Vaux Le Vicomte

Roman Bust

Vaux Le Vicomte

Ceiling bathroom

Nicolas Fouquet's bed

Madame Fouquet's chambers

Madame Fouquet's chambers

Bust of Architect Le Brun

Madame Fouquet's chambers

Heavenly gardens

If there was every an unlucky person in French history, Nicolas Fouquet could almost take the prize. When he celebrated the finishing of his splendid chateau on the outskirts of Paris, he invited Henri XIV and his subjects. The chateau had been designed by Louis Le Vau, the gardens had been beautifully laid out by Le Notre and the painter Charles Le Brun was called.

Here he gathered the rarest manuscripts, paintings, jewels and antiques in profusion, and above all surrounded himself with artists and authors. They say that in Vaux Le Vicomte the first dining room in the sense as we know it today was created.

In August 1661, Fouquet threw a party that rivalled the most magnificent parties in French history, at which Moliere's Les Fâcheux was produced for the first time. The splendour of the entertainment and Fouquet's beautiful Chateau sealed his fate. Jealous with rage, that he dared to have a home more beautiful than his, Henri XIV set about destroying Fouquet and building Versailles. Henri XIV called all the same three who designed Vaux Le Vicomte to make his castle the biggest and the best.

Three weeks after Fouquet's party the king took Fouquet to Nantes and had him arrested by a captain of musketeers. The trial lasted almost three years, and its violation of the forms of justice is still the subject of frequent monographs by members of the French bar. Public sympathy was strongly with Fouquet, and La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne and many others wrote on his behalf; but when Fouquet was sentenced to banishment, the king, disappointed, commuted the sentence to imprisonment for life. He was sent at the beginning of 1665 to the fortress of Pignerol, where, according to official records, he died 19 years later.

Fouquet wrote at Pignerol:

I loved my elegant chateau, the graceful arabesques of my parterre,

my sheets and falls of water. I took so much trouble to acquire it.

Now I will never see it again.

I'll never see my orange trees...