Ten Years Later by Dumas, Alexandre. Part one

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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later

every one of those thirty days I will pay you a hundred

thousand crowns.”

“My lord,” replied Guenaud, in a firm voice, “it is God who

can give you days of grace, and not I. God only allows you a

fortnight.”

The cardinal breathed a painful sigh, and sank back upon his

pillow, murmuring, “Thank you, Guenaud, thank you!”

The physician was about to depart; the dying man, raising

himself up: “Silence!” said he, with flaming eyes,

“silence!”

“My lord, I have known this secret two months; you see that

I have kept it faithfully.”

“Go, Guenaud, I will take care of your fortunes, go and tell

Brienne to send me a clerk called M. Colbert. Go!”

CHAPTER 44

Colbert

Colbert was not far off. During the whole evening he had

remained in one of the corridors, chatting with Bernouin and

Brienne, and commenting, with the ordinary skill of people

of a court, upon the news which developed like air-bubbles

upon the water, on the surface of each event. It is

doubtless time to trace, in a few words, one of the most

interesting portraits of the age, and to trace it with as

much truth, perhaps, as contemporary painters have been able

to do. Colbert was a man in whom the historian and the

moralist have an equal right.

He was thirteen years older than Louis XIV., his future

master. Of middle height, rather lean than otherwise, he had

deep-set eyes, a mean appearance, his hair was coarse, black

and thin, which, say the biographers of his time, made him

take early to the skull-cap. A look of severity, or

harshness even, a sort of stiffness, which, with inferiors,

was pride, with superiors an affectation of superior virtue;

a surly cast of countenance upon all occasions, even when

looking at himself in a glass alone — such is the exterior

of this personage. As to the moral part of his character,

the depth of his talent for accounts, and his ingenuity in

making sterility itself productive, were much boasted of.

Colbert had formed the idea of forcing governors of frontier

places to feed the garrisons without pay, with what they

drew from contributions. Such a valuable quality made

Mazarin think of replacing Joubert, his intendant, who had

recently died, by M. Colbert, who had such skill in nibbling

down allowances. Colbert by degrees crept into court,

notwithstanding his lowly birth, for he was the son of a man

who sold wine as his father had done, but who afterwards

sold cloth, and then silk stuffs. Colbert, destined for

trade, had been clerk in Lyons to a merchant, whom he had

quitted to come to Paris in the office of a Chatelet

procureur named Biterne. It was here he learned the art of

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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later

drawing up an account, and the much more valuable one of

complicating it.

This stiffness of manner in Colbert had been of great

service to him; it is so true that Fortune, when she has a

caprice, resembles those women of antiquity, who, when they

had a fancy, were disgusted by no physical or moral defects

in either men or things. Colbert, placed with Michel

Letellier, secretary of state in 1648, by his cousin

Colbert, Seigneur de Saint-Penange, who protected him,

received one day from the minister a commission for Cardinal

Mazarin. His eminence was then in the enjoyment of

flourishing health, and the bad years of the Fronde had not

yet counted triple and quadruple for him. He was at Sedan,

very much annoyed at a court intrigue in which Anne of

Austria seemed inclined to desert his cause.

Of this intrigue Letellier held the thread. He had just

received a letter from Anne of Austria, a letter very

valuable to him, and strongly compromising Mazarin; but, as

he already played the double part which served him so well,

and by which he always managed two enemies so as to draw

advantage from both, either by embroiling them more and more

or by reconciling them, Michel Letellier wished to send Anne

of Austria’s letter to Mazarin, in order that he might be

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