to excite so much interest as he who has really lived, and whose existence we can follow step by step? Whilst, in fact, an inevitable uncertainty must always be mingled with the attraction exercised by the former, whilst the pity and emotion experienced must ever be restrained by the impossibility of proving even his birth; in the second case we are concerned with a misfortune quite as great, and this time real, with an individual much less eminent, but who has indeed existed, and who, condemned like the former to an unjust punishment, has really lived, suffered, and been persecuted. Wherefore, too, should one measure one’s pity by the importance of those who deserve it? Are not all the victims of arbitrary power equally worthy of interest, and does not the persistence of misfortune raise the persecuted to the level of those who are great by birth and by splendour of position? Fouquet in the depths of his prison, separated from every one that he loves, but finding in his Christian sentiments sufficient strength to overcome his sorrow, seems to us a great deal more touching in his resignation than interesting from the recollection of the splendid part he had played in the court of Louis XIV. Matthioly also was torn from his family and held a high position, but in a much less important court; he too suffered the loneliness of captivity, and for him this loneliness was lasting. His wife took refuge in a convent, and thus withdrew from a world from which Louis XIV. had violently carried off her husband. His family was dispersed, powerless, and silent, feeling itself threatened as it were by the blow which had struck its chief. He dragged out his existence in various prisons, proceeding from Pignerol to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, from these islands to the Bastille, sometimes resigned, at others disordered by grief, and in his fits of madness calling himself a near relation of Louis XIV., and for this reason demanding his liberty. On November 19, 1703, his misfortunes terminated with his life.