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.
Fouquet sensed, however, that something was wrong and he fell ill: he again began to suffer from those intermittent fevers which had struck him down following prolonged exposure to damp and cold when supervising the works at Vaux. More and more frequently he lost restoring sleep. He was seen once, weeping silently behind a door.
At last he left in Louis' retinue and, at the end of August, arrived in Nantes. At once, however, fever forced him again to take to his bed. The King, who had taken up lodgings in a castle at the far end of town, even showed signs of concern and sent visitors to inquire after his health. Fouquet recovered, although with difficulty. At last, on 5th September, the Sovereign's birthday, he was summoned at seven o'clock in the morning. He worked with the King until eleven, after which the Sovereign unexpectedly kept him back to discuss certain matters. When at length Fouquet left the castle, his carriage was stopped by a company of musketeers. A second lieutenant of musketeers, a certain d'Artagnan, read him the arrest warrant. Fouquet was incredulous. 'Sir, are you certain that it is I whom you are to arrest?' Without according him one moment more, d'Artagnan confiscated all the papers which he had with him, even those which he carried on his person. All these were sealed and he was placed in a convoy of royal carriages which took him to the Chateau of Angers. There he remained for three months.
