Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  From gallery D, we had returned to gallery C, which we would doubt­less need now to explore thoroughly. This time, however, leaving to our right branch E, which led to the Palace of the Chancery, we went straight on.

  I noted the absorbed expression of Abbot Melani and above all his silence. I guessed that he must be meditating upon our discoveries, and therefore decided to question him with the curiosity which he himself had instilled in me only a few hours before.

  "You said that Louis XIV never hated anyone more than Superintendent Fouquet."

  "Yes."

  "And that, supposing he had discovered that Fouquet had not died at Pinerol but was here in Rome, alive and free, his wrath would certainly have been unleashed anew."

  "Precisely."

  "But why such implacable rage?"

  "That is nothing compared to the Sovereign's brooding fury at the time of the arrest and during the trial."

  "Was it not enough for the King that he had been dismissed?"

  "You are not the only one to have asked such questions. And you must not be surprised, for no one has ever found an answer to that. Not even I. At least, not yet."

  The mystery of Louis XIV's hatred for Fouquet, explained Abbot Melani, was a matter of endless discussion in Paris.

  "There are things which, for lack of time, I have not yet been able to tell you."

  I pretended to accept this excuse. But I now knew that, because of his new state of mind, Atto was prepared to confide in me many things which he had hitherto kept to himself. It was thus that he again evoked those terrible days in which the noose of the conspiracy tightened around the Superintendent's neck.

  Colbert began to spin his web from the day when Cardinal Mazarin died. He knew that he must act under cover of the state's interests and the glory of the monarchy. He also knew that he did not have much time: he must act quickly while the King was still inexpert in financial matters. Louis was unaware of what had really been going on under the government of Mazarin, whose machinations escaped him. The only one with access to the Cardinal's papers was Colbert, the master of a thousand secrets. And, while he was already tampering with the documents and falsifying evidence, the Serpent lost no opportunity to instil in the Sovereign, like a subtle poison, mistrust for the Superintendent. In the meanwhile, he soothed the latter with pledges of loyalty. The plot was working perfectly: three months before the festivities at the Chateau de Vaux, the King was already meditating on how to bring down his Su­perintendent of Finances. There remained, however, a final obstacle: Fouquet, who still held the office of Procurator-General, enjoyed par­liamentary immunity. The Coluber, adducing the pretext of the King's urgent need for money, persuaded the Squirrel to sell his office.

  Poor Nicolas fell headlong into the trap: he earned one million four hundred thousand livres from the transaction and as soon as he received an advance of a million livres, donated it to the King.

  "And when he received the money, the King said, 'He is putting his own hands in irons,' Atto remembered bitterly, brushing a little dirt from his sleeves and then examining his still soiled cuffs with disappointment.

  "How horrible!" I could not restrain myself from exclaiming.

  "Not as much as you think, my boy. The young King was tasting his power for the first time. He could do this only by imposing his royal prerogative, and therefore injustice. What proof of power would it have been to favour the best, those whose qualities already des­tined them for the highest honours? He is powerful who can elevate the mediocre and the cunning over the wise and the good, by his sole caprice subverting the natural course of events."

  "But did Fouquet suspect nothing?"

  "That is a mystery. He was warned from several sides that some­thing was being plotted behind his back. But he felt that his con­science was clear. I recall that he would respond with a smile, quoting the words of a predecessor: 'Superintendents are made to be hated.' Hated by kings, with their ever increasing demands for money for battles and ballets; and hated by the people, who have to pay the taxes."

  Fouquet, Atto continued, even realised that something important was to take place in Nantes, where he was soon to end up in irons, but he would not look reality in the face: he convinced himself that the King was about to arrest Colbert, not him. Once in Nantes, his friends persuaded him to take up lodgings in a house which had a secret underground passage. This was an ancient conduit leading to the beach, where a fully equipped boat was kept at the ready, to bear him to safety. In the days that followed, Fouquet saw that the streets surrounding the house were full of musketeers. He began to open his eyes, but told his family that he would never run away: "I must run the risk: I cannot believe that the King means to ruin me."

  "That was a fatal error!" exclaimed Atto. "The Superintendent knew only the politics of confidence. He could not see that those had had their day and been displaced by the crude politics of suspicion. Mazarin was dead, all was changed."

  "And how was France before the death of Mazarin?"

  Abbot Melani sighed. "How was it?... Ah, it was the good old France of Louis XIII: a world—how could I put it?—both more open and more mobile, in which speech and thought were free, and gay originality, bold attitudes and moral equilibrium seemed set to reign forever. So it appeared: in the circles of the Precieuses, Madame de Sevigne and her friend Madame de la Fayette, in the maxims of the Sieur de la Rochefoucauld and in the verses of Jean de la Fon­taine. None could foresee the glacial, absolute domination of the new King."

  Six months were all the Serpent needed to ruin the Squirrel. After his arrest, Fouquet languished in gaol for three months be­fore obtaining a trial. At last, in December 1661, the Chamber of Justice which was to judge him was constituted. It consisted of Chancellor Pierre Seguier, President Lamoignon and twenty-six members appointed from the regional parlements and from among the referendaries.

  President Lamoignon opened the first session by describing with tragic grandiloquence the wretched condition of the people of France, crushed each year under the weight of fresh taxes and beset by hunger, disease and desperation. To make matters worse, their plight had of late been aggravated by several years of bad harvests. In many provinces, people were literally dying of hunger; yet the rapa­cious hand of the tax collectors knew no pity and preyed upon the poor villagers with ever greater avidity.

  "What had the misery of the people to do with Fouquet?"

  "It had much to do with him. It served to introduce and to il­lustrate a theorem: in the countryside, the peasants were dying of hunger because he had enriched himself scandalously at the expense of the state."

  "And was that true?"

  "Of course not. In the first place, Fouquet was not really wealthy. And, secondly, after his imprisonment at Pinerol, the wretched con­dition of France's villages became considerably worse. But listen to what followed."

  At the opening of the trial, a notice was read out in all the churches of the realm in which citizens were invited to denounce all collec­tors of the salt tax and tax farmers, collectors and financiers who had committed financial abuses. In a second edict, those accused of such misdeeds were forbidden to leave their cities. Any who did so would at once be arraigned on charges of embezzlement, a crime punishable by death.

  This had an enormous effect. All financiers, tax farmers and col­lectors were immediately denounced to the people as criminals; the immensely wealthy Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, was thus depicted as the head of a band of brigands which terrorised the peasantry and had reduced it to famine.

  "Nothing could have been more false: Fouquet had always pointed out to the Crown, but in vain, the danger of imposing excessively high taxes. When he was sent to the Dauphine as Intendant for Fi­nances, for the purpose of squeezing more taxes out of those refrac­tory people, he had even succeeded in getting himself dismissed by Mazarin. After thorough inquiries, Fouquet had in fact concluded that the taxes levied in that region were intolerably high and he had even made so bold as
to present in Paris an official request for exemp­tion. The members of the Parlement of Dauphine had all mobilised in his defence."

  Those times seemed, however, to have been forgotten. At the beginning of the Superintendent's trial, no fewer than ninety-six charges were read out, which the rapporteur of the Bench sensibly reduced to about ten: above all, he was accused of having made the King bogus loans, on which he had unjustly charged interest; sec­ondly, of illicitly confusing the King's money with his own, and using it for private purposes; thirdly, of receiving from subcontractors more than three hundred thousand livres in exchange for granting them favourable conditions; and of having personally encashed the revenue from this operation, using false names; fourthly, he was charged with having given the state expired bills of exchange in return for cash.

  When the hearing opened, the people's hatred for Fouquet was most violent. In the days following the arrest, the guards took care to avoid certain villages in which the mob was ready to tear him to pieces.

  Locked in his tiny cell, isolated from everything and from every­one, the Superintendent was unable fully to grasp into what an abyss he had been cast. His health declined and he asked to be sent a confessor; he sent memoranda to the King in his defence; four times, he begged him in vain for an audience; he had letters circulated in which he proudly pleaded his cause; he cherished the illusion that the incident could be concluded honourably. All his requests were rejected, and he began to realise that there was no breach in the wall of hostility raised against him by the King and Colbert.

  In the meantime, Colbert was manoeuvring behind the scenes: he summoned the members of the Chamber of Justice in the King's presence and subjected them to innuendo, coercion and threats. He did worse with the witnesses, many of whom were investigated in their turn.

  We were interrupted by Ugonio. He showed us a trapdoor through which he and Ciacconio had lowered themselves a few weeks earlier, thus discovering the gallery which we were now moving along.

  "Where does the trapdoor lead?"

  "To the hinder part of the Subpantheon."

  "Bear this in mind, my boy," Atto said to me. "If I have under­stood correctly, this trapdoor leads to some underground chambers behind the Pantheon. Thence, one finds one's way into some private courtyard and, finally, we can use one of your keys to open the gate and go out into the street, is that not so?"

  Ugonio nodded, with a coarse, self-satisfied smile, adding that there was no need for any key, as the gate was always left open. Hav­ing taken in that news, we all continued our march, and Abbot Mel­ani, his narration.

  At the trial, Fouquet defended himself alone, without any lawyers. His eloquence was prodigious, his reflexes ever prompt, his argumentation, subtle and insinuating, his memory, infallible. His papers had all been requisitioned and probably purged of anything that might be used in his defence; but the Superintendent defended himself as no one else could. For every challenge he had a ready answer. It was impossible to catch him out.

  "As I have already mentioned, the counterfeiting of certain documentary proofs by one Berryer, Colbert's man, was discovered. And, in the end, all the documents in the case, a veritable mountain of paper, did not suffice to prove a single one of the charges against Fouquet! What did, however, tend to emerge was the responsibility and involvement of Mazarin, whose memory must, however, remain immaculate."

  Colbert and the King, who had trusted in a swift, utterly servile and merciless judiciary, had not foreseen that many of the judges of the Chamber of Justice, who were old admirers of Fouquet, might refuse to treat the trial as a mere formality.

  Time passed quickly: from one hearing to another, three long years had soon gone by. Fouquet's passionate harangues had become an attraction for all Paris. The people, who, at the time of his arrest, would have torn him apart, had come gradually to feel pity for him. Colbert had stopped at nothing to raise ever greater taxes, which were to serve for the pursuit of more wars and the completion of the Palace of Versailles. More than ever, the peasants had been tormented, abused, even summarily hanged. The Serpent had increased the pressure of taxation far beyond anything that Fouquet had ever dared impose. Moreover, the inventory of all the property owned by Fouquet at the time of his arrest proved that the Superintendent's accounts were in deficit. All the splendour with which he had surrounded himself had been no more than dust thrown in the eyes of creditors, with whom he had personally exposed himself, not knowing how otherwise to meet the costs of France's wars. He had thus contracted personal debts amounting to sixteen million livres, against a fortune in land, houses and offices valued at no more than fifteen million livres.

  "Nothing when compared with the thirty-three million livres net which Mazarin left to his nephews in his will."

  "Then Fouquet should have been able to obtain an acquittal," I observed.

  "Yes and no," replied the abbot, while we stopped to replenish the oil in one of the lanterns. "In the first place, Colbert succeeded in preventing the judges from seeing the inventory of Fouquet's prop­erty. In vain, the Superintendent requested that it be placed among the documents before the court. And then, immediately after the arrest, came the discovery that was to bring about his downfall."

  This was the last of the charges levelled against him, which had nothing to do with financial malpractice or any other question involv­ing money. This was a document which was found hidden behind a mirror when Fouquet's house at Saint-Mande was searched. It was a letter to friends and relatives, dated 1657, four years before his ar­rest. In it, he expressed his anxiety at the growing mistrust which he sensed on the part of Mazarin and the intrigues whereby his enemies sought to ruin him. Fouquet then gave instructions concerning the action to be taken in the event of Mazarin's ordering his incarcera­tion. This was no plan for an insurrection but for subtle political agi­tation, destined to alarm the Cardinal and lead him to negotiate, in full awareness of Mazarin's inclination to back off when faced with an awkward situation.

  Notwithstanding the fact that there was no word in the docu­ment of any uprising against the Crown, the procurer presented this as a plan for a coup d'etat; in other words, something like the Fronde, which all the French remembered only too well. Again, according to the procurer, the rebels were to take refuge in the isolated fortress of Belle-Ile, which belonged to Fouquet. Emissaries of the investigators were sent to Belle-Ile, off the coast of Brittany, and these did their best to present as proofs of guilt the work on the fortifications, the cannons and the stocks of gunpowder and ammunition laid up there.

  "But why had Fouquet fortified the island?"

  "He was a genius of the sea and of marine strategy and he planned to use Belle-Ile as a support base against England. He had even thought of building a city in that place with its excellent natural har­bour and particularly favourable position, so as to divert from Amster­dam all the commercial traffic of the North, thus rendering a great service to the King of France."

  Thus, Fouquet, who had been arrested for embezzlement, found himself tried for fomenting sedition. Nor was that all. At Saint-Mandé, a padlocked wooden box had been found containing the secret correspondence of the Superintendent. The King's representatives found therein the names of all the accused's most faithful friends, and many trembled at this. Most of the letters were sent to the King and in the end they were all entrusted to Colbert's care. He kept many of them, being well aware of their potential usefulness as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon those involved. Only a few letters, which Col­bert was able to select in his own good time, were burned so as not to compromise some illustrious personage.

  "Do you then think," I interrupted, "that the letters from Kircher which you discovered in Colbert's study were found in that box?"

  "Perhaps."

  "And how did the trial end?"

  Fouquet had requested that several judges should be challenged on grounds of partiality: for instance, Pussort, Colbert's uncle, who persistently referred to the Serpent his nephew as
"my party". Pussort attacked Fouquet so coarsely as even to prevent him from re­sponding, thus upsetting all the other judges.

  Chancellor Seguier also sat in the court, yet during the Fronde he had been among the insurgents against the Crown. Fouquet observed: how could Seguier judge a state crime? The next day, all Paris applauded the brilliant counter-attack of the accused, but the challenge was rejected.

  The public began to murmur: not a day passed without some new accusation being levelled against Fouquet. His accusers had made the rope so thick that it was becoming too unwieldy to strangle him with.

  So, the decisive moment drew nigh. Some judges were requested by the King in person no longer to take an interest in the trial. Talon himself, who in his speeches for the prosecution had showed great zeal without obtaining much success, had to make way for another Procurator-General, Chamillart. It was he who, on 14th November, 1664, set out his own conclusions before the Chamber of Justice. Chamillart called for Fouquet to be condemned to death, and for the restitution of all sums illicitly taken from the state. It then fell to the rapporteurs of the trial to make their concluding speeches. Judge Olivier d'Ormesson, vainly subjected to Colbert's attempts at intimi­dation, spoke passionately for five whole days, unleashing his fury against Berryer and his men. He concluded by calling for a sentence of exile: the best possible solution for Fouquet.