“My friends!” said Fouquet, deeply wounded.
“Your friends, certainly; but the safety of the State requires that an exemplary punishment should be inflicted on the guilty.”
“I will not permit myself to remind your Majesty that I have just restored you to liberty, and have saved your life.”
“Monsieur!”
“I will only remind your Majesty that had M. d’Herblay wished to play the part of an assassin, he could very easily have assassinated your Majesty this morning in the forest of Senart, and all would have been over.”
The King started.
“A pistol-bullet through the head,” pursued Fouquet, “and the disfigured features of Louis XIV, which no one could have recognized, would have been M. d’Herblay’s complete absolution.”
The King turned pale with fear at the idea of the danger he had escaped.
“If M. d’Herblay,” continued Fouquet, “had been an assassin, he had no occasion to inform me of his plan in order to succeed. Freed from the real King, it would have been impossible to guess the false one. And if the usurper had been recognized by Anne of Austria, he would still have been a son for her. The usurper, so far as M. d’Herblay’s conscience was concerned, was still a King of the blood of Louis XIII. Moreover, the conspirator in that course would have had security, secrecy, and impunity. A pistol-bullet would have procured him all that. For the sake of Heaven, Sire, forgive him!”
The King, instead of being touched by that picture, so faithful in all its details, of Aramis’s generosity, felt himself painfully humiliated. His unconquerable pride revolted at the idea that a man had held suspended at the end of his finger the thread of his royal life. Every word which Fouquet thought would be efficacious in procuring his friend’s pardon, carried another drop of poison to the already rankling heart of Louis XIV. Nothing could bend him. Addressing himself to Fouquet, he said, “I really don’t know, Monsieur, why you should solicit the pardon of these men. What good is there in asking that which can be obtained without solicitation?”
“I do not understand you, Sire.”
“It is not difficult either. Where am I now?”
“In the Bastille, Sire.”
“Yes; in a dungeon. I am looked upon as a madman, am I not?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“And no one is known here but Marchiali?”
“Certainly.”
“Well; change nothing in the position of affairs. Let the madman rot in the dungeon of the Bastille, and M. d’Herblay and M. du Vallon will stand in no need of my forgiveness. Their new King will absolve them.”
“Your Majesty does me a great injustice, Sire; and you are wrong,” replied Fouquet, dryly. “I am not child enough, nor is M. d’Herblay silly enough, to have omitted to make all these reflections; and if I had wished to make a new King, as you say, I had no occasion to have come here to force open all the gates and doors of the Bastille, to free you from this place. That would show a want of common-sense even. Your Majesty’s mind is disturbed by anger; otherwise you would be far from offending groundlessly the very one of your servants who has rendered you the most important service of all.”
Louis perceived that he had gone too far, that the gates of the Bastille were still closed upon him; while, by degrees, the floodgates were gradually being opened behind which the generous-hearted Fouquet had restrained his anger. “I did not say that to humiliate you, Heaven knows, Monsieur,” he replied. “Only you are addressing yourself to me in order to obtain a pardon, and I answer you according as my conscience dictates. And so, judging by my conscience, the criminals we speak of are not worthy of consideration of forgiveness.”
Fouquet was silent.
“What I do is as generous,” added the King, “as what you have done, for I am in your power. I will even say, it is more generous, inasmuch as you place before me certain conditions upon which my liberty, my life, may depend, and to reject which is to make a sacrifice of them both.”
“I was wrong, certainly,” replied Fouquet. “Yes; I had the appearance of extorting a favor. I regret it, and entreat your Majesty’s forgiveness.”