Achille de Harlay bought it for fourteen hundred thousand livres; a million in ready money was remitted to the king for his Majesty's urgent necessities; the superintendent was buying up everybody, even the king.
[Illustration: Colbert----405] On the 17th of August, 1661, the whole court thronged the gardens of Vaux, designed by Le Netre; the king, whilst admiring the pictures of Le Brun, the _Facheux_ of Moliere represented that day for the first time, and the gold and silver plate which encumbered the tables, felt his inward wrath redoubled.

"Ah! Madame," he said to the queen his mother, "shall not we make all these fellows disgorge ?" He would have had the superintendent arrested in the very midst of those festivities, the very splendor of which was an accusation against him.

Anne of Austria, inclined in her heart to be indulgent towards Fouquet, restrained him.
"Such a deed would scarcely be to your honor, my son," she said; "everybody can see that this poor man is ruining himself to give you good cheer, and you would have him arrested in his own house!" [Illustration: Vaux le Vicomte----405a] "I put off the execution of my design," says Louis XIV.

in his Memoires, "which caused me incredible pain, for I saw that during that time he was practising new devices to rob me.

You can imagine that at the age I then was it required my reason to make a great effort against my feelings in order to act with so much self-control.