iend of Marie Michon, the
new foe of the old duchesse.

Chapter XXXVII. The Two Lighters.

D'Artagnan had set off; Fouquet likewise was gone, and with a rapidity
which doubled the tender interest of his friends. The first moments of
this journey, or better say, this flight, were troubled by a ceaseless
dread of every horse and carriage to be seen behind the fugitive. It was
not natural, in fact, if Louis XIV. was determined to seize this prey,
that he should allow it to escape; the young lion was already accustomed
to the chase, and he had bloodhounds sufficiently clever to be trusted.
But insensibly all fears were dispersed; the surintendant, by hard
traveling, placed such a distance between himself and his persecutors,
that no one of them could reasonably be expected to overtake him. As
to his position, his friends had made it excellent for him. Was he not
traveling to join the king at Nantes, and what did the rapidity prove
but his zeal to obey? He arrived, fatigued, but reassured, at Orleans,
where he found, thanks to the care of a courier who had preceded him,
a handsome lighter of eight oars. These lighters, in the shape of
gondolas, somewhat wide and heavy, containing a small chamber, covered
by the deck, and a chamber in the poop, formed by a tent, then acted as
passage-boats from Orleans to Nantes, by the Loire, and this passage,
a long one in our days, appeared then more easy and convenient than the
high-road, with its post-hacks and its ill-hung carriages. Fouquet went
on board this lighter, which set out immediately. The rowers, knowing
they had the honor of conveying the surintendant of the finances, pulled
with all their strength, and that magic word, the _finances_, promised
them a liberal gratification, of which they wished to prove themselves
worthy. The lighter seemed to leap the mimic waves of the Loire.
Magnificent weather, a sunrise that empurpled all the landscape,
displayed the river in all its limpid serenity. The current and the
rowers carried Fouquet along as wings carry a bird, and he arrived
before Beaugency without the slightest accident having signalized the
voyage. Fouquet hoped to be the first to arrive at Nantes; there he
would see the notables and gain support among the principal members of
the States; he would make himself a necessity, a thing very easy for a
man of his merit, and would delay the catastrophe, if he did not succeed
in avoiding it entirely. "Besides," said Gourville