The constant assistance which Louis XIV. had as yet lent to the enemies of the Turks made the position of his representatives more difficult still. One day, when one of them recalled to the Grand Vizier, Kiuproli-Ogli, the old alliance of France and Turkey, and evoked the recollections of the time of Francis I., “I do not know,” answered Kiuproli, “if the French are our allies; but it is certain they are invariably to be found among our enemies. There were six thousand of them at the passage of the Raab. Your Admiral, Beaufort, attacked Gigery, and made a cruel war on the Moors placed under our protection, and you have assisted the Venetians in Candia.” Far from having appeased these very legitimate feelings of resentment, Ferriol’s predecessors had excited them still more by most imprudent acts. Sometimes, even, they had resorted to violence in order to get rid of a difficult situation, and had had recourse to those arbitrary acts of authority, of which the Sultan, it is true, often set them an example in his seraglio, but which should have been impossible to the representatives of a civilized nation. It was thus that La Haye, ambassador at Constantinople in 1659, did not scruple to free himself by a crime from an extreme peril in which his very equivocal conduct had placed him.[223] France was succouring Candia, besieged by the Turks. It was an assistance quite natural and assuredly very praiseworthy; but what was less honourable, the French ambassador carried on with the Venetians a continued secret intercourse, and, in a cypher correspondence, kept them informed of all the designs of the Turks. One day the person charged to carry his mysterious news to the Venetians betrayed him, and, seduced by the bait of a reward, presented himself to the Caïmacan[224] of Constantinople and announced that he wished to embrace the Mahometan faith, and to deliver to the Grand Vizier himself a packet of letters of great importance. The Ottoman Minister, who already had suspicions of this intercourse, eagerly received the proofs brought to him, but it was in vain that he tried to decipher them, and neither the interpreters nor the renegades who swarmed at the Sultan’s court, could penetrate the secret of the intercepted letters. In the meanwhile there arrived at Constantinople a Frenchman, named Quiclet, an adventurer without resources, who boasted of having acquired by long practice the science of deciphering letters without a key. Badly received by La Haye, to whom he had applied for pecuniary assistance, he had the imprudence to menace him with his vengeance, and his wife said to the people of the embassy, “His Excellency refuses money to my husband, but we know very well how to obtain it from the Grand Vizier.” La Haye became alarmed when informed of this speech. He feared lest this wretched intriguer might really be able to decipher the despatches, or failing this, might, by aid of his imagination, render them more compromising still.