There are two elements of major significance that contribute to Vaux le Vicomte‘s lasting fame. Vaux was the tragic setting for the downfall of Fouquet, a faithful minister who paid the price of life imprisonment, because of an embezzlement he did not commit, because of the jealousy of others and also because he went a little too far in bestowing lavish hospitality. For a period of ten years under Fouquet’s protection, Vaux was also a haven for leading French artists. Writers, poets, painters and sculptors gave the best of their talents to the glory of Vaux.
HISTORY OF THE FRENCH CASTLE
In the early seventeenth century, between the royal residences of Vincennes and Fontainebleau, a small castle stood at the confluence of two small rivers. The domain was called Vaux-le-Vicomte: it was then just a place on the map and its reputation had still to be made.
In 1641 a 26 year-old parliamentarian, Nicolas Fouquet, purchased the estate.
Fifteen years later the first stone of a unique masterpiece was laid; it was to be the finest château and garden in France.
This achievement was brought about through the collaboration of three men of genius whom Fouquet had chosen for the task: the architect Le Vau, the painter-decorator Le Brun and the landscape gardener Le Nôtre. The artistic and cultivated sensibility of their patron was a great stimulus to their talents.
They were not alone; the poet La Fontaine, Molière, playwright and actor, Madame de Sévigné, Pellisson and Scarron formed the circle around this great patron of literature and the arts.
Vaux-le-Vicomte was, moreover, the setting for one of the finest “fêtes” or celebrations, of the seventeenth century. It was lavish, refined, and dazzling to behold, but rich in hidden drama. The King had asked to visit, to throw Fouquet off the scent; secretly he had decided that Fouquet would die. Overcome with joy at the chance of parading Vaux-le-Vicomte before the sovereign whose faithful servant he remained, Fouquet assumed that he would take over the post of prime minister vacated by Cardinal Mazarin.
Two weeks later Fouquet was arrested. He was never to leave prison alive.
It may have been under threat of abandon or destruction, but Vaux-le-Vicomte has survived, thanks to the unfailing determination of three centuries of dedicated individuals.
Resplendent today as it was in former times, Vaux-le Vicomte stands as a symbol of the intelligence, taste and independence of its creator, Nicolas Fouquet.
- August 17, 1661
It was a beautiful summer’s day. Nicolas Fouquet and his wife officially opened Vaux-le-Vicomte in the presence of the King, who had expressed a desire to see the recent improvements, together with the Queen Mother and part of the Court.
After the heat of the day died down, the guests followed their Royal Highnesses into the gardens and marveled at all the lakes and fountains, at the lawns, terraces and flowers, at the awesome grottoes and cascades and at the peerless view. Returning from their walk, a meal was served in the château, then everyone hurried to the edge of the woods for the entertainment; “Les Facheux”, a ballet-comedy written and played by Molière. As the curtain went down, a fireworks display started over the grottoes, reflected in the mirror-like surface of the Great Canal, where a giant whale let off more fireworks. After the last explosion, the King headed back to the château when suddenly hundreds of rockets shot up from the dome of the building, forming an arch of flame in the night sky.
This unprecedented enchanting celebration, the model of royal “fêtes” to come, marked the high point of Fouquet’s career, as he himself had no reason to doubt. Only the King, the Queen Mother and Colbert knew that he was in fact only hours from his fall. For Louis XIV to witness such applause going to someone else, to visit a home more luxurious than his old palaces and a magical garden, were trials for his self-esteem that were hard to endure, and they fueled his desire to destroy the minister. Were it not for the Queen Mother’s advice he would have had Fouquet arrested on the spot.
Later Voltaire was to sum up the famous fête thus: “On 17 August, at six in the evening Fouquet was the King of France: at two in the morning he was nobody.”
- From 1705 to today
After Nicolas Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned for life, and his wife exiled, Vaux-le-Vicomte was place under sequestration. The King seized, confiscated, and occasionally purchased, 120 tapestries, the statues, all the orange trees and much more besides. Madame Fouquet had to wait patiently for ten years to recover her property and she retired there with her eldest son. After her husband’s death in 1680, her son died too. In 1705 she decided to put Vaux-le-Vicomte up for sale.
The greatest military leader in the kingdom, a Duke and French Peer, the Maréchal de Villars, became the new owner although he had never even set eyes on the place. The man who had risen in rank by means of his sword and won the war against Spain at Denial, grew fond of Vaux where, far from his military campaigns, he would relax with his charming wife.
In 1764 the Maréchal’s son sold the estate to the Duke of Praslin, whose descendants were to maintain the property for over a century, until, after a thirty year period of neglect, they put it up for sale.
On 6 July, 1875, a discerning bidder, Monsieur Alfred Sommier, acquired Vaux-le-Vicomte at a public auction. The château was empty, some of the outbuildings had fallen into ruin, and the famous gardens were totally overgrown. The huge task of restoration and refurbishment began. When Alfred Sommier died in 1908, the château and the gardens had recovered their original appearance. His son, Edme Sommier, and his daughter-in-law completed the task. Today, his direct descendants, Patrice and Cristina de Vogüé, are continuing work on the preservation of Vaux-le-Vicomte.
NICOLAS FOUQUET
Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680) who ordered the construction of Vaux-le-Vicomte was descended from a line of parliamentarians, that rich and enterprising body of men, upon whom the crown came increasingly to depend and whose services were rewarded with appointments to high office. Fouquet’s own father, François Fouquet, had been a trusted advisor to Cardinal Richelieu on maritime and commercial affairs.
In 1648 the Royal, that is to say the State treasury, collapsed. As a result, debts run up by the crown with private financiers, in anticipation of tax returns, were not to be honored. This brazen, ill-conceived decision, for which every financial secretary since the death of Henry IV was in part responsible, resulted in a withdrawal of investments, and the flight of private investors.
These troubled events lay behind Cardinal Mazarin’s appointment of Nicolas Fouquet as financial secretary in 1653, his mission to replenish the empty treasury. Fouquet had already risen rapidly, remaining true to his family device, the squirrel, and to his motto, “Quo non ascendet” (“What heights will he not scale?”).
Fouquet owed his success to his matchless intelligence, his daring and to his loyalty to the throne. To these gifts were added extreme generosity (not always free from self-interest), a lively, winning manner, and an overweening ambition to live amid luxury and refinement. He loved the arts, letters, poets, flowers, pictures, tapestries, books, statues, in short, beauty and pleasure in every form. He showered artists with gifts, commissions, and encouragement, and in this way, attracted a d
istinguished circle of men which included, among others, La Fontaine and Molière, Le Nôtre and Poussin, Puget, Le Brun and La Quintinie.
The minister’s objective in 1653 was to bring about a return of capital to fund Royal spending. In this he was successful, finding the ready money required each day to supply the needs of the administration and the war, to cover the cost of court entertainments, and to satisfy the colossal greed of Mazarin. Every loan he negotiated on the money markets, on behalf of the King, was guaranteed by his own personal fortune. As was the custom, indeed, as was the case with Mazarin himself, France’s foremost speculator and embezzler, a large part of the profits naturally fell to him.
Yet, this brilliant man, always an ardent and loyal supporter of the King and the Cardinal had too great a faith in his own charmed destiny and did not stop to consider the envy and suspicion his high rank and wealth inspired in the minds of his more ambitious detractors. Neither did he suspect the determination and diligence with which Louis XIV would pursue his aim to reign absolute, nor the insult his own intellectual independence and luxurious lifestyle represented to the proud young King.
His duties led him often to work in close association with Cardinal Mazarin’s private secretary, Colbert, a descendant of a dynasty of prominent merchant bankers, accumulating considerable profits of his own on the business undertakings of the crown.
On the death of Mazarin in 1661, Fouquet had no doubt that his own decisive contribution to the recovery of the kingdom’s finances would earn him the position of First Minister, as successor to the Cardinal. At the same time, Louis XIV, a young man of twenty-two, decided to abolish the post, and consequently to deprive Fouquet of it. At the same time also, Colbert decided to overthrow the financial secretary, to “dress himself in the minister’s robes”, and “raise up his own edifice on the ruins of the secretary’s”.
To achieve this end, and also perhaps to divert attention away from his own profiteering, Colbert laid the entire blame for France’s “financial disorders” at Fouquet’s door. Louis XIV may have welcomed this move, for, in destroying the Financial Secretary, there was reason to believe that the memory of Cardinal Mazarin, who had been his godfather, and an intimate friend of his mother, would be cleared of all suspicion.
With each passing day, Colbert sowed seeds of distrust in the young King’s mind, combining just reproach with calumny. The routine repairs on the ramparts of Fouquet’s property of Belle-isle-en-Mer were, for example, used by Colbert to persuade the King that the minister was at the head of an anti-Royalist plot.
In spite of the many warnings Fouquet received from his friends, he did nothing to reduce either the luxury of his life-style or the audacity of his financial scheming. These Colbert constantly denounced to the king as obstacles to the salutary management of Royal funds.
It was May 1661 and the King’s mind was made up. The Financial Secretary was to be thrown into prison as soon as he had supplied the treasury with the money he had promised, and sold off his duties as Attorney General at the Parliament of Paris which removed him from all but the jurisdiction of his peers. To throw his future victim off the scent, Louis XIV expressed a desire to return to Vaux to admire the latest improvements of which the whole court spoke with praise.
It was at Vaux then, against the background of France’s most beautiful château, that Fouquet gave an incomparable “fête” in honor of his King on 17 August 1661. Guests were enchanted by the promenade, dinner, theatricals and fireworks. The extravagance of these entertainments has often been understood – mistakenly- to have been the chief cause of Fouquet’s downfall. Voltaire himself was to add to the myth writing; “On 17 August at 6 in the evening, Fouquet was King of France; at 2 in the morning, he was nobody.”
Three weeks later, on 1O September, at Nantes, d’Artagnan, captain of the King’s musketeers, arrested Fouquet on the orders of Louis XIV and brought him before a specially convened emergency court.
Despite the pressure brought to bear upon the magistrates by the King – “the court performs arrests, not services!” was the righteous retort of Fouquet’s judge, d’Ormesson – the trial, falsified in part by Colbert, dragged on for more than three years, and turned gradually to the advantage of the accused. The King was counting on the death penalty, but the majority of the judges were for banishing Fouquet. This was tantamount to an acquittal, for Fouquet would have found freedom beyond the confines of the kingdom.
For the first and last time in French history, the head of state, in whose hands lies the power to pardon an offender, overruled the court’s decision, not to lighten the sentence, but to increase it. Louis XIV sentenced his former minister to life-imprisonment. By this denial of justice, he ensured order within France for half a century to come, and at the same time placed under lock and key certain sensitive state secrets to which he suspected Fouquet was privy. This theory has led a number of authors, among them Alexandre Dumas in “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” to link the fate of Fouquet with that of the man in the iron mask.
Fouquet was dispatched to Pignerol, a small fortified position in the Alps of Savoie, dominated by the tower of the fortress in which he was to be imprisoned under close surveillance until his death on 23 March, 1680.
The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon, written sixty years later, contain the following epitaph, inspired by the contrasts in the life of one who, “after eight years as Financial Secretary, paid for Mazarin’s stolen millions, the jealousy of Tellier and Colbert, and a touch too much gaiety and magnificence, with nineteen years of imprisonment.” Of Fouquet’s brilliant but short-lived career, there remains Vaux-le-Vicomte.
THE GARDEN
The gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte sweep along a grand perspective, of almost a mile and a half (3km). This new style in landscaping testifies to FOUQUET and LE NOTRE‘s love of innovation.
Creating a setting for the château and outbuildings out of a wild area of around 100 acres (40 hectares), LE NOTRE and LE VAU created for the first and only time in the seventeenth century, a perfect harmony between architecture and its environment.
The vast area, Le Nôtre‘s first masterpiece, is divided up into a sequence of terraces, forming an orderly composition of broderies of box based on motifs from Turkish carpets, bordered flower beds, shrubberies, grottos, lawns, lakes and fountains. If no other garden of the period were to have survived, the Vaux gardens would suffice to illustrate the principles of landscape gardening in the age of elegance.
Set within a huge green space which, from the entrance gate to the furthest statue of Hercules, extends in length to around 5000 feet (1500 meters) and to a sixth of this in width, the château dominates from whatever distance it is seen. Such a “reigning” position over such a large area symbolizes the power of the master of the house. The remarkable use of laws of perspective and optical illusion, also gives the observer the pleasant sensation of being able to ’embrace’ the gardens at a glance. This is for the most part, however, an illusion deliberately and skillfully maintained by LE NÔTRE. Thus the grottos which appear to be just a few minutes walk from the château, rising from the edge of the square lake, recede as they are approached. A few more steps and suddenly the strip of lig
ht of the Grand Canal appears from a valley which until now has been invisible, and reality is revealed to the mystified onlooker. The grottos are, in fact, over six hundred feet (200 meters) away on the other side of the canal.
Framing the thoughtfully-planned gardens are deciduous woods, where other enchantments lie in wait for a walk in the leafy shade.
Electric cars are available to enable further exploration of a natural environment which LE NÔTRE transformed into a great work of art.
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS
Castle : Castle entirerly furnished. Visits of the state apartments and private cabinets, the dining room on the main floor, the bedrooms and private apartments on the first floor, and the kitchens and cellars in the basement.
Optional visit the frame and the roof and panoramic vue from the top of the dome.
French style gardens : Created by André le Nôtre, gardener-designer.
Horse driven carriages museum : A unique and private collection of 18th and 19th century carriages.
The André le Nôtre exhibition : In the vaulted cellars of the château, this exhibition gives visitors the illusion of strolling along the paths of the garden: cabinets of greenery, embroidered flowerbeds refreshed by the sound of jets of water, interactive model (not accessible to school groups).
- Access
From Paris:
By car : 55 km by road, 45 minutes.
Take the A6 or A4 and follow direction A5 (Troyes). Exit à t the first toll of the A5 and then follow the Vaux le Vicomte signs.
On GPS, enter first the city of Maincy and then find Vaux le Vicomte.
By train: from Gare de Lyon in Paris : 25 minutes to the station of Melun,
[New : Chateaubus shuttle]. With the RER D from Paris (Le Chatelet) to Melun station. From Melun station to the chateau : 6 km by taxi or with the Chateaubus shuttle.
Shuttle Chateaubus Melun station- Vaux le Vicomte:
Chateaubus shuttle Melun station – Vaux le Vicomte, saturdays, sundays and national holidays from april to october 2008. No Chateaubus shuttles during Christmas holidays but see below for ParisVision shuttles.
One way ticket: 3,5 € per person or 7 € round trip*.
Please Click here for the schedules.
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