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
drawing up an account, and the much more valuable one of complicating