ur
papers. _Mordioux!_ Monseigneur Fouquet, a man like you ought not to be
dejected in this manner. Suppose your friends saw you?"

"Monsieur d'Artagnan," returned the surintendant, with a smile full
of gentleness, "you do not understand me; it is precisely because my
friends are not looking on, that I am as you see me now. I do not live,
exist even, isolated from others; I am nothing when left to myself.
Understand that throughout my whole life I have passed every moment of
my time in making friends, whom I hoped to render my stay and support.
In times of prosperity, all these cheerful, happy voices--rendered so
through and by my means--formed in my honor a concert of praise and
kindly actions. In the least disfavor, these humbler voices accompanied
in harmonious accents the murmur of my own heart. Isolation I have never
yet known. Poverty (a phantom I have sometimes beheld, clad in rags,
awaiting me at the end of my journey through life)--poverty has been the
specter with which many of my own friends have trifled for years past,
which they poetize and caress, and which has attracted me towards them.
Poverty! I accept it, acknowledge it, receive it, as a disinherited
sister; for poverty is neither solitude, nor exile, nor imprisonment.
Is it likely I shall ever be poor, with such friends as Pelisson, as
La Fontaine, as Moliere? with such a mistress as--Oh! if you knew how
utterly lonely and desolate I feel at this moment, and how you, who
separate me from all I love, seem to resemble the image of solitude, of
annihilation--death itself."

"But I have already told you, Monsieur Fouquet," replied D'Artagnan,
moved to the depths of his soul, "that you are woefully exaggerating.
The king likes you."

"No, no," said Fouquet, shaking his head.

"M. Colbert hates you."

"M. Colbert! What does that matter to me?"

"He will ruin you."

"Ah! I defy him to do that, for I am ruined already."

At this singular confession of the superintendent, D'Artagnan cast
his glance all round the room; and although he did not open his lips,
Fouquet understood him so thoroughly, that he added: "What can be done
with such wealth of substance as surrounds us, when a man can no longer
cultivate his taste for the magnificent? Do you know what good the
greater part of the wealth and the possessions which we rich enjoy,
confer upon us? merely to disgust us, by their very splendor even, with
everything which does not equal it! Vaux! you will