Vaux-le-Vicomte

Interesting facts

To make room for the estate, Fouquet bought and razed three villages, then employed the displaced villagers to tend the new gardens.

Le Nôtre built optical tricks into the layout: the pools widen as they recede, so from the top of the steps the whole garden seems far shorter than it is.

The canal crossing the garden runs for nearly a kilometre, and a circular basin seen from the house reads as an oval until you approach it.

The vestibule and oval salon began as an open loggia, with three sets of aligned arches letting arriving guests see straight through the house to the garden.

It was the first French château built two rooms deep and with its main rooms on the ground floor, which is why it has no grand staircase.

Long corridors on the basement and upper floors gave rooms their own access, a convenience that was still almost unknown in mid-17th-century houses.

The house was first designed in brick and stone, but Fouquet switched to stone alone late in the design, leaving brick and stone only to the service buildings.

Voltaire later summed up the fête of 1661 by saying Fouquet was king of France at six in the evening and nobody by two in the morning.

Marshal Claude de Villars bought the estate in 1705 without ever having seen it.

The château played the California home of the villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker (1979) and stood in for Versailles in the television series Versailles.

Why it is worth it

Vaux-le-Vicomte is the house that taught Louis XIV how to build Versailles, and the house that ruined the man who built it. Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances to the young king, raised it between 1658 and 1661 on his lands at Maincy, and for the first time brought together three men who would define French classicism: the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter and decorator Charles Le Brun and the garden designer André Le Nôtre. Fouquet's emblem was a climbing squirrel with the motto Quo non ascendet?, "how high will he not climb?", and it still turns up across the house.

The heart of the château is an oval salon rising into a slate-covered dome, a shape more Italian than anything then built in France. Around it the state rooms are laid out as matching apartments for the king and the host, painted by Le Brun and his workshop. Le Nôtre's gardens are the real revelation. They run away from the house for well over a kilometre in terraces of parterres, basins and fountains, and they are designed as a play on perspective: the great canal that crosses the axis lies in a hollow, hidden from the house, and only appears as you walk towards it, with a wall of grottoes and statues beyond. At the far end, on a rising lawn, stands a statue of Hercules added in the 19th century.

On 17 August 1661 Fouquet gave a fête for the court with fireworks and the premiere of Molière's Les Fâcheux. The splendour confirmed what Colbert had been telling the king about the minister's finances; within weeks Fouquet was arrested by d'Artagnan and spent the rest of his life in prison. The king took the tapestries, statues and orange trees, and sent Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nôtre on to a far larger project at Versailles. After long neglect in the 19th century the estate was sold at auction in 1875 to Alfred Sommier, who restored house and gardens; since 1967 it has belonged to the de Vogüé family, making it the largest privately owned château in France. On summer candlelit evenings some two thousand candles light the house and gardens.

Getting there

Vaux-le-Vicomte stands in Maincy, about 5 km from Melun and some 50 km southeast of Paris. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 32 km away. Line R trains run from Paris Gare de Lyon to Melun in about 25 minutes, and in season a shuttle bus connects Melun station with the château.

Vaux-le-Vicomte

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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