treasures of the earth, or of the joys of Paradise, but much
of all the horrors of hell. Whilst burning-hot napkins,
physic, revulsives, and Guenaud, who was recalled, were
performing their functions with increased activity, Colbert,
holding his great head in both his hands, to compress within
it the fever of the projects engendered by the brain, was
meditating the tenor of the donation he would make Mazarin
write, at the first hour of respite his disease should
afford him. It would appear as if all the cries of the
cardinal, and all the attacks of death upon this
representative of the past, were stimulants for the genius
of this thinker with the bushy eyebrows, who was turning
already towards the rising sun of a regenerated society.
Colbert resumed his place at Mazarin’s pillow at the first
interval of pain, and persuaded him to dictate a donation
thus conceived.
“About to appear before God, the Master of mankind, I beg
the king, who was my master on earth, to resume the wealth
which his bounty has bestowed upon me, and which my family
would be happy to see pass into such illustrious hands. The
particulars of my property will be found — they are drawn
up — at the first requisition of his majesty, or at the
last sigh of his most devoted servant,
Jules, Cardinal de Mazarin.”
The cardinal sighed heavily as he signed this; Colbert
sealed the packet, and carried it immediately to the Louvre,
whither the king had returned.
He then went back to his own home, rubbing his hands with
the confidence of a workman who has done a good day’s work.
CHAPTER 47
How Anne of Austria gave one Piece of Advice
to Louis XIV., and how M. Fouquet gave him another
The news of the extreme illness of the cardinal had already
spread, and attracted at least as much attention among the
people of the Louvre as the news of the marriage of
Monsieur, the king’s brother, which had already been
announced as an official fact. Scarcely had Louis XIV.
returned home, with his thoughts fully occupied with the
various things he had seen and heard in the course of the
evening, when an usher announced that the same crowd of
courtiers who, in the morning, had thronged his lever,
presented themselves again at his coucher, a remarkable
piece of respect which, during the reign of the cardinal,
the court, not very discreet in its preferences, had
accorded to the minister, without caring about displeasing
the king.
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
But the minister had had, as we have said, an alarming
attack of gout, and the tide of flattery was mounting
towards the throne. Courtiers have a marvelous instinct in
scenting the turn of events; courtiers possess a supreme
kind of science; they are diplomatists in throwing light
upon the unraveling of complicated intrigues, captains in
divining the issue of battles, and physicians in curing the
sick. Louis XIV., to whom his mother had taught this axiom,
together with many others, understood at once that the
cardinal must be very ill.
Scarcely had Anne of Austria conducted the young queen to
her apartments and taken from her brow the head-dress of
ceremony, when she went to see her son in his cabinet,
where, alone, melancholy and depressed, he was indulging, as
if to exercise his will, in one of those terrible inward
passions — king’s passions — which create events when they
break out, and with Louis XIV., thanks to his astonishing
command over himself, became such benign tempests, that his
most violent, his only passion, that which Saint Simon
mentions with astonishment, was that famous fit of anger
which he exhibited fifty years later, on the occasion of a
little concealment of the Duc de Maine’s. and which had for
result a shower of blows inflicted with a cane upon the back
of a poor valet who had stolen a biscuit. The young king
then was, as we have seen, a prey to a double excitement;
and he said to himself as he looked in a glass, “O king! —
king by name, and not in fact; — phantom, vain phantom art