*To sighs, to suffering, / to torments, to chagrin, / return o my heart...
"Nicolas Fouquet had all that was needful to that end," sighed Abbot Melani. "He was the most splendid patron of the arts, the most grandiose, the most tolerant and the most generous, the most gifted in the art of living and making politics. But he was ensnared in the web of avid, jealous, proud, intriguing and dissimulating enemies."
Fouquet came of a wealthy family from Nantes, which had already a century before made a well-merited fortune trading with the Antilles. He was entrusted to the Jesuit Fathers, who found in him a superior intelligence and exceptional charisma: the followers of the great Ignatius made of him a nobly political spirit, able to weigh up every opportunity, to turn all situations to his advantage and to persuade his every interlocutor. At the age of sixteen, he was already a counsellor at the Parlement of Metz, and at twenty, he became a member of the prestigious corps of the
maitres des requetes,
the public servants who administer justice, finance and the military.
In the meanwhile, Cardinal Richelieu had died and Cardinal Mazarin had ascended: Fouquet, being a protege of the former, passed without difficulty into the service of the latter. This was also because when the Fronde, the famous revolt of the nobility against the Crown, had broken out, Fouquet had defended the young King Louis well and had organised his return to Paris, after the troubles had compelled the Sovereign and his family to leave the city. He had shown himself to be an excellent servant of His Eminence the Cardinal, most faithful to the King and a man of daring. Once the tumult was over, at the age of thirty-five, he purchased the charge of Procurator- General of the Parlement of Paris, and in 1653 he was finally appointed Superintendent of Finances.
"But these facts," ventured Abbot Melani, "are merely the gilded frame of all his noble, just and eternal deeds."
His house was open to men of letters and artists and to business men; both in Paris and in the country, all awaited the precious moments which he stole from the duties of state to gratify those who had talent in poetry, in music and in the other arts.
It was no accident that Fouquet was the first to have understood and loved the great La Fontaine. The poet's scintillating talent was more than worthy of the rich pension which the Superintendent bestowed on him from the very dawning of their acquaintance. And to ensure that his friend's delicate soul should suffer no oppression, he asked him to repay his debt by periodic instalments, but in verse. Moliere himself was indebted to the Superintendent, but never would this be held against him, because the greater debt was moral. Even the good Corneille, now aged and no longer kissed by glory's ardent and capricious lips, was, at this the most difficult moment of his life, gratified materially, and thus saved from the coils of melancholy.
But the noble nuptials of the Superintendent with letters and with poesy were not exhausted in a mere sequence of presents and patronage, however long the catalogue of his munificence. The Superintendent did not stop short at material assistance. He read works still in gestation, he proffered advice and encouragement, he corrected, admonished, criticised where necessary, and praised where praise was opportune. And he gave inspiration: not only in words but through his noble presence. The good heart which shone forth from the Superintendent's countenance instilled courage, comfort and confidence: those great childlike cerulean eyes, the long nose, retrousse at the tip, the wide fleshy mouth and the dimples which creased his cheeks when he smiled his open smile.
Early in life, architecture, painting and sculpture had knocked at the door of Nicolas Fouquet's soul. Here, however, warned the abbot, a sorrowful chapter opens.
In the country, near Melun, there stands a chateau, a jewel of architecture, marvel among marvels, which Fouquet had built with incomparable taste and executed by artists whom he himself had discovered: the architect Le Vau, the gardener Le Notre, the painter Le Brun, recalled from Rome, the sculptor Puget, and so many others whom the King was soon to take into his own service, making them the foremost names in French art.
"Vaux, the castle of illusions," moaned Atto, "an immense affront in stone: the decor of a glory that lasted a single summer's night, that of the 17th of August, 1661. At six of the clock in the afternoon, Fouquet was the real King of France, at two the next morning, he was nothing."
On that 17th of August, the Superintendent, who had recently inaugurated his chateau, organised a day of festivities in honour of the King. He wished to please and delight him. He did this with his usual gaiety and munificence, but alas for him, without having understood the Sovereign's warped character. He had delivered to Vaux, for the still incomplete salons, day-beds decked in brocade with gold braided trimmings, tapestries, rare furniture, silverware, crystal chandeliers. Through the streets of Melun came a procession of treasures from a hundred museums and a thousand antiquaries: carpets from Persia and from Turkey, Cordovan leather wall coverings, porcelains sent from Japan by the Jesuits, lacquers imported from China via Holland, thanks to the privileged route which the Superintendent had created for the importation of rare merchandise from the Orient; and then, the paintings which Poussin had discovered in Rome and sent to him through his brother, the Abbe Fouquet. All the artists and poets who were his friends were recruited, including Moliere and La Fontaine.
"In every salon, from that of Madame de Sevigne to that of Madame de la Fayette, the Chateau of Vaux was the one subject of conversation," continued Melani, lost now in memories of those days. "The entrance to the chateau welcomed the visitor with the austere tracery of its wrought-iron grille and the eight busts of deities who seemed to hover on either side. Then came the immense outer courtyard, the
cour d'honneur,
linked to the dependencies by a series of bronze pilasters. And, in the three round arches of the imposing entrance portal, the climbing squirrel, Fouquet's emblem."
"A squirrel?"
"In Breton, the Superintendent's native dialect, the word
fouquet
means a squirrel. And my friend Nicolas resembled the little creature in complexion and temperament: industrious, moving suddenly and rapidly, nervous in body, with a playful, attractive gaze. Under his coat of arms, the motto: '
Quo non ascendant?'
—or 'How high shall I not climb?'—which referred to the squirrel's passion for reaching ever-greater heights. By this, I mean of course, heights of generosity: Fouquet loved power as a little boy might. His was the simplicity of one who never takes himself too seriously."
Around the chateau, continued the abbot, spread the splendid gardens of Le Notre: "Velvet lawns and flowers from Genoa, where the begonia borders had the regularity of hexameters. Yews so clipped as to form cones, box bushes fashioned to resemble braziers, and then the great cascade and the lake of Neptune, leading to the grottoes; and, behind these, the park, with those celebrated fountains which so astonished Mazarin. All was ready to receive the young Louis XIV"
The King and the Queen Mother had left the Palace of Fontainebleau in the afternoon. At six, they arrived at Vaux with their retinue. Only Queen Maria Teresa, who was carrying the first fruit of her husband's love, was not among the guests. Manifesting indifference, the royal party passed between the ranks of guards and musketeers with their swelling chests and then through the busy swarms of pages and valets bearing gold chargers overburdened with the most ornate victuals, adjusting triumphs of exotic flowers, dragging cases of wine, arranging chairs around enormous damasked tables on which the candlesticks, the services and the cutlery were of gold and silver, the cornucopias full of fruit and vegetables, and the drinking glasses of the finest crystal, also ornamented in gold: all these things combined to make a splendid, stupefying, inimitable, irritating display.
"It was then that the pendulum of fate began to swing back," commented Abbot Melani, "and the reversal was as sudden as it was violent."
The young King Louis disliked the almost insolent ostentation of the fete. The heat and the flies, which were as anxious as the guests to take part in the celebrations, enervated both the Sovereign and his retinue, who were constrained by the conventions to make a punishing tour of the gardens of Vaux. Roasted by the sun, throats hemmed in by tight lace collars and lawn cravats pulled through the sixth buttonhole of their justaucorps, they were dying to be rid of their breeches and periwigs. It was with infinite relief that they saluted the cool of evening and at last sat down to dine.
"And how was the dinner?" I asked, my appetite whetted, imagining that the cuisine must have been on the same level as the house and the ceremony.
"The King did not like it," said the abbot gloomily.
Above all, the young King did not like the array of thirty-six dozen solid gold dishes and the five hundred dozen silver ones on the tables. He did not like the fact that so very many guests had been invited, hundreds and hundreds of them, or that the file of carriages and pages and little coaches waiting outside the chateau should be so long and so gay, almost a second fete. He did not like the whispered comment of a courtier, uttered as though it were some gossip which he was entitled to share, to the effect that the festivities had cost more than twenty thousand
livres.
The King did not like the music which accompanied the banquet— cymbals and trumpets with the entrees, followed by violins—nor did he like the enormous sugar basin which was placed in front of him, and which hampered his movements.
He did not like being received by one who, although not a crowned head, was demonstrating that he was more generous, more rich in fantasy, more skilled in astounding his guests and at same time winning them over, uniting hospitality and magnificence; and thus more splendid. In a word: more royal.
After the miseries of the meal, Louis must needs endure those of the open-air spectacle which followed. While the banquet dragged on, Moliere in his turn, pacing nervously back and forth in the shelter of the great tents, cursed the Superintendent:
Les Facheux
, the comedy which he had prepared for the occasion, should have begun two hours earlier. Now the daylight was fading. In the end it was under the dark blue and green shield of the setting sun's last rays that he came on stage, while in the east the first stars dotted the heavens. There now followed yet another marvel: on the proscenium, there appeared a great clam, whose valves opened; whence a dancer, the sweetest of naiads, arose; and it was then as though all Nature spoke, and the surrounding trees and statues, moved by the subtlest of divine forces, gathered around the nymph to intone with her the sweetest of hymns: the eulogy of the King with which the comedy opened:
Pour voir sur ces beaux lieux le plus grand roi du monde Mortels, je viens a vous de ma grotte profonde...*
At the end of the sublime spectacle came the fireworks prepared by that Italian, Torelli, who, thanks to the magic of those explosions and colours which he alone knew how to stir with such consummate skill in the black, empty cauldron of heaven, was known in Paris as the Great Wizard.
At two o'clock in the morning, or perhaps even later, the King signalled with a nod that the time had come to take his leave. Fouquet was dumbfounded to see that his visage was dark with anger; perhaps he understood, and he grew pale. He approached and, on bended knee, with a sweeping gesture of the hand, publicly offered him Vaux as a gift.
*To behold in this fine place the greatest King in the world, / Mortals, I come to you from my deep cavern...
Young Louis did not respond. He climbed into his carriage and cast a last glance at the chateau outlined in the dark: it was perhaps then (some swear to this) that there passed before his eyes an image from the Fronde, a troubled afternoon from his childhood, an image of which he no longer knew whether it was his own memory or what others had told him; an uncertain reminiscence of that night when, with the Queen Mother Anne and Cardinal Mazarin, he had escaped from Paris by stealth, his ears deafened by detonations and the clamour of the crowd, and in his nostrils, the sickening scent of blood mingling with the stink of the plebeians, ashamed to be King and despairing of ever returning to the city, his city. Or perhaps the King (some swear this, too) beheld the proud, arrogant jets of the fountains of Vaux, whose plashing he could still hear even as his carriage drove away, and suddenly realised that there was not a drop of water at Versailles.
"And then what happened?" I asked with a small voice, moved and troubled by the abbot's narration.
A few weeks passed, and the noose swiftly tightened around the Superintendent's neck. The King feigned the need to visit Nantes in order to make Brittany feel the weight of his authority and to impose those tributes which the Bretons had been slow to pay into the coffers of the realm. The Superintendent followed him without excessive anxiety, since Nantes was his own native city and many of his friends dwelled there.
Before he left, however, some began to suggest that he should cast an eye over his shoulder; his most faithful friends warned discreetly that a plot was being hatched against him. The Superintendent requested an audience with the King and opened his heart to him: he begged his pardon if the Treasury was in difficulties, but he had until a few months earlier been at Mazarin's orders, as Louis well knew. The King was perfectly understanding and treated him with the utmost consideration, asking his advice on even the most insignificant matters and following his indications without batting an eyelid.