“I will not permit myself to remind Your Majesty that I have just restored you to liberty, and have saved your life.”
“Monsieur!”
“I will not allow myself to remind Your Majesty that had M. d’Herblay wished to carry out his character of an assassin, he could very easily have assassinated Your Majesty this morning in the forest of Sénart, and all would have been over.” The king started.
“A pistol-bullet through the head,” pursued Fouquet, “and the disfigured features of Louis XIV, which no one could have recognized, would be M. d’Herblay’s complete and entire justification.”
The king turned pale and giddy at the bare idea of the danger he had escaped.
“If M. d’Herblay,” continued Fouquet, “had been an assassin, he had no occasion to inform me of his plan in order to succeed. Freed from the real king, it would have been impossible in all futurity to guess the false. And if the usurper had been recognized by Anne of Austria, he would still have been—her son. The usurper, as far as Monsieur d’Herblay’s conscience was concerned, was still a king of the blood of Louis XIII. Moreover, the conspirator, in that course, would have had security, secrecy, impunity. A pistol-bullet would have procured him all that. For the sake of Heaven, sire, grant me his forgiveness.”
The king, instead of being touched by the picture, so faithfully drawn in all details, of Aramis’s generosity, felt himself most painfully and cruelly humiliated. His unconquerable pride revolted at the idea that a man had held suspended at the end of his finger the thread of his royal life. Every word that fell from Fouquet’s lips, and which he thought most efficacious in procuring his friend’s pardon, seemed to pour another drop of poison into the already ulcerated heart of Louis XIV. Nothing could bend or soften him. Addressing himself to Fouquet, he said, “I really don’t know, Monsieur, why you should solicit the pardon of these men. What good is there in asking that which can be obtained without solicitation?”
“I do not understand you, sire.”
“It is not difficult, either. Where am I now?”
“In the Bastille, sire.”
“Yes; in a dungeon. I am looked upon as a madman, am I not?”
“Yes, sire.”
“And no one is known here but Marchiali?”
“Certainly.”
“Well; change nothing in the position of affairs. Let the poor madman rot between the slimy walls of the Bastille, and M. d’Herblay and M. du Vallon will stand in no need of my forgiveness. Their new king will absolve them.”
“Your Majesty does me a great injustice, sire; and you are wrong,” replied Fouquet, dryly; “I am not child enough, nor is M. d’Herblay silly enough, to have omitted to make all these reflections; and if I had wished to make a new king, as you say, I had no occasion to have come here to force open the gates and doors of the Bastille, to free you from this place. That would show a want of even common sense. Your Majesty’s mind is disturbed by anger; otherwise you would be far from offending, groundlessly, the very one of your servants who has rendered you the most important service of all.”
Louis perceived that he had gone too far; that the gates of the Bastille were still closed upon him, whilst, by degrees, the floodgates were gradually being opened, behind which the generous-hearted Fouquet had restrained his anger. “I did not say that to humiliate you, Heaven knows, Monsieur,” he replied. “Only you are addressing yourself to me in order to obtain a pardon, and I answer according to my conscience. And so, judging by my conscience, the criminals we speak of are not worthy of consideration or forgiveness.”
Fouquet was silent.
“What I do is as generous,” added the king, “as what you have done, for I am in your power. I will even say it is more generous, inasmuch as you place before me certain conditions upon which my liberty, my life, may depend; and to reject which is to make a sacrifice of both.”
“I was wrong, certainly,” replied Fouquet. “Yes—I had the appearance of extorting a favor; I regret it, and entreat Your Majesty’s forgiveness.”
“And you are forgiven, my dear Monsieur Fouquet,” said the king, with a smile, which restored the serene expression of his features, which so many circumstances had altered since the preceding evening.
“I have my own forgiveness,” replied the minister, with some degree of persistence; “but M. d’Herblay, and M. du Vallon?”
“They will never obtain theirs, as long as I live,” replied the inflexible king. “Do me the kindness not to speak of it again.”
“Your Majesty shall be obeyed.”
“And you will bear me no ill-will for it?”
“Oh! no, sire; for I anticipated the event.”
“You had ‘anticipated’ that I should refuse to forgive those gentlemen?”
“Certainly; and all my measures were taken in consequence.”
“What do you mean to say?” cried the king, surprised.
“M. d’Herblay came, as may be said, to deliver himself into my hands. M. d’Herblay left to me the happiness of saving my king and my country. I could not condemn M. d’Herblay to death; nor could I, on the other hand, expose him to Your Majesty’s justifiable wrath; it would have been just the same as if I had killed him myself.”
“Well! and what have you done?”
“Sire, I gave M. d’Herblay the best horses in my stables and four hours’ start over all those Your Majesty might, probably, dispatch after him.”
“Be it so!” murmured the king. “But still, the world is wide enough and large enough for those whom I may send to overtake your horses, notwithstanding the ‘four hours’ start’ which you have given to M. d’Herblay.”
“In giving him these four hours, sire, I knew I was giving him his life, and he will save his life.”
“In what way?”
“After having galloped as hard as possible, with the four hours’ start, before your musketeers, he will reach my château of Belle-Isle, where I have given him a safe asylum.”
“That may be! But you forget that you have made me a present
