Vaux-le-Vicomte: Fouquet’s Rise and Fall

20 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in France, History, Literature

Tags

Alexandre Dumas, Colbert, Jean de La Fontaine, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV, Nicolas Fouquet, The Man with the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, Vaux-le-Vicomte

Vaux-le-Vicomte: Nicolas Fouquet’s Castle

Nicolas Fouquet, by Sébastien Bourdon (Musée national du château de Versailles) (Photo credit: Larousse)

Nicolas Fouquet

The story of the “City Rat and the Country Rat,” or “Town Mouse and Country Mouse” is not insignificant. Our country mouse is as poor as the peasants who paid the astronomical bill Louis XIV ran up building Versailles. But Louis had seen Vaux-le-Vicomte, the castle Nicolas Fouquet, the “Superintendent of Finances,” had built for himself and Louis XIV was not about to be housed in humbler dwellings than the magnificent château owned by his “surintendant des Finances,” a patron of Jean de La Fontaine, and various authors and artists.

Nicolas Fouquet,[i] marquis de Belle-Île, vicomte de Melun et Vaux (27 January 1615 – 23 March 1680) was “Superintendent of Finances” in France between 1653 and 1661. A lawyer by training, he had risen to prominence rapidly and had been named “Superintendant of Finances,” a position Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin (14 July 1602 – 9 March 1661), who ruled France, could not deny him. Fouquet knew that Mazarin was using his own position as “Prime Minister” to amass wealth, while the “country mice” of France lived in abject poverty.

Le chancelier Séguier, by Charles Le Brun (1655)

(Photo credit: Larousse)

Vaux-le-Vicomte

Nicolas Fouquet’s château, Vaux-le-Vicomte,[ii] had been built by the future architect of Versailles: Louis Le Vau, and was decorated by Versailles’ future painter Charles Le Brun, who owed his training as an artist to a powerful individual, le chancelier Séguier.[iii] As for the grounds, they were designed by landscape artist André Le Nôtre. Fouquet had therefore assembled the team that would later build Louis XIV’s castle at Versailles, a community where his father, King Louis XIII, a composer, had a hunting lodge he used as his main residence. Fouquet also owned Belle-Île-sur-Mer, a fortified island where he could live if ever he needed a safe haven. As well, Fouquet had bought several private properties in Paris, “hôtels” or “hôtels particuliers,” and, in 1651, a widower, Fouquet married a very wealthy Spanish woman, Marie de Castille.

A Feast

In 1661, shortly after Louis XIV ascended the throne, Fouquet hosted a fête that could not be rivalled and that convinced Louis XIV, first, that Fouquet was using public funds for private purposes and, second, that he, the King, needed a castle that would be more beautiful than the castle of a mere “subject,” at any cost.

François Vatel, maître d’Hôtel

The fête was a great success. François Vatel, Louis II de Bourbon-Condé‘s future maître d’hôtel served the finest of foods, including tropical fruit grown in Fouquet’s green house, an orangerie, located on his estate. Louis XIV would ask architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart (16 April 1646 – 11 May 1708) to build an orangerie at Versailles.

Molière and Lully

Moreover, on 17 August 1661, dramatist Molière premièred Les Fâcheux, a comedy and a ballet, at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The king loved to dance and had discovered a composer who could provide the appropriate music, Italian-born Giovanni Battista Lulli, renamed Jean-Baptiste Lully (28 November 1632 – 22 March 1687). Molière was one of Fouquet’s protégés, but he was also a friend of Louis XIV.

Louis XIV in Lully‘s Ballet de la nuit, 1653 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Louis XIV, by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fouquet Arrested and Jailed

Louis quickly suspected embezzlement (malversation de fonds publics) on the part of Nicolas Fouquet, abolished the position of Superintendant of Finances, arranged for Fouquet to accompany him to Nantes where D’Artagnan, whose full name was Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Comte d’Artagnan (c. 1611 – 25 June 1673), one of his Musketeers (les mousquetaires de la maison militaire du roi de France), took the very wealthy Fouquet into custody. Famed and prolific novelist Alexandre Dumas, père (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870) used D’Artagnan as the leading figure in his Trois Mousquetaires (1844).

This festive event sealed Fouquet’s fate.Whether or not justice was served, we may never know, but in December 1664, after a three-year trial, Nicolas Fouquet was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to banishment, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment. (See Fouquet, Wikipedia.) Fouquet died at Pignerol (now Pinerolo), in 1680. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who coveted a place as a member of the Conseil du Roi, assembled the material that would serve to destroy Fouquet, a possible rival. Unlike Louis XIII, who let France be governed by prime ministers: Cardinal Richelieu, replaced, in 1642, by Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Louis XIV did not want a prime minister.

The Three Musketeers , by Maurice Leloir, 1894 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Athos, Porthos, Aramis & D’Artagnan”

The Man with the Iron Mask, c. 1872 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Interestingly, Fouquet served his sentence in the same prison as the man with the iron mask (l’homme au masque de fer), whose identity has yet to be determined, but who was Fouquet’s man-servant for a short period. Rumour has it that the man in the iron mask may have been Louis XIV’s father. Louis XIII is unlikely to have fathered a son. As noted above, he preferred to live with friends in his hunting lodge at Versailles, where Louis XIV, would have his castle built.

Fouquet as patron of the Arts: Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine, the author of Le Songe de Vaux, tried to help his patron and, as a result, he was not “elected” to the Académie française until 1682. In fact, under Louis XIV, a candidate was not “elected” to one of the forty seats of the Académie, les quarante immortels; one was appointed by the King himself. The Académie française was established by Cardinal Richelieu (9 September 1585 – 4 December 1642) in 1635. It perished in 1793, during the French Revolution, but was reestablished by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1803.

Vaux-le-Vicomte had been a lesson to La Fontaine who set about writing fables that he called “a comedy immense,” cultivating a discreet form of congeniality with his peers and hosts. I believe he was the rustic rather than the city rat. Between the lines of his fables, he painted a fresco of his era. However, he did so using anthropomorphism. His animals, the elements, the trees, all were humans in disguise and stereotypes, which protected the fabulist. The Lion may be king, but the King is not a lion and would not want to be. Imagine the ridicule Louis XIV would have brought unto himself, if he had allowed anyone to think that he was an animal, La Fontaine’s lion. La Fontaine therefore wrote

Une ample comédie à cent actes divers

Et dont la scène est l’univers.

Le Bûcheron et Mercure (V.i; V.1)

Thus swells my work—a comedy immense

Its acts unnumbered and diverse,

Its scene the boundless universe.

The Woodman and Mercury (V.i; V.1)

Conclusion

Fouquet’s story is well-known. Absolutism would not allow transgressions. Not only was Fouquet jailed for the remainder of his life, but the possessions he cherished were seized. Under Louis XIV, the only person who could keep a king humble was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, whose sermons are famous and who emphasized that all of us are mere mortals: memento mori.

____________________
[i] Nicolas Fouquet

http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/personnage/Nicolas_Fouquet/187131 (FR)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Fouquet

[ii] “Vaux-le-Vicomte”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 20 Aug. 2013

<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/624201/Vaux-le-Vicomte>.

[iii] Portrait du chancelier Séguier

http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/oeuvre/Portrait_du_chancelier_S%C3%A9guier/181324 (FR)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_S%C3%A9guier

Vaux-le-Vicomte

images

20 August 2013

WordPress

The Duc d’Enghien: a Murdered Duke

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in 19th-Century France, History, Literature

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Alexandre Dumas, Émigrés, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duc d'Enghien, French Revolution, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Les Chouans, Napoleon, Quibéron

Un Épisode de l’affaire de Quibéron, 1795 by Paul-Émile Boutigny (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On 21 March 1804, aged 31, His Serene Highness, the Duke of Enghien, born on 2 August 1772, was executed by single firearm. He was an émigré, but dragoons captured him and brought him to Strasbourg on 15 March 1804. He was the grand-son of Louis XIV, by Madame de Montespan, and the son of Louise Marie Thérèse Bathilde d’Orléans, the Duke of Orléans’ sister. Philippe duc d’Orléans, or Philippe Égalité, the duc d’Enghien’s uncle, voted in favour of his brother’s, Louis XVI, execution, by guillotine.

A Portrait of the Three Consuls, from left to right, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles-François Lebrun, duc de Plaisance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Duc d’Enghien was a prince of the blood (Prince du Sang) and, therefore, a possible heir to the throne of France. He was accused of participating in a Royalist plot (Cadoudal -Pichegru) to defeat the Consulate (18 Brumaire [9 November] 1799 –1804), part of the Napoleonic era (c. 1795 – 1815 [Congress of Vienna]). He was tried for the sake of appearances, Napoleon having decided he had to be eliminated. D’Enghien had been the commander of a corps of émigrés during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), but he had not played a role in the above-mentioned 1804 conspiracy. By the time the duke was captured, he had married Charlotte de Rohan (25 October 1767 – 1 May 1841), privately and in near secrecy, and the couple lived in Ettenheim, in Baden, on the Rhine. (See Duc d’Enghien, Wikipedia.)

Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé, duc d’Enghien (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There were of course many Royalists among the French during the French Revolution (1789-1794). Particularly noteworthy is a failed invasion of France called l’affaire Quibéron portrayed above by artist Paul-Émile Boutigny (1853 -1929). On 23 June 1795, émigrés landed at Quibéron to lend support to the Vendéens, who had long fought Revolutionary forces, and the chouannerie, royalist uprisings. The émigrés hoped they could raise support in western France, end the French Revolution and re-establish the monarchy. By 21 July 1795, they had been routed.

As for the duke, nothing could be done to save him. If Joséphine de Beauharnais,[i] Napoléon I‘s first wife, could not dissuade her husband, born Napoleone Buonaparte, no one could. Joseph Fouché, 1st Duc d’Otrante (known as the Duke of Otranto), Napoleon’s chief of police, said of the execution that “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake:” “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.“ The crime, for it was a crime, was imputed, probably wrongly, to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, one of history’s foremost survivors. However, if the murder of the young duc d’Enghien is remembered to this day, it is as an obvious injustice, one that lingered in the mind of great writers.

The “Chouans” and the Duke in literature: Balzac, Dumas and Leo Tolstoy

In Les Chouans, a 1829 novel, French writer Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) immortalized the royalist chouannerie, uprisings in western France and, by the same token, the royalist Vendéan insurrection. For his part, the duc d’Enghien was bestowed life eternal by Leo Tolstoy (9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910), Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. In the first book of War and Peace, Tolstoy has the vicomte de Mortemart, a French émigré, say that:

“‘[a]fter the murder of the duc, even the most partial ceased to regard [Buonaparte] as a hero. If to some people he ever was a hero, after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth.’ The vicomte said that the duc d’Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte’s hatred of him.”

There is an anecdote according to which, during one of his fainting spells,[ii] Napoléon was at the mercy of the duke of Enghien who spared him. The execusion of the duc d’Enghien who spared him. The execusion of the duc d’Enghien might well have been Napolèons’ brief put personal French Revolution. He needed to kill an aristocrat. Alexandre Dumas, père (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870) featured the duc d’Enghien in his The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine), unfinished at the time of Dumas’ death, but now published and translated into English:

“[T]he dominant sentiment in Bonaparte’s mind at that moment was neither fear nor vengeance, but rather the desire for all of France to realise that Bourbon blood, so sacred to Royalist partisans, was no more sacred to him than the blood of any other citizen in the Republic.

‘Well, then’, asked Cambacérès,[iii] ‘what have you decided?’

‘It’s simple’, said Napoleon, ‘We shall kidnap the Duc d’Enghien and be done with it.'”[iv]

Let these words be the conclusion of this post. The duc d’Enghien was a scapegoat.

Henri de La Rochejacquelein at the Battle of Cholet in 1793 by Paul-Émile Boutigny (10 March 1853 – 27 June 1929), Musée d’art et d’histoire de Cholet.

_________________________

[i] Napoleon divorced Joséphine in 1810 so he could marry Marie Louise d’Autriche, the future Duchess of Parma, who gave him a son. Napoléon wanted un ventre, a fertile woman.

[ii] Napoleon had epileptic seizures. One of Talleyrand’s duties was to remove Napoléon from public sight when seizures occurred.

[iii] Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, 1st Duke of Parma, is the author of the Napoleonic Code, a fine document still in use in Quebec.

[iv] See Duc d’Enghien, Wikipedia.

Hector Berlioz (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869)

Grande Messe des Morts

: Crop of a carte de visite photo of Hector Berlioz by Franck, Paris, c. 1855 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

20 May 2013

WordPress

Comments on Simon Frobisher as Privateer

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in History

≈ Comments Off on Comments on Simon Frobisher as Privateer

Tags

Alexandre Dumas, Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, Muscovy Company, Spanish Armada, Tower of London, Walter Raleigh

The Spanish Armada[i]

Some posts require more tags than one would suspect. Frobisher was an explorer, a gold digger, a privateer, one of the men who repelled the “invincible” Spanish Armada, and the sort of character one expects to find in novels written by Robert Louis Stevenson or Alexandre Dumas père. Moreover, although Martin Frobisher explored a new world, his own native world was entering a new age.

Privateers & loyal servants to their Queen

Queen Elizabeth had four trusted seamen who were destined to belong to legend, if only for their role in defeating the Spanish Armada. Hawkins was an admiral and Drake, a vice-admiral, but they were also privateers, not pirates, and it is mainly as privateers that they could be protagonists in novels written by Stevenson or Alexandre Dumas père. As the list below indicates, Frobisher was in excellent company and all four Sea Dogs fought to repel the Spanish Armada. Here are their names and dates:

Sir Francis Drake (1540 – 27 January 1596);
Sir Martin Frobisher (c. 1535 or 1539 – 15 November 1594);
Sir John Hawkins (Plymouth 1532 – 12 November 1595);
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1554 – 29 October 1618).

Of the four, Sir Walter Raleigh is the more legendary. He married secretly which angered Elizabeth. She had him and his wife thrown into the Tower of London, but Sir Walter Raleigh bought his release. He was nevertheless beheaded, unjustly, for his alleged involvement in a plot to kill King James I.[ii]

Explorers

Our four Sea Dogs were explorers.

Sir Francis Drake was the second seaman to circumnavigate the globe, a feat carried out from 1577 to 1580.
Between 1584 and 1589, Sir Walter Raleigh tried to establish a colony near Roanoke Island (the present North Carolina) but failed. He made tobacco popular in England, and he fought against Spain in her colonies.
Sir John Hawkins was a slave-trader and he built her Majesty’s navy.
As for Sir Martin Frobisher, although he did so inadvertently, he nevertheless discovered the Hudson Strait which led to the Hudson Bay and, therefore, to North America’s gold: beaver pelts. He is a Canadian explorer.

(please click on the picture to enlarge it)

Ivan IV of Russia Shows His Treasury to Jerome Horsey (Alexander Litovchenko, 1875)

Capitalism

My post on Frobisher also allowed a brief peak at capitalism. Michael Lok of the Muscovy Company found investors who made it possible for Frobisher to embark on his three expeditions.

According to Wikipedia,[iii] the Muscovy Company, or Московская компания, was the first major chartered joint stock company. Europeans had learned to pool their money and enter into ventures that could fail but could also be extremely profitable. For instance, Prince Rupert invited individuals to buy shares that would allow the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Hudson’s Bay Company was established in 1670 and remains active.

Music

I chose a piece by Henry Purcell (10 September 1659 (?)– 21 November 1695), a seventeenth-century composer. I love Purcell. But John Dowland (1563 – buried 20 February 1626) may have been a better choice. He was a Renaissance composer of lute songs and Lachrimae, a genre epitomized by his own “Flow my Tears.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

“Flow my Tears,” by John Dowland

Sir Martin Frobisher as Privateer and Hero to his Queen (November 26, 2012)

Sir Martin Frobisher: the First Thanksgiving (November 25, 2012)

_________________________

[i] Armada, Spanish: Spanish Armada off the coast England. Photograph. Britannica Online for Kids. Web. 27 Nov. 2012.

<http://kids.britannica.com/elementary/art-76585>.

[ii] “Sir Walter Raleigh.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 27 Nov. 2012
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/490271/Sir-Walter-Raleigh>.

[iii] “The Muscovy Company had a monopoly on trade between England and Muscovy until 1698 and it survived as a trading company until the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Muscovy Company traces its roots to the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands [long title], founded in 1551 by Richard Chancellor, Sebastian Cabot and Sir Hugh Willoughby, who decided to look for the Northeast Passage to China.” (The Muscovy Company, Wikipedia)

composer: John Dowland (1563 – buried 20 February 1626)

piece: Lachrimae Antiquae

performers: Jordi Savall, Hespérion XX

November 27th, 2012

WordPress

On Months, Dates & Planned Obsolescence

13 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Sharing, Uncategorized

≈ 60 Comments

Tags

Aldo Ciccolini, Alexandre Dumas, Kenneth Grahame, La Reine Margot, Marguerite, Mr Toad, planned obsolescence, Wind in the Willows

Pieter Casteels

Pieter Casteels (1684 – 1749)

Mozart: 9 Variations sur un menuet de Duport en Ré Majeur, K.273 (Aldo Ciccolini)

I started writing the post I published yesterday on March 10, 2012, and it is dated accordingly. Technologies! It deals with Alexandre Dumas, père’s novel about Marguerite de Valois. He wrote a novel about her entitled Queen Margot or La Reine Margot.

* * *

I hope that when I finally grow up and know which month and which day we are, I may also have a better understanding of new technologies. At the moment, as soon as I am somewhat familiar with a gadget, a new one is put on the market and mine has become obsolete. It’s called “planned obsolescence,” which is quite the trouvaille (find), for the manufacturer.

The same is true of kitchen appliances. They are made to last approximately five years. Where appliances are concerned, most of us are currently too poor not to purchase the very best with a lifetime warranty. In the long-term, you will have paid the higher price because of your numerous calls to the technician. Remember that he or she does not come to your home for less than a $100.00.

As for your furniture, chose the classics and chose something you know you can live with. If it is the last fad, or dernier cri, stay away. As well, buy bookcases that have clean lines just so they will match your cat’s Louis-Philippe day bed. At any rate, what you need has probably been discarded and might be sitting in the basement or in the attic, if you have a basement or an attic. Your parents bought it in the 1950s or 1960s.

In other words, do not do as Mr Toad does, i. e. fall into temptation, except a few. Mr Toad is the main character in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). He goes crazy when he hears the siren of a car and puts himself behind the wheel of a vehicle that is not his. He lands in jail.

You will not land in jail by purchasing the latest, but you may run up a debt because by now you have the essential credit card and using it does not feel the same as taking ‘real money’ out of one’s wallet.

My computer is fairly new, but there will soon be a ‘better’ product that I will require because my nearly new computer will be a dinosaur. My computer has become essential equipment.