Vaux-le-Vicomte

The finance minister Fouquet has Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nôtre build a château and garden. At the inaugural fête the king becomes so envious that Fouquet soon ends up in prison.

The same artists then went on to build Versailles for Louis XIV.

Nicolas Fouquet was France’s finance minister in the time of Cardinal Mazarin and had amassed an enormous fortune, partly by lending money to the state and mixing his own and public funds. He was a generous patron of writers such as La Fontaine and Molière, and he wanted a country seat that displayed his position. He had bought the estate of Vaux as early as the 1640s. When Mazarin died in March 1661, the young Louis XIV declared that he would rule himself, without a chief minister. Fouquet hoped to take Mazarin’s place, but Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who wanted to become finance minister himself, had already begun gathering evidence against him for the king.

The château was built from 1656 in just a few years. Louis Le Vau designed the main building, surrounded by a moat, with an oval salon beneath a dome at its centre opening onto the garden. Charles Le Brun directed the paintings and interiors, and a weaving workshop nearby made tapestries for the château. André Le Nôtre laid out the garden, and three villages were demolished to make room for it. The garden is arranged along a long axis with parterres, pools, a canal and a grotto, and it relies on optical effects: distances look shorter than they are, and new views only open up as you walk. It was the first time the three artists had worked together.

On 17 August 1661 Fouquet entertained the king and the court with a fête featuring a dinner, fireworks and a new comedy by Molière. Three weeks later he was arrested in Nantes by the captain of the musketeers, d’Artagnan. After a long trial he was sentenced to banishment, but the king increased the sentence to life imprisonment, and Fouquet died in prison in 1680. Louis XIV took over his artists, orange trees and tapestries, and several of them were taken to Versailles. Vaux was restored in the late 19th century and is privately owned today. The Swedes, too, learned from Le Nôtre’s garden, and at Drottningholm the Tessins, father and son, laid out a Baroque garden in the same spirit.