day to the young king. "I have no ministers,
Mr. Ambassador," replied Louis XIV.; "you mean to say my men of
business."

Long habituation to the office of king was not destined to wear out, to
exhaust, the youthful ardor of King Louis XIV. He had been for a long
while governing, when he wrote, "You must not imagine, my son, that
affairs of state are like those obscure and thorny passages in the
sciences which you will perhaps have found fatiguing, at which the mind
strives to raise itself, by an effort, beyond itself, and which repel us
quite as much by their, at any rate apparent, uselessness as by their
difficulty. The function of kings consists principally in leaving good
sense to act, which always acts naturally without any trouble. All that
is most necessary in this kind of work is at the same time agreeable; for
it is, in a word, my son, to keep an open eye over all the world, to be
continually learning news from all the provinces and all nations, the
secrets of all courts, the temper and the foible of all foreign princes
and ministers, to be informed about an infinite number of things of which
we are supposed to be ignorant, to see in our own circle that which is
most carefully hidden from us, to discover the most distant views of our
own courtiers and their most darkly cherished interests which come to us
through contrary interests, and, in fact, I know not what other pleasure
we would not give up for this, even if it were curiosity alone that
caused us to feel it." [_Memoires de Louis XIV.,_ t. ii. p. 428.]

At twenty-two years of age, no more than during the rest of his life, was
Louis XIV. disposed to sacrifice business to pleasure, but he did not
sacrifice pleasure to business. It was on a taste so natural to a young
prince, for the first time free to do as he pleased, that Superintendent
Fouquet counted to increase his influence and probably his power with the
king. "The attorney-general [Fouquet was attorney-general in the
Parliament of Paris], though a great thief, will remain master of the
others," the queen-mother had said to Madame de Motteville at the time of
Mazarin's death. Fouquet's hopes led him to think of nothing less than
to take the minister's place.

[Illustration: Fouquet----404]

Fouquet, who was born in 1615, and had been superintendent of finance in
conjunction with Servien since 1655, had been in sole possession of that
office since the death of his colleague in 1659. He had