The arrest of Matthioli, certainly appears to have been the effect of a vindictive feeling against him in the breast of Lewis himself; for it is impossible to imagine that any minister would have ventured, of his own free-will, upon a step by which so much was to be hazarded, and nothing, in fact, was to be gained. The act is only to be explained in this manner; that the monarch insisted upon his revenge, which the ministers were obliged to gratify; and, at the same time, in order to prevent any ill consequences that might result from it, determined upon burying the whole transaction under the most impenetrable veil of mystery.
The confinement of Matthioli is decidedly one of the deadliest stains that blot the character of Lewis the Fourteenth: for, granting that Matthioli betrayed the trust reposed in him by that monarch, one single act of diplomatic treachery was surely not sufficient to warrant the infliction of the most horrible of all punishments,--of solitary confinement, for four and twenty years, in a dungeon!--It was, however, an act of cruel injustice that was to be expected from the man, who, when the unhappy Fouquet[83] was condemned by the tribunals of his country to exile, himself changed his sentence to that of perpetual imprisonment;--who, to please his mistress, confined his former favourite, Lauzun,[84] for nine years in the fortress of Pignerol, and only then released him in order, by that means, to swindle Mademoiselle de Montpensier[85] out of her fortune, in favour of his bastard, the Duke du Maine;--who shut up so many other persons, guilty only of imaginary crimes, in various prisons, where they died of misery and ill-treatment;--who revoked the Edict of Nantes;--ordered the burning of the Palatinate;--persecuted the saints of Port Royal;--and gloried in the Dragonades, and the war of the Cevennes;--who, in short, whether we regard him as a man or a sovereign, was one of the most hardened, cruel, and tyrannical characters transmitted to us in history. Providence doubtless made use of him as a scourge befitting the crimes of the age he lived in; and, in this point of view, his existence was most useful. Nor is his memory less so; which has been left to us and to all posterity, as a mighty warning of the effects, even in this world, of overweening ambition; and as a melancholy example of the perversion of a proud heart, which "gave not God the glory," and was therefore abandoned by the Almighty to the effects of its own natural and irretrievable wickedness.
