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onjour!
this month we are dedicating our newsletter to Vaux-le-Vicomte, one of the most beautiful
castles in France, located about 35 miles south of Paris. Far beyond its elegance and beauty,
what makes this monument unique is that it took only one nice summer evening for it to go down
in history. Its story is above all that of Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV's Superintendent of
Finances and the happy owner of the Vaux-le-Vicomte castle. The master of this domain seemed to
have been born under a lucky star. However, it quit shining on that fateful night of August 17, 1661.
But before continuing, please remember that you can access and read all the newsletters already
published at http://www.francemonthly.com/
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A Promising Future
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In 1635, young Nicolas Fouquet had a promising future in front of him. He was barely
20 years old when he entered public office. Five years later, he became a petitions
magistrate, an office as prestigious as it was expensive. At 27, he was appointed
paymaster in the North Army. Daring, brilliant and ambitious, the young man was
enjoying life with a disconcerting simplicity.
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Vaux le Vicomte Paris, Aerial View
(Click photo to enlarge)
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Everything he undertook was successful. He was just 30 when Cardinal Mazarin hired him,
with the mission to fill up the kingdom's empty coffers. Nicolas Fouquet was a confident
young man, but also a lucid one. He understood perfectly well the necessity to be close
to power to continue his rise, which is why he bought his first residence in St-Mandé.
His garden was adjacent to the Castle of Vincennes, which allowed him to be close to
his master, but also closer to the young king and the queen mother. This same reasoning
led him to choose the old castle of Vaux as his next residence a few years later, as it
was located in the small commune of Maincy. Every summer, the court would stay nearby,
in Fontainebleau. Had the court been at Versailles at the time, no doubt Fouquet would
have chosen Versailles!
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The Spirit of War: Money
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Taxes alone were not enough to replenish the kingdom's coffers, and other stratagems
were conceived. For instance, the very wealthy bourgeois could buy themselves a title
of nobility, or a very respectable office in the Parliament. One could also purchase
a "lettre de cachet", a letter signed by the king and closed with the royal seal, that
contained an order to arrest a family member, for being a little crazy or simply troublesome.
In these cases, one would have to cover all inherent expenses for the person's confinement,
because the day the poor soul's "accommodation charges" were no longer paid, he would be
immediately released, regardless of how dangerous he might be or the specific reasons for
his imprisonment. The only matter of concern was that the money kept pouring in. The State
took out numerous loans, but the credibility of Cardinal Mazarin who was at the head of
France while Louis XIV was still only a child, eventually shrank away to nothing. To
accomplish this difficult task of collecting funds, the cardinal chose Nicolas Fouquet,
a brilliant man who was also wealthy and therefore credible. He would be granted loans
that were not made readily available to a king who was much too poor, or to a cardinal
of dubious honesty.
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Recipe for Sept 2008
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Salmon Crumble
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A Dazzling Rise
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Nicolas Fouquet accomplished his mission with formidable efficiency. He found the
anticipated money through a series of more or less opaque operations, at a time
when any means of control was virtually nonexistent. In the process, he allowed a
few coins to fall into the cardinal's pockets, as well as his own. He was already
rich to begin with, but became even more so with the death of his first wife in
childbirth, who left him a considerable inheritance.
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View from the Gardens
(Click photo to enlarge)
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His father also died that same year, and this double inheritance enabled him to buy a
medieval looking castle in the small commune of Maincy, in a huge park sheltered by
great walls. He became Lord and Viscount of Vaux on February 1, 1641. He didn't
immediately transform his castle but continued to acquire land, demolishing no less
than three entire villages in the surrounding area to enlarge his estate. At the same
time, his career was taking gigantic steps forward, as he became a respectable Public
Prosecutor in the Parliament in 1651. He became even richer the following year thanks
to the dowry brought to him by his second wife, and in February 1653, Fouquet became
Minister of State and Superintendent of Finances under King Louis XIV.
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Vaux, a Monument to His Glory
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Fouquet had the luck of the bold and his fortune gave him access to considerable credit lines. All
that was missing was a residence worthy of his social standing, and that would become Vaux.
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Fountain in the Gardens
(Click photo to enlarge)
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He called on the period's greatest masters of French art: Louis Le Vau, a talented architect
already working for the king at the Louvre and at Vincennes; the painter Charles Le Brun,
whose work was already very much in demand amid Parisian society; and André Le Nôtre, the
king's landscape architect at the Tuileries. Construction began in 1657 and it wasn't long
before rumors spread, of an excessively large building site. Fouquet realized a little
discretion was in order and recommended that the work continue literally behind closed
doors. He asked that everyone do their best to push work forward before reaching the
"season when everybody goes to the countryside". There were up to 18,000 workers on site
for whom Fouquet even had a hospital built. A tapestry manufacture was created just to
satisfy the demand of the castle, and it was so profitable that Colbert would eventually
turn it into the Manufacture des Gobelins, the famous tapestry factory. It's not hard to
imagine how difficult it was to keep this entire project secret. One day, as the king was
complaining to his brother that the work at the Louvre was not progressing fast enough, the
latter answered: "His Majesty should appoint himself Superintendent of Finances for just
one year and he would have plenty to build with".
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The Palace of the Sun
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His most cherished desire was to turn the old Vaux manor house into a real architectural
masterpiece, and a peace site dedicated to the arts and humanities. He wanted to receive
his protégés there, among them La Fontaine, Molière, and Corneille, and friends like
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame de Sévigné, and above all, the king.
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The Oval Salon
(Click photo to enlarge)
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The problem was that it never occurred to Fouquet, blinded by his social success and true to
the family motto "Quo non ascendet" (How high won't he rise), that he was going too far. He
wanted a splendid gilded residence, decorated with tapestries, paintings, sculptures and statues
built to his glory. As was the fashion at the time, Le Brun borrowed from mythology and allegories
to celebrate the superintendent: Hercules symbolized his power, Apollo his mind and taste for the
arts, and the Muses his loyalty to the king. A sumptuous oval drawing room opened onto a huge and
magnificent French style garden. Even though it was his first creation, Le Nôtre accomplished real
feats, whether aesthetic or technical, to offer visitors the spectacle of long straight paths, all
in perspective, all framing wonderful flower beds and shrubs, adorned with delightful pools of water,
gigantic fountains and grottoes built out of the hillside. It was an absolute wonder and a real
masterpiece!
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The Squirrel, the Grass Snake, and the Sun King |
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In each room of this splendid monument, the family emblem appears in the guise of a small
lively and curious animal, the squirrel. However, in one of the studies, one can see
frightened little squirrels being chased by grass snakes. Fouquet was quick to recognize
in the snake, his enemy Colbert. Both men were extremely intelligent, but that was the
only trait they had in common. Colbert was everything Fouquet was not: a taciturn hard-working
fellow, often bitter and jealous. Unfortunately for him, Fouquet never properly assessed the
magnitude of his hatred and therefore of the threat that this minister represented, being as
loyal and close to the king as he was. Neither did he take heed of the perfectly clear warning
Louis XIV gave after the death of Mazarin, when he assembled his ministers. The king declared:
"Gentlemen, I brought you here to inform you that up until today I let the deceased cardinal run
my affairs of state. From now on, I will be governing myself". A naïve Fouquet didn't alter his
habits in any way, and this lack of perceptiveness would prove to be his downfall. He had no idea
that Colbert had inspected his "accounting errors" daily, and reported them to the king. Indeed,
the Superintendent had been making some unreported profits on the side, while the king was after
only one thing, absolute power.
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A Celebration to Mark His Loyalty
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Monsieur and Madame Fouquet received the king on the evening of August 17, 1661. Everything was ready
down to the smallest detail to welcome the 6,000 guests.
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Vaux le Vicomte at Night
(Click photo to enlarge)
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The visit began with a tour of the gardens. Delighted guests walked down the paths, marveling
at the fountains and waterfalls, and the grotto. Then they entered the castle through the huge
oval drawing-room to have a light meal. A raffle was held where all the guests were winners,
the women walking away with jewelry and the men, firearms. While Le Brun explained the meaning
of the painted allegories on the ceilings, Vatel was bustling about getting dinner ready. All
too happy to please, Fouquet didn't notice that the king found the rooms too big, the furniture
too fancy, the gold-woven tapestries too pretty, and the paintings too evocative of his host's
power. Indeed, behind the king's obliging smile lurked thoughts of bringing down Fouquet. Finally,
it was time for dinner. The ultimate in luxury and fashion, the feast took place in a space called
a "dining room". The most delicate dishes were served on beautiful silver and ruby dish sets,
although malicious gossip would later spread that they were of gold. The evening continued with
fireworks and a play by Molière and his company called "Les Fâcheux" (The Bores). At 2 o'clock
in the morning, the king gave the signal to leave. A spray of rockets burst from the castle's
central dome, lighting up the sky. Fouquet didn't forget a thing, and as required by tradition,
he offered his castle to the king, who against all expectations ... refused it!
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An Invitation to Travel... |
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The story of this magnificent castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte is forever tied to the life of a man
who was too rich, too smart, but also too self-confident. Fouquet was a master in the art of
living and the evening of August 17, 1661 was the dazzling demonstration of it, but it was
also the straw that broke the camel's back for a king who couldn't stand to be outshined by
anyone wealthier or more powerful than himself. Louis XIV wasn't content to simply deprive
his minister of his freedom, he also stole from him all of his most valuable belongings. A
few days after an arrest that had been planned long before the famous party, the black and
white paving of Vaux was sent over to the Louvre, while dozens of big chestnut trees were
uprooted and transplanted to the Trianon, and a mass of carps were fished out of the pools
to fill the Marly fountains. Everything that Louis XIV saw at Vaux that evening served as
inspiration for Versailles. He needed a bigger palace, even more sumptuous, and with that
in mind he hired Fouquet's artists, Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nôtre, and set aside for himself
the most precious objects, the tapestries, fabrics, furniture, vases, and 13,000 volumes
from the extraordinary collection that included 27,000 books.
How lucky we are that having escaped the destructive madness of the French Revolution, and
after many ups and downs and decades of neglect, the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte now belongs
to a family who has been relentlessly working to preserve this extraordinary heritage, ever
since the end of the 19th century. It is a pleasurable must to visit this castle in order to
understand the origin of the castle of Versailles. Please refer to this link:
http://www.vaux-le-vicomte.com/en/accueil.php to check the numerous festivals that take place
there. They allow the visitors to relive certain experiences of the castle's glorious past,
including the extraordinary and fatal evening of August 17. The next reenactment of Nicolas
Fouquet's famous celebration will take place on August 14 and 15, 2009.
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