Chapter IV: Preface

In 1656, Foucquet was forty-one years of age. For five years he had been Attorney-General in the Paris Parliament, and for three Comptroller of Finance, having been the control of the Treasury at the troubles which had afflicted France during the minority of Louis XIV. He had successfully weathered a difficult period, and had acquired no little confidence in his genius and his guiding star. Now, in the prime of life, feeling securely established in office, he proceeded to order his life in accordance with the magnificence of his tastes. Ambitious, pleasure-loving, adoring all that was great and beautiful, sensitive to all that exalts or caresses the soul, he called upon the Arts to surround him with the symbols of glory and of pleasure. The miracles of Vaux were the outcome of this demand, which was first satisfied, then cruelly punished.

On the 2nd of August, 1656, in the presence of Le Vau, his architect, Foucquet signed the plans and estimates for this mansion of Vaux, which was to be built within four years, in a new and noble style. It was to be adorned with magnificent paintings, with statues and tapestries; it was to command a view over gardens, grottoes and bewitching ornamental waters; to abound in gold plate and gems and valuables of every kind. It was destined to receive, with a luxury hitherto unknown, the most powerful and the most beautiful alike, to welcome the Court and the King. Thereafter, when the last lights of a miraculous festival had been extinguished, it was to be the home, for ever, of only solitude and desolation.

Nevertheless, to Nicolas Foucquet remains the honour of having discerned and selected men of superior talent, and of having been the first to employ those great masters of French Art whose works have shed an enduring splendour over the reign of Louis XIV. After he had disgraced his Minister, the King could not do better than take from him his architect Louis Le Vau, his painter Charles Le Brun and his gardener André Le Nostre, and remove to Paris the looms which Foucquet had set up at Maincy and which became the Manufacture des Gobelins. But there was something which the King could not appropriate: the taste, the feeling for art, the delicate yet profound instinct for the beautiful which endeared the Comptroller to all the artists who worked for him. Le Brun, on whom the King showered benefits, regretted notwithstanding his generous host of Vaux.

It is said that during his trial, when in danger of a capital sentence, Foucquet, on leaving the Court, was walking, strongly guarded, past the Arsenal, when seeing some men at work he asked what they were making. Hearing that they were at work on a basin for a fountain, he went to look at the latter and gave his opinion of it. Then, turning to Artagnan, the Musketeer, who was in charge of him, he said, smiling: "You are wondering why I meddle in such a business? It is because I used, to be something of an expert in these matters." And Foucquet spoke the truth. He was surely a sincere lover of the arts whom the sight of men at work upon a fountain could suddenly distract from the thought of dungeons and the imminence of the scaffold.