courtyard and corridors; while Fouquet, who had only that morning arrived,
walked all through the palace with a calm, observant glance, in order to give his
last orders, after his intendants had inspected everything.
It was, as we have said, the 15th of August. The sun poured down its
burning rays upon the heathen deities of marble and bronze: it raised the temperature of the water in the conch shells, and ripened, on the walls, those magnificent peaches, of which the king, fifty years later, spoke so regretfully, when, at Marly, on an occasion of a scarcity of the finer sorts of peaches being
complained of, in the beautiful gardens there—gardens which had cost France double the amount that had been expended on Vaux—the great king observed to
some one: “You are far too young to have
