So may you freely yield to your urgent grief;
All men look to you for that sympathetic act:
The Fates content: misfortune has smitten Orontes.6
Later in the poem, La Fontaine urges the Nymphs to appeal to Louis to show clemency for Foucquet:
Ye, whose home he made so fine,
Nymphs, who owe to him your fairest charms,
If along your banks Louis should stray,
Try to soften him, to relax his angry mood;
He loves his people; he is just; he is wise;
Make him aspire to be termed clement;
For clemency makes monarchs equal with the gods.
Let him study magnanimous Henri’s7 life
Who, able to revenge himself, desired it not.
Inspire in Louis equal mercy;
No victory so fine as that o’er one’s own heart
Orontes now does clemency deserve
What though he yielded to promptings of unchecked power,
His hard fate is punishment sufficient,
And to be unfortunate is to be innocent.
However, despite the tears of the poor Nymphs, it would soon become clear that Louis was in no mood to be merciful.
Upon Foucquet’s arrest in September 1661, seals were placed on all his properties and his papers were seized. These papers were carefully scrutinized, and it was quickly found that many among them praised the superintendent’s work or justified his actions. Among these were letters sent to Foucquet by Mazarin, all of which were quietly withdrawn. Over the course of the process, false or redacted documents would be inserted among genuine ones in order to enhance the apparent guilt of the accused. Other letters, many of which were compromising, had allegedly been sent to Foucquet by certain ladies at the court. Louis ordered them to be suppressed, but several of them found their way into the public domain in order to blacken Foucquet’s name and destroy whatever sympathy he might have enjoyed among courtiers.
One document, however, proved even more explosive. This was a paper that would become known to history as the Projet de Saint-Mandé, an elaborate plan detailing the measures Foucquet, his friends, and business partners should take in the event of his arrest by the unpredictable Mazarin. Foucquet had written it at a particularly difficult period in his relationship with the cardinal, and he had revisited it several times as changes in his circumstances arose. Read in an unfavorable light, and when taken together with Foucquet’s activities in Brittany,8 the Projet could be interpreted as proof that Foucquet intended to commit high treason.
All the while, Foucquet had languished in the grim donjon of Vincennes, a mere stone’s throw from his home at Saint-Mandé. During his first week of captivity, he wrote two letters to Michel Le Tellier, although it was clear that both were intended for the king. In the first, he wrote as a sick man afraid of death, begging for medical and spiritual assistance.9 Whether or not this one was answered is not known. The second letter, which was very long, was not the work of a frail and frightened man but that of an accused minister expressing indignation at his treatment, pointing out his past services, and appealing to Louis’s “goodness and his clemency, which are truly royal virtues . . . and for justice,10 which, if it is there to punish faults, it is also there to reward service.” He could not understand how matters had turned out as they had, but he would have been prepared to give up his post as superintendent if the king had asked him to. As it was, he asked Louis to change his imprisonment into exile, for he owned a dreary cottage in a remote corner of Brittany, where he could retire and live as a private person under the supervision of La Meilleraye.11 He closed by begging Le Tellier to find time to read the letter in full to Louis, and appealing to the king for “the same mercy that he would desire God to show him one day.”12
Foucquet did not receive the grace that he asked for. Louis ordered Le Tellier to write to d’Artagnan13 that Foucquet’s letters were too long, that His Majesty did not have time to read them. Five days later, he dictated another letter forbidding Foucquet to write any more letters without the express order of the king.14
The former superintendent had little idea of what was going on beyond the walls of his cell. He had no contact with his family apart from a few letters that he was allowed to exchange with his wife. These were passed through the hands of Michel Le Tellier, who ensured that they contained nothing but essential family business.
Louis’s dilemma was to try Foucquet without subjecting the state finances to inquiry; to do so would not be in the best interests of the state, and it would alienate many prominent families in France and abroad.15 As such, Louis thought that a small panel of masters of requests presided over by Chancellor Séguier would be appropriate.16 This was not an unusual approach in such cases, and the process would be swiftly and satisfactorily accomplished.
Colbert, however, urged Louis to try the former superintendent against the setting of a dramatic show trial, as befitting the circumstances of his arrest. For this, it would be necessary to establish a Chambre de justice.17 Colbert’s motive was simple: it allowed for the reformation of the finances by highlighting alleged abuses in the system over a period of several years. In this case, the former superintendent would be tried not only for irregularities that occurred during his tenure but also for financial crimes going back to 1635; that is, sixteen years before he took office. Colbert’s hostility towards Foucquet was useful to Louis, whose wish to bring the former superintendent down was driven by his need to enhance royal power, to crush once and for all any chance that the Fronde may rise again,18 and to rid his kingdom of a man who was more magnificent than himself. Louis agreed to Colbert’s proposal.
The judges and officials were duly appointed. Colbert was careful to choose men who were known to be unsympathetic towards Foucquet, but whom he trusted to find the verdict and recommend the sentence required by the king. This process took several weeks, and the Chambre held its first sitting on December 3, 1661. Chancellor Séguier, who distinguished himself by his hostility towards the defendant, led the Chambre; the premier président of the Parlement of Paris, Guillaume de Lamoignon, was appointed presiding magistrate. The second president was François-Theodore de Nesmond, and Denis Talon, one of Foucquet’s fiercest enemies, took the post of procureur-général for the Chambre. Lamoignon, who had ties with Foucquet and was suspected of being sympathetic towards him, was replaced midway through the process by Séguier.19 The Chambre was tasked to establish Foucquet’s guilt without also putting Mazarin on trial or incriminating Colbert and others.
Two members of the Chambre, Pierre Poncet and Jacques Renard, interrogated Foucquet in his cell at Vincennes. They were accompanied by the greffier, or clerk of the court, Joseph Foucault, who noted down Foucquet’s every word. They assailed Foucquet with leading questions and used legal though unethical means to place him under as much pressure as possible.
Thus far, Foucquet had been denied access to his papers and was forbidden to see the notes on his case. He was also denied counsel. However, his sharp intelligence and thorough knowledge of the legal system told him much of what he needed to know about the case that was being built against him. This insight allowed him to mount a brilliant defense. Recognizing that Colbert and his clients were behind the attack on him, Foucquet implicated his former friend and colleague, whose financial activities were equally suspect. He also humiliated the Chambre, whose case was encumbered by weak accusations and its own partiality.
The charges Foucquet was to face fell into two categories: financial crimes and high treason. On the financial side, he was accused of making false loans to the state; agreeing to private advances of funds to the state; making use of state revenues for his own, private purposes; creating false identities in order to speculate in tax farming.20
None of these charges could be proven, and the only evidence that apparently supported them lay in Foucquet’s apparent wealth, of which the château Vaux-le-Vicomte was the most obvious example. In his defense, Foucqu
et pointed out that his debts far exceeded his assets, and he insisted that the Chambre should audit his accounts. This was not done.21 In fact, the charge of peculation and other finance-related crimes against Foucquet were not as sharply defined as Colbert asserted. Certainly, Foucquet’s accounts were in serious disarray, but that was the case with financiers in general.
The charge of high treason was based upon the plan found at Foucquet’s house at Saint-Mandé. Certainly, if it had been read by anyone determined to ruin Foucquet, they would find their ammunition in this document. On the other hand, Foucquet had made no attempt to implement any of the measures described in it, nor had he told anyone about the plan.22 The charge of high treason, though unsustainable, would become one of the highlights of the trial.
In October 1662, the Chambre appointed two rapporteurs, or court reporters, whose responsibility was to sum up the prosecution’s case and, where appropriate, offer their recommendations for sentencing. The rapporteurs selected for Foucquet’s trial were Jacques Le Cormier de Sainte-Hélène and Olivier Lefèvre d’Ormesson. Acting on the advice of their lawyers, Foucquet’s wife and mother immediately challenged the appointment of these two men due to their association with Colbert. In view of this, Lamoignon advised Louis to recuse the two men. The conscientious premier président was anxious that due process should be observed, and he feared for the integrity of the Chambre. Louis, following the counsel of Colbert, Le Tellier, and others, insisted that Sainte-Hélène and Ormesson should take up their posts, stating that the Mmes Foucquet were afraid of the “known integrity of these magistrates, and that fear is one more reason to appoint them.”23 The suspicions of the Foucquet ladies would prove to be justified in Sainte-Hélène’s case. However, Ormesson’s reputation for probity and integrity would show itself to be well earned.
At the end of August 1664, the Chambre discovered that some of the original documents pertaining to the case had been tampered with. One of their members, Louis Berryer, was blamed for having omitted some lines from one of the witness statements, and the resulting uproar held the process back by some four weeks. The reputation of the Chambre, however, had been dented.24 Notwithstanding this, the trial of Nicolas Foucquet finally opened on November 14, 1664, at the Arsenal in Paris, more than three years after his arrest. The proceedings at the court, which would sit for most days until December 4, were interrupted after only two days when the queen became dangerously ill.
Marie-Thérèse, who was pregnant with her third child, had been feeling unwell for some time. A month earlier, Louis had announced that he would take the court to Versailles, but Marie-Thérèse, fearing the long journey might cause her to miscarry, did not want to go. Louis, however, did not want to leave her behind, so he designed a special chair that would allow her to make the journey. The contraption was a kind of portable bed, and when the queen tried it, she found it to be very comfortable.25 Upon her return, she came down with a tertian fever and violent pains in her legs. On November 4, she gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Marie-Anne de France, who was given the title la Petite Madame.26 The following day, the queen had convulsions, and her life was despaired of. Louis, weeping with grief, was very attentive, but the queen’s life was in the hands of God. The king, as though to purchase divine favor for Marie-Thérèse, distributed money to the poor and ordered the release of some prisoners, all the while bargaining with God to save the queen. He confided to the maréchal de Villeroy that while Marie-Thérèse was in labor, “although it would be the greatest misfortune in the world for him to lose a child, he could be consoled for that, provided God did him the favor to preserve the queen’s life, and also that his child could [live long enough to] be baptized.”27
It was about this time28 that Sebastiano Locatelli, an Italian abbot and visitor to the court, took the opportunity to watch Louis as he went to mass at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois and later wrote a description of the king. Louis wore a suit of black velvet with a large floral [jacquard-type] design, with the insignia of the Saint-Esprit on his cloak. He carried a short cane in his hand and wore a small hat decorated with a rose of diamonds on one side. Locatelli noted that Condé and other dukes and peers were better dressed than the king, but Louis, probably influenced by his mother, preferred to dress plainly for church. Louis’s dark blond hair was still long and luxurious, his forehead was high, and his eyes were “more blue than dark.” His nose was aquiline, and his mouth and chin were “very beautiful.” The king’s figure was plump, and his skin was “more olive than white”; he was also rather tall, while his shoulders were slightly bowed, which “indicated well that vigor that is apparent in all his actions.”29
As Marie-Thérèse received the last rites, Louis was inconsolable. “It is the most magnificent and the saddest things in the world to see the king and all the court, with the candles and a thousand torches, going to ask for the sacrament and escort it back,” said Mme de Sévigné. It had not been without difficulty to make the queen receive it, and Louis was required to warn her of the gravity of her condition. Aware of the queen’s illness, Mme Foucquet the Elder offered a remedy of her own recipe to Anne of Austria, a plaster that, when applied, reduced the queen’s fever. An hour later, she was on the road to recovery.30
While Marie-Thérèse lay on what everyone thought to be her deathbed, she made a special request to Louis: to arrange a marriage for Louise de La Vallière. Louis was taken aback by such a surprising appeal. He did not want to promise, but he also did not want to refuse his wife’s dying wish, so he compromised by assuring her that he would not oppose it, but that they might look for a suitable husband for Louise together.
The story goes that every eligible man at court and beyond refused Louise’s hand, but in fact Louise was the one who refused to take a husband.31 If she were to marry, it would be as a bride of Christ. When Marie-Thérèse recovered, Louis broke the promise he had made to her. If there had been talk of marriage, he said, it was only because he knew Louise would never hear of it.
It was time, Louis thought, to have a little fun, to lift the somber mood that had descended upon the court during the past few weeks. He had recently taken up writing verses, his poesy guided by Saint-Aignan and Dangeau.32 One day he wrote a little madrigal, although he was not very pleased with it, and he decided to ask the elderly maréchal de Gramont to read it to see if he had “ever seen one so irrelevant.” He went on to explain that “because it is known that I have lately taken a liking to poems, people bring me all sorts of them.”33
The maréchal, having read the madrigal, told Louis, “Sire, Your Majesty judges divinely everything; it is true that this is the silliest and most ridiculous madrigal that I have ever read.”
The king laughed at this and replied, “Is it not true that whoever wrote this is indeed a fop?”
“Sire, there is no other name for him.”
“Oh, good,” said Louis, “I am delighted that you have spoken so plainly; it is I who wrote it.”
“Ah, Sire, what treachery!” cried Gramont. “Will Your Majesty give it back to me; I read it too quickly.”
“No, M. le maréchal,” replied the king. “The first impressions are always the most natural.”
While Louis laughed at his little joke, others found it the “cruelest thing one could do to an old courtier.” Louis, however, was in excellent spirits: he had been successful in keeping his beloved Louise all to himself, and his queen had been restored to him. However, those who thought that Mme Foucquet’s intervention in the queen’s crisis might help to alleviate her son’s plight were sadly mistaken. The trial was quickly resumed until December 9, when, for the next eight days, the rapporteurs presented their summing up, offered their verdicts, and recommended the sentence each thought Foucquet should receive.
Ormesson was the first to address the court. He found Foucquet guilty of certain financial irregularities but insisted that these must be judged in context. Foucquet, he noted, had taken his orders directly from Mazarin, an Italian unfamiliar with
the French financial system. He pointed out that because actual proof of the former superintendent’s guilt was incomplete, Foucquet could be found guilty only of negligence and misappropriation of public funds, for which he should receive the lesser sentence of banishment and the confiscation of his assets by the crown, except for 5 thousand livres to be donated to charity.34
Sainte-Hélène now stood to give his verdict, which was that Foucquet was guilty of embezzlement, malfeasance during his tenure as superintendent, and high treason. Proof of treason lay in the Projet de Saint-Mandé, which Sainte-Hélène had interpreted as a plot to kill the king. Regicide, he pointed out, required the death penalty, but in view of Foucquet’s noble birth, he should not be hanged but beheaded within the Bastille, while his possessions should be forfeited to the crown.
For the next four days, each of the judges registered their votes and presented the grounds upon which they reached their judgments. On December 20, the final verdict was announced: nine judges had agreed with Sainte-Hélène and found for death; the other thirteen had been persuaded by Ormesson’s arguments and found Foucquet guilty of financial misdemeanors with a sentence of banishment for life beyond the borders of the kingdom.35
This sentence, harsh though it was, brought comfort to Foucquet’s friends and supporters; however, one of these, Mme de Sévigné, could not shake off a feeling of unease. She had been following the trial and writing a running commentary to a friend. After listing the verdicts reached by the various members of the Chambre, she wrote:
This is where we are, which is a state so advantageous that our joy is not unmixed; for you know that M. Colbert is so angry, that we expect something atrocious and unjust that will throw us back into despair. Were it not for that, my poor, Monsieur, we would have the joy of seeing our friend, unhappy though he may be, at least with his life saved, which is a great thing.36
Her instincts were correct: not only was Colbert furious but Louis was also displeased with the final verdict and sentencing. He had expected Foucquet to be executed if found guilty37 and had warned his mother not to appeal for clemency should Foucquet be sentenced to death.38 When the verdict became known, he told Louise that Foucquet would die for all he would do to help him.39
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