Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  Fouquet gathered around his table, for which the food was prepared by the renowned chef Vatel, France’s most celebrated artists and authors, such as Jean de La Fontaine, Paul Scarron, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné. And he was attracted not merely by fame but by talent. The reputation of playwright Pierre Corneille, who did not adhere to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action that the Academy considered indispensable in the Golden Age, was so low in 1659 that, unable to bear the prospect of more vicious attacks by French literary critics, he had not written a play in eight years, and, impoverished and depressed, was determined never to write again. Fouquet, however, recognized Corneille’s greatness and gave him both a pension and praise—as well as an idea for a new play. He kept encouraging Corneille until he began writing again. Watching Fouquet provide artists with pensions, private rooms in his château, meals prepared by a great chef, and scintillating conversation, an admirer wrote that he had the “true fiber of humanity: he could touch its spring in others and they would answer to him.” The artists themselves adored him. For example, from 1654 on, he gave the absentminded La Fontaine a thousand livres a year, the condition being that every three months he was to present Fouquet with a new poem. Books were dedicated to Fouquet, and he appeared as a character in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s novel Clélie, in which he is described as a “man who makes nothing but what is great, and whose mind by its vast range cannot conceive little designs.”

  All of Nicolas Fouquet’s love for the arts was poured into Vaux-le-Vicomte.

  At the time he bought the property, it held only a tiny fortress and three little villages. The first thing he did was raze them. The second was to plant a forest where they had stood. In the 17th century a forest signified more than trees to a man intent on rising above his station. Like the feudal tower, which was a symbol of feudal authority, the forest was a symbol of a feudal lord’s rights, a place where he could hunt and cut down trees for firewood, while the peasantry was forbidden to do so. And Fouquet—whose motto was “How high shall I not climb?”—was very intent upon rising above his station. Then he instructed Le Nôtre to design a park so that it seemed to be carved out of the forest.

  To build Vaux he brought together a team of relatively unknown young men whose work had caught his keen eye: the architect Louis Le Vau; the painter Charles Le Brun; and Gilles Guérin and Thibault Poissant for sculpture. Le Brun had a talent for organizing groups of artists. He suggested to Fouquet that André Le Nôtre, with whom he had developed a friendship while an apprentice in the workshop of Simon Vouet, join the team to design the gardens, and Fouquet agreed. Fouquet gave Le Brun the opportunity to deploy his full artistic talents in the decoration of his château, and Le Brun never again painted as sensuously and movingly as he did at Vaux. His work at Versailles is generally agreed to lack the vitality it has here. The allegorical paintings at Vaux are by his own brush; he provided the designs for the garden sculptures and for the decorative sculptures in the château; and he drew the cartoons for tapestries, which were manufactured at Maincy, where a factory was created to supply Fouquet’s needs. Eighteen thousand men worked on building Vaux and its gardens.

  Fouquet commissioned and oversaw every detail of construction. You know this, for example, when you look at Le Nôtre’s planned landscape designs, now hanging on a wall in the château, and then see Fouquet’s alterations in the actual gardens. He filled Vaux’s library with 38,544 manuscripts, many of them very rare. Ancient Greek marble statues, 17th-century busts of Socrates and Seneca, tables of porphyry, rare mosaics, a copy of the Talmud, several old copies of the Bible, and other treasures filled its rooms.

  When the château was completed, he invited the king and his entire court—all the hundreds of courtiers—to a great fête in the king’s honor, to take place at Vaux on August 17, 1661. Louis accepted the invitation, but he had already become suspicious of the methods by which his superintendent of finances had obtained the funds to build Vaux. He was beginning to wonder how high Fouquet’s ultimate ambitions might reach, and, in fact, had begun subtly to undermine the sources of his power.

  Louis’s suspicions had been awakened a few months before, when, on March 9, 1661, the dying Mazarin had warned the 22-year-old king about Fouquet’s financial manipulations and had recommended another young minister, Colbert, as a safeguard against them.

  Colbert found six million livres Mazarin had squirreled away in various places in the Château of Vincennes (that was in addition to the fortune, estimated to be as high as forty million livres, he left his nieces) and shrewdly turned the money over to Louis. From that moment, Louis trusted him implicitly; he would write in his memoirs, “To keep an eye on Fouquet, I associated with him Colbert...in whom I had all possible confidence, for I knew his intelligence and application and honesty.” Louis appointed Colbert as Fouquet’s “assistant,” which meant that every afternoon Fouquet went over accounts with Louis, and every evening Colbert would show Louis how Fouquet had falsified those accounts.

  Colbert began to intrigue against Fouquet—and Fouquet, supremely overconfident, didn’t bother to defend himself at first. In the meantime, he had purchased his own island—Belle-Ile-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany—and begun repairing the existing ramparts to create a fortress there. And under the pretext of nurturing an infant sardine industry, he was in effect creating his own fleet by purchasing armed vessels from Holland, which he added to his whaling fleet.

  Nothing is so dangerous as weakness, of whatever kind it may be. To command others, one must rise above them; and after having heard all sides, one must decide on what must be done with an open mind, always keeping in view to order or execute nothing unworthy of oneself, of the character one bears, or of the grandeur of the State....

  —Louis XIV

  But Louis XIV, although certain Fouquet was guilty of embezzlement, did not yet feel in a position to arrest his financial minister. He was too powerful and too popular. His popularity extended from the Parliament of Paris, where his position as procureur général protected him from investigation, to the coterie of artists he subsidized, and most important, to Louis’s own mother, Anne of Austria, whom Fouquet had often supplied with funds and who was very fond of him.

  But Anne’s fondness was about to be destroyed—by her old friend the Duchess of Chevreuse. When, on June 27, 1661, the queen mother visited the duchess at Dampierre, Colbert was there; his daughter was about to marry the duchess’s son, bringing with her a large dowry, and Colbert and the duchess had become allies. They told Anne how Fouquet was extending his power, buying the support of members of the Parliament and promoting his friends and relatives by means of public money. By the time the queen mother completed her visit to Dampierre, her mind was so poisoned she was ready to accept Fouquet’s arrest.

  When he learned from spies of Colbert’s success in turning the queen mother against him, Fouquet tried to persuade Louis’s mistress, Louise de La Vallière, to intercede with the king on his behalf, using a technique that had proved successful with other women. As the keen-eyed Athénaïs de Montespan, whom Louise had brought to court to amuse the king with her charming banter, reported:

  M. Fouquet has one great defect: he took it into his head that every woman is devoid of willpower and of resistance if only one dazzles her eyes with gold. Another prejudice of his was to believe, as an article of faith, that, if possessed of gold and jewels, the most ordinary of men can inspire affection.

  Making this two-fold error his starting point as a principle that was incontestable, he was wont to look upon every beautiful woman who happened to appear on the horizon as his property acquired in advance.

  This time, however, the technique failed, although the offer—twenty thousand pistoles, if Louise would speak highly of Fouquet to the king—was certainly generous. Madame de Montespan reported:

  To his extreme astonishment, this young beauty declined to understand such language. Couched in other terms, he renewed his suit, yet appare
ntly was no whit less obscure than on the first occasion. Such a scandal as this well-nigh put him to the blush, and he was obliged to admit that this modest maiden wither affected to be, or really was, utterly extraordinary.

  Finally, according to Louis’s biographer, Vincent Cronin, Louise replied, “with scorn in her voice,” that “not for a quarter of a million pistoles would she commit such an indiscretion,” and she complained to Louis that Fouquet had insulted her.

  Fouquet also underestimated the young king. Although Louis XIV had told Fouquet at Mazarin’s death that he would be his own chief minister, (“Il est temps que je les gouverne moi-même”), Fouquet, knowing Louis’s passion for women, hunting, and the ballet—Louis was an enthusiastic and graceful dancer—had not taken him seriously, had not taken the measure of the man with whom he was dealing. Louis, however, understood Fouquet all too well. The king now tricked him into selling the position of procureur général, which protected him from investigation, by hinting that he would appoint Fouquet to Mazarin’s old post as head of government if only a conflict of interest between his position with the Parliament and his potential position as minister could be resolved. When he learned that Fouquet had decided to sell, Louis informed Colbert, “He is digging his own grave.”

  The great fête at Vaux was the last straw.

  Fouquet’s building of a grand château at Vaux was not unusual, nor was his invitation to the king. Both Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin had built sumptuous châteaux while they were ministers to the king. René de Longueil had built Maisons-Laffitte while he was superintendent of finances, and had entertained Louis when the king hunted in the forests of St-Germain-en-Laye. And Colbert, of course, built Sceaux. But this party went beyond the others.

  Historians say it was equaled by only one or two celebrations over the entire history of France. Meals were served on solid gold plates; there were ballets, concerts, and a play written by Molière for the occasion. Molière dressed in everyday clothes and greeted the assembled courtiers opposite the cascade, saying he had no actors and no time to prepare the entertainment that was expected, unless some unforeseen help was forthcoming. A shell thereupon opened to reveal a naiad and actors dressed as statues came to life, and Les Fâcheux was presented.

  Since Athénaïs de Montespan was there, I will let her speak:

  On reaching Vaux-le-Vicomte, how great and general was our amazement! It was not the well-appointed residence of a minister, it was not a human habitation that presented itself to our view—it was a veritable fairy palace. All in this brilliant dwelling was stamped with the mark of opulence and of exquisite taste in art. Marbles, balustrades, vast staircases, columns, statues, groups, bas-reliefs, vases, and pictures were scattered here and there in rich profusion, besides cascades and fountains innumerable. The large salon, octagonal in shape, had a high vaulted ceiling, and its flooring of mosaic looked like a rich carpet embellished with birds, butterflies, arabesques, fruits and flowers.

  On either side of the main edifice, and somewhat in the rear, the architect had placed smaller buildings, yet all of them ornamented in the same sumptuous fashion; and these served to throw the château itself into relief. In these adjoining pavilions there were baths, a theater, a paume ground [tennis court], swings, a chapel, billiard rooms, and other salons.

  One noticed magnificent gilt roulette tables and sedan chairs of the very best make. There were elegant stalls at which trinkets were distributed to the guests—notebooks, pocket mirrors, gloves, knives, scissors, purses, fans, sweet-meats, scents, pastilles, and perfumes of all kinds.

  But to Louis, aware by this time of Fouquet’s financial manipulations, such extravagance was proof of how much his minister had stolen from him. As Athénaïs put it:

  It was as if some evil fairy had prompted the imprudent minister to act in this way, who, eager and impatient for his own ruin, had summoned the King to witness his appalling systems of plunder in its entirely, and had invited chastisement.

  And finally there was the incident of the forest. The king liked the view from the balcony of his apartment at Vaux—except for one large, rather barren-looking clearing. He mentioned this to his host, who, while the king slept, put hundreds of peasants to work. When Louis awoke the next morning and stepped out on the balcony, the clearing was completely filled with full-grown trees. Recounted Athénaïs:

  Fouquet, with airy presumption, expected thanks and praise. This, however, was what he had to hear: “I am shocked at such expense!”

  Louis, infuriated, wanted to arrest Fouquet on the spot, but his mother persuaded him that this would be unseemly behavior for a guest. So he waited for nineteen days, and then, as Fouquet left the royal presence, had him arrested by d’Artagnan, the most trusted of the royal musketeers.

  The trial that followed lasted three years. The artists Fouquet had supported now supported him and, as Madame de Sévigné wrote to him, “count chances on their fingers, melt with pity, with apprehension, hoping, hating, admiring; some of us are sad, some of us are overwhelmed. In short, my dear sir, the state in which we live is an extraordinary one, but the resignation and courage of our dear sufferer are almost more than human.” It was what she wrote on November 20, after attending his trial, that made me cry:

  As he was returning by the arsenal on foot for exercise, M. Fouquet asked who were those workmen he perceived. He was told that they were people altering the basin of a fountain. He went up to them and gave his advice; and then turning to d’Artagnan [said] “Do you wonder that I should interfere? I was formerly considered clever at these sorts of things.”

  While most of the judges were in favor of merely exiling Fouquet from France, the king intervened and increased the sentence from exile to life imprisonment. Fouquet, who loved beauty and women, would spend the rest of his life under heavy guard in a cold, damp dungeon in the Pignerol fortress in the Alps.

  (Various theories arose to explain the harshness of Fouquet’s sentence. One suggested a link to the Man in the Iron Mask, Louis’s supposed twin brother and a threat to his throne; this explanation provided Alexandre Dumas with the story line for Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Those preferring a soap opera version saw Fouquet’s imprisonment as the result of his attempted seduction of Louise de La Vallière, the king’s mistress. Others claimed that Louis, who had been forced to melt his silver to pay for his wars, became furious when served a sumptuous supper on gold plates.)

  Louis XIV arrested Fouquet three weeks after seeing Vaux-le-Vicomte, but he entertained no animosity toward the artists who had created it. Instead, the entire team assembled by Fouquet to create Vaux (along with several hundred of Fouquet’s orange trees) were brought to Versailles to create the great palace that Louis XIV had envisioned while standing on the escarpment at St-Germain-en-Laye.

  Bob and I have been to Vaux-le-Vicomte a number of times. It is not far from Orly, and whenever we rent a car at the airport, we try to stop at Vaux before making our way south.

  Only minutes outside Paris I am winging down a country road. There are crisp blue skies and a wisp of wood smoke in the air, but the once-royal forests are still deep emerald and the fields of Ile-de-France still glow golden in the September sun. The historical core of the country, Ile-de-France encircles Paris in a pastoral halo, threaded with rivers and studded with ancient cities, new towns, and an unparalleled wealth of cathedrals, churches, and châteaux—Versailles, Fontainebleau, Vaux-le-Vicomte, St-Denis, St-Germain-en-Laye, Malmaison—magic names all, and all within easy reach.

  As I cross the plain south of Paris, blond as the renowned Brie cheese they produce, I am retracing the route of medieval traders as they carried their wares to market in the 12th-century citadel of Provins. Granted safe conduct by the powerful counts of Champagne, they came by the thousands, with dancing bears and musicians, furs and gold, honey and oils, wines and spices, silks and embroideries from Provence, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic, and the Orient.

  —Jean Bond Rafferty, “The Magical Secrets
of Paris-Ile-de-France,” France Discovery Guide

  We have visited Vaux both on days when the fountains are in operation and on days when they are not. I highly advise making sure they are on before visiting the gardens. On our last day in France, we decided to visit Louis XIV in Paris. We began at the Louvre, which had been his palace for the first 28 years of his reign, the years he was transforming France into the most powerful and civilized country in Europe. There, in the Louis XIV Galleries, we could see the furniture he used, the Savonnerie carpets he walked on, the Gobelin tapestries and Le Brun paintings that hung on his walls, and the sculptures by Girardon and Coysevox he chose to have near him. We entered the palace grounds as Louis XIV would have wanted—through the pavilion he commissioned. He wanted the pavilion to possess a grand and impressive façade, which would tell the world they were entering the palace of a great king. Voltaire felt he had succeeded, calling this façade “one of the most august monuments of architecture in the world,” adding that “no palace in Rome has an entrance comparable.” I had seen it before—the whole previous summer I had routinely passed through it on my way somewhere else. I confess, however, I hadn’t taken much notice of it. As I stood there looking at it, I realized that it reminded me of something, that its design echoed the style of the Maison Carrée, that perfect Roman temple which had left me totally unimpressed in Nîmes. While I now understood that I could never share Voltaire’s ecstatic reaction to the façade—the style is not to my taste—I was nonetheless impressed with the young king who oversaw its construction. The leading architect of the day, the 66-year-old Bernini, who had just completed Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, was commissioned to design this façade. Louis XIV, only 27 at the time, demonstrating those aesthetic qualities which set such uncompromising standards for the art of his age, rejected the revered old man’s designs. The Baroque pavilion Bernini envisioned would have been inconsistent both with the elegant architecture of Louis’s age and with the preexisting pavilions at the Louvre.