The confinement of Matthioli is decidedly one of the deadliest stains that blot the character of Lewis the Fourteenth: for, granting that Matthioli betrayed the trust reposed in him by that monarch, one single act of diplomatic treachery was surely not sufficient to warrant the infliction of the most horrible of all punishments,--of solitary confinement, for four and twenty years, in a dungeon!--It was, however, an act of cruel injustice that was to be expected from the man, who, when the unhappy Fouquet[83] was condemned by the tribunals of his country to exile, himself changed his sentence to that of perpetual imprisonment;--who, to please his mistress, confined his former favourite, Lauzun,[84] for nine years in the fortress of Pignerol, and only then released him in order, by that means, to swindle Mademoiselle de Montpensier[85] out of her fortune, in favour of his bastard, the Duke du Maine;--who shut up so many other persons, guilty only of imaginary crimes, in various prisons, where they died of misery and ill-treatment;--who revoked the Edict of Nantes;--ordered the burning of the Palatinate;--persecuted the saints of Port Royal;--and gloried in the Dragonades, and the war of the Cevennes;--who, in short, whether we regard him as a man or a sovereign, was one of the most hardened, cruel, and tyrannical characters transmitted to us in history. Providence doubtless made use of him as a scourge befitting the crimes of the age he lived in; and, in this point of view, his existence was most useful. Nor is his memory less so; which has been left to us and to all posterity, as a mighty warning of the effects, even in this world, of overweening ambition; and as a melancholy example of the perversion of a proud heart, which “gave not God the glory,” and was therefore abandoned by the Almighty to the effects of its own natural and irretrievable wickedness. After the arrest of Matthioli, he underwent several interrogatories,[86] in which, in spite of his numerous prevarications, his treachery was still more amply discovered. The examinations were all sent to Louvois by Catinat, who, as soon as they were concluded, left Pignerol, and returned to the court.[87]