Travelers' Tales Paris (26 page)

The great things Fouquet did, however, were at least as much in his own behalf as in the king's. As superintendent of finances, he paid the government's bills partly by borrowing on his own credit, but in the process hopelessly intermingled the public purse with his own; he successfully kept the royal armies outfitted and provisioned and the royal coffers filled, but more successfully, and fraudulently, filled his own. His position as
procureur général
(attorney general) shielded him from investigation, as did Mazarin's favor. Fouquet, noted Louis's mistress Athénaïs de Montespan, was,

But eventually even Mazarin became alarmed at the extent to which Fouquet was diverting the nation's taxes. About to launch an inquiry into Fouquet's activities, however, the aging cardinal realized
that the investigation would reveal the immense gifts his protégé had made to
him
—and he let Fouquet off with a warning.

But Fouquet was much more than a financier. He was also a remarkable patron of the arts, a man of superb taste, possessing an uncanny ability to recognize and inspire great talent—in both young and old—in all the arts. He seems to have thought of himself as a 17th-century Maecenas, the ancient Roman patron of the arts who, like himself, was both an adviser to a great ruler (Maecenas to the emperor Augustus) and the most renowned literary patron of his day (among Maecenas's protégés were Horace and Virgil). Comparing the Age of Louis XIV to the Age of Augustus was not uncommon—and there are indeed similarities. It wasn't merely that Voltaire, writing less than a generation later, compared the Grand Siècle to the Augustan Age, or that, as a 20th-century historian of Louis's reign wrote, “Not since Augustus had any monarchy been so adorned with great writers, painters, sculptors, and architects.” The people who lived during France's Golden Age saw themselves as the embodiment of all that was to be admired in the ancient world. Louis XIV certainly saw himself as a modern Augustus, and so did artists of his age. In the statue of Louis by Girardon at Vaux, the king is dressed as a Roman emperor, as he is in the painting by Mignard, and the statue in the Venus Drawing Room and the carved medallion in the War Room at Versailles. Louis considered the wall of the Roman Theater of Orange, the one containing the statue of Augustus, “the finest wall in my kingdom.” When he tore down the medieval walls surrounding Paris, he built at the entrance to the city a series of triumphal arches, such as Augustus had built at the entrances to Roman cities.

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.

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:

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:

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: