Travelers' Tales Paris (27 page)

But to Louis, aware by this time of Fouquet's financial manipulations, such extravagance was proof of how much his minister had stolen from him. As Athénaïs put it:

And finally there was the incident of the forest. The king liked the view from the balcony of his apartment at Vaux—except for
one large, rather barren-looking clearing. He mentioned this to his host, who, while the king slept, put hundreds of peasants to work. When Louis awoke the next morning and stepped out on the balcony, the clearing was completely filled with full-grown trees. Recounted Athénaïs:

Louis, infuriated, wanted to arrest Fouquet on the spot, but his mother persuaded him that this would be unseemly behavior for a guest. So he waited for nineteen days, and then, as Fouquet left the royal presence, had him arrested by d'Artagnan, the most trusted of the royal musketeers.

The trial that followed lasted three years. The artists Fouquet had supported now supported him and, as Madame de Sévigné wrote to him, “count chances on their fingers, melt with pity, with apprehension, hoping, hating, admiring; some of us are sad, some of us are overwhelmed. In short, my dear sir, the state in which we live is an extraordinary one, but the resignation and courage of our dear sufferer are almost more than human.” It was what she wrote on November 20, after attending his trial, that made me cry:

While most of the judges were in favor of merely exiling Fouquet from France, the king intervened and increased the sentence from exile to life imprisonment. Fouquet, who loved beauty and women, would spend the rest of his life under heavy guard in a cold, damp dungeon in the Pignerol fortress in the Alps.

(Various theories arose to explain the harshness of Fouquet's
sentence. One suggested a link to the Man in the Iron Mask, Louis's supposed twin brother and a threat to his throne; this explanation provided Alexandre Dumas with the story line for
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne
. Those preferring a soap opera version saw Fouquet's imprisonment as the result of his attempted seduction of Louise de La Vallière, the king's mistress. Others claimed that Louis, who had been forced to melt his silver to pay for his wars, became furious when served a sumptuous supper on gold plates.)

Louis XIV arrested Fouquet three weeks after seeing Vaux-le-Vicomte, but he entertained no animosity toward the artists who had created it. Instead, the entire team assembled by Fouquet to create Vaux (along with several hundred of Fouquet's orange trees) were brought to Versailles to create the great palace that Louis XIV had envisioned while standing on the escarpment at St-Germain-en-Laye.

Bob and I have been to Vaux-le-Vicomte a number of times. It is not far from Orly, and whenever we rent a car at the airport, we try to stop at Vaux before making our way south.

We have visited Vaux both on days when the fountains are in operation and on days when they are not. I highly advise making
sure they are on before visiting the gardens. On our last day in France, we decided to visit Louis XIV in Paris. We began at the Louvre, which had been his palace for the first 28 years of his reign, the years he was transforming France into the most powerful and civilized country in Europe. There, in the Louis XIV Galleries, we could see the furniture he used, the Savonnerie carpets he walked on, the Gobelin tapestries and Le Brun paintings that hung on his walls, and the sculptures by Girardon and Coysevox he chose to have near him. We entered the palace grounds as Louis XIV would have wanted—through the pavilion he commissioned. He wanted the pavilion to possess a grand and impressive façade, which would tell the world they were entering the palace of a great king. Voltaire felt he had succeeded, calling this façade “one of the most august monuments of architecture in the world,” adding that “no palace in Rome has an entrance comparable.” I had seen it before—the whole previous summer I had routinely passed through it on my way somewhere else. I confess, however, I hadn't taken much notice of it. As I stood there looking at it, I realized that it reminded me of something, that its design echoed the style of the Maison Carrée, that perfect Roman temple which had left me totally unimpressed in Nîmes. While I now understood that I could never share Voltaire's ecstatic reaction to the façade—the style is not to my taste—I was nonetheless impressed with the young king who oversaw its construction. The leading architect of the day, the 66-year-old Bernini, who had just completed Saint Peter's Square in Rome, was commissioned to design this façade. Louis XIV, only 27 at the time, demonstrating those aesthetic qualities which set such uncompromising standards for the art of his age, rejected the revered old man's designs. The Baroque pavilion Bernini envisioned would have been inconsistent both with the elegant architecture of Louis's age and with the preexisting pavilions at the Louvre.

Once I was in the Cour Carrée, surrounded by the gleaming white stone and frilly Corinthian columns, the caryatides supporting the dome of the Clock Pavilion, the friezes of cherubs and garlands, it was not difficult to imagine being in the royal courtyard
of a palace. I was reminded of the places I had been and kings I had visited on my journey through France when I saw the initials carved in the stone of the four pavilions: the intertwined “H” and “D” of Henry II and his mistress Diane that I had seen at Chenonceau and Anet (initials that Catherine de' Medici, acting as regent after Henry's death, contended were an “H” and a reversed “C”); the solitary “H” of Henry III, Catherine's transvestite son, the last of the Valois line, whom I had visited at Blois; the “H D B” of Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon line, and his initial again, this time joined by the “G” of his favorite mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrées, whose children played at court with the dauphin, the future Louis XIII; and the “LA” for Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, whose union finally produced Louis XIV and the age I had just briefly visited.

Later that day we left the Louvre through the Court of Napoleon and found ourselves facing the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which Napoleon commissioned to commemorate his victories of 1805. It is a triple arch, like the Roman arch at Orange, topped with horses and a chariot, as that Roman arch once had been. Both arches, after their completion, underwent rededication. The four horses Napoleon placed on top were the four gilded bronze horses that his troops had removed from Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice after he conquered Italy. Those magnificent horses were returned toVenice after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. The reins of the horses now there are held by a Goddess symbolizing the restoration—which, after Napoleon's defeat, the arch was then intended to honor. The arch at Orange had originally commemorated the victories of Caesar's Second Legion but was later rededicated to the Emperor Tiberius's victory over a Gallic rebellion led by Sacrovir. Napoleon was dissatisfied with this tiny arch as soon as it was built, and commissioned the Arc de Triomphe to honor the glory of his Imperial Army. In the distance, we could see, as Napoleon never would, that grand and monumental arch atop the Étoile hill, and beyond it, La Défense, the symbol of modern Paris which I wished would go away.

From the Louvre we walked up the great mall to the Hôtel de
Invalides, the last group of buildings in Paris built during the reign of Louis XIV. Before reading Voltaire, I was unaware that Louis built this immense hospital and old-age home for his wounded veterans; I associated the Invalides with Napoleon, since it is the Emperor's magnificent tomb that dominates its domed church, and it is the Emperor's accomplishments that are carved in stone in the crypt encircling the magnificent red porphyry sarcophagus that sits upon a base of green granite. (Just as I had been unaware that the Place Vendôme—dominated by a statue of Napoleon atop a tall column made from 1,200 cannons he captured in one of his victories—had actually been built by Louis, and was once called “Place Louis Le Grand.”)

When we arrived at the Invalides, I remembered at once the helmeted windows in the Mansard roof, which reminded me of a battalion of knights, but was surprised to see prominently carved over the entrance gate a bas-relief equestrian figure of Louis XIV. There he was, standing between Prudence and Justice, but I had somehow missed him on previous visits. In my mind, I had associated Louis XIV with Versailles and Napoleon with the Invalides. I walked through the huge Roman arched entrance into the court-yard with its two tiers of arches marching around its sides, and was reminded of the Pont du Gard and of the arches marching through the wilderness of Languedoc that the Romans had built almost two thousand years before to bring water to the fountains of Nîmes. To me, those arches in the Invalides brought back the smell of wild rosemary and the taste of picnics, but to Louis they meant the glory and power of Rome.

After dinner that night, as we walked back to our apartment, we passed the Place de la Concorde. There, Paris was a collage of monuments to kings and emperors, lit against the sky, vying for posterity's attention. As we came to the Rond-Point, I turned and saw the freshly gilded and illuminated dome of the Invalides. Louis had commissioned the huge, soaring, majestic dome above its church to represent “the glory of my reign.” It seemed to float above Paris, a ghostly golden crown in a velvety blue-black sky, regal and majestic, a symbol of the Golden Age of France. I felt Louis was beckoning
me to remember the splendor and magnificence of his age, and I was reminded of all the kings before Louis who wore the royal crown.

Louis XIV had commissioned the Hôtel des Invalides for his old soldiers in 1670. Designed to accommodate 7,000 disabled veterans, it was altogether grander than anything the V.A. has ever come up with. Life within its walls was rigorously, indeed rather monastically, organized and revolved around church observances. What we visit today as two churches, the Eglise des Soldats and the Eglise du Dôme, was conceived as Siamese twins, sharing a common sanctuary and altar. The Eglise des Soldats was intended for the residents of the Hôtel des Invalides; the Eglise du Dôme was reserved for royal use. The first was based on a design by Libéral Bruant, overall architect of the Hôtel; it was elaborated and carried out by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The second was from the drawing board of Hardouin-Mansart—or, perhaps more precisely, that of his great-uncle, François Mansart, as Hardouin-Mansart seems to have lifted most of the hastily commissioned design from his uncle's plans for an unbuilt Bourbon chapel intended for St-Denis.