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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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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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