Vaux-le-Vicomte

 The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte is a baroque French château located in Maincy, near Melun, 55 km southeast of Paris in the Seine-et-Marne département of France. It was built from 1658 to 1661 for Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle Île, Viscount of Melun and Vaux, the superintendent of finances of Louis XIV.

The château was in many ways the most influential work built in Europe in the mid-17th century and the most elaborate and grand house built in France after the Château de Maisons. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the architect Louis Le Vau, the landscape architect André le Nôtre, and the painter-decorator Charles Le Brun worked together on a large-scale project for the first time. Their collaboration marked the beginning of a new order: the magnificent manner that is associated with the "Louis XIV style" involving a system of collective work, which could be applied to the structure, its interiors and works of art and the creation of an entire landscape. The garden's use of a baroque axis that extends to infinity is an example of this style.

From the Wall Street Journal:

By JONATHAN LOPEZ

In the 1979 James Bond movie "Moonraker," actor Richard Kiel's steel-toothed character, Jaws, chews his way through cable-car wires and survives a plunge from the top of Iguazu Falls—but Mr. Kiel's isn't the only memorable role in the film. An equally striking part is played by the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a spectacular piece of 17th-century French architecture that serves as the location set for villain Hugo Drax's home. When Bond, played by Roger Moore, approaches the château in a helicopter for his first meeting with Drax, the camera pans across the geometrically organized pathways and fountains of the formal gardens before lingering on the main building, whose limestone facade casts a shimmering reflection in the waters of a surrounding moat. This stunning aerial view underscores a question then very much on Bond's mind: How could anyone afford to live in such breathtaking splendor?

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Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte

The creative team behind the château went on to design the palace at Versailles.

Awestruck wonder over money matters is a time-honored tradition for visitors to Vaux, a place whose initial source of funding was—to put it politely—a bit mysterious. The château—in the municipality of Maincy, some 38 miles southeast of Paris—was built as the home of Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV's superintendent of finances, who spared no expense in the pursuit of beauty. Fouquet employed more than 18,000 laborers during the five-year construction of Vaux; he relocated three entire villages just to accommodate the landscaping. His three-man creative team—architect Louis Le Vau, garden designer André Le Nôtre and painter-decorator Charles Le Brun—turned in some of their finest work on the project, every aspect of which conspires to welcome and delight.

Coordinating their efforts with painstaking care, Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun made sure the house would look from every angle like a perfectly set gem. The building's structure is symmetrical, with two rhythmically massed outer wings flanking an oval central dome that surmounts the interior showpiece—the elegant grand salon. There, a sense of openness and light prevails, as towering French doors pierce the pale stone walls so that the intervening pilasters appear like delicate tracery between the broad expanses of glass. Framed by this wall of windows, the topiaries, manicured lawns and intricately planted flowerbeds of the garden become the room's primary decorations.

Gazing out from the salon, viewers perceive a landscape that seems to stretch, unbroken, to the far horizon, but the gardens are actually constructed on a series of massive terraces. Following the path down the central axis of Le Nôtre's ingenious, exquisitely balanced landscape design, one finds a sudden drop-off at the end of the final terrace, where hidden fountains play at the edge of a picturesque mile-long canal that traverses the property.

Small pleasures are scattered inside the house as well, where the decorator Le Brun, founding director of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, arranged for carved, painted and woven depictions of squirrels—Fouquet's family emblem—to appear in a multitude of unexpected locations. While Hercules and Apollo perform superhuman feats in Le Brun's majestic ceiling paintings, bushy-tailed squirrels peer out from the background or pose in secondary panels, including an oblong cartouche in the Salon des Muses emblazoned with Fouquet's motto, "Quo non ascendet?"—what heights will he not scale?

If that phrase sounds like hubris to you, your opinion was shared by Louis XIV, who attended a housewarming party at Vaux on the night of Aug. 17, 1661. As Fouquet's guests celebrated amid fireworks, orchestral music and the premiere of a play by Molière, the king surely admired the glorious château. Louis even found a lavish guest bedroom designed expressly for his royal self—yet this room, too, abounded with Fouquet's painted squirrels. In the presence of so many posturing rodents, his highness apparently began to smell a rat, and a scant three weeks after the party, Fouquet was taken into custody by Lt. Charles d'Artagnan of the king's musketeers on charges of embezzling state funds. How else, Louis reasoned, could Fouquet have bankrolled the wonders of Vaux?

Fouquet was condemned to life in prison—locked up alongside Eustache Dauger, aka the Man in the Iron Mask, in the alpine town of Pignerol—and never returned to Vaux. The king, meanwhile, knew talent when he saw it and promptly hired Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun to re-create the achievements of Vaux on a larger scale in the town of Versailles, where a modest hunting lodge was soon to be transformed into an architectural ode to Louis's grandeur. For good measure, Louis arranged to have most of the furniture, tapestries and sculpture removed from Vaux and brought to the new royal château. Even Fouquet's impressive collection of exotic trees would eventually be replanted in the gardens of Versailles. As Mel Brooks remarked, in a somewhat different context, it's good to be the king.

And yet, for all its magnificence, Versailles could never surpass Vaux's jewel-like perfection of form. A personal residence, Vaux was designed on a human scale, and although the house celebrates its owner, it is equally devoted to seducing guests. Versailles, in contrast, was meant to serve a state function—housing the French court—and its overwhelming scale was intended to convey the monarchy's seemingly limitless power, an effect essentially incompatible with domestic intimacy.

That such a deeply personal place as Vaux is today open to the public is a treat made necessary, in part, by the tremendous expense of maintaining the property. Unlike the Bond villain Hugo Drax, Vaux's real-life owner, the comte de Vogüé, is not a madman bent on world domination, and he does not possess unlimited resources. Occasional film shoots help defray costs, as do entry fees paid by the thousands of visitors who come each year to see this indisputable masterpiece of residential architecture, a home so beautiful that it inspired the envy of a king.

—Mr. Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques