Nicolas Fouquet

Nicolas Fouquet was superintendent of finances to Louis XIV and was arrested three weeks after giving the most magnificent party in French history. He came from a family of Breton merchants and magistrates, bought his way into office as was normal, and made himself indispensable to Mazarin during the Fronde by raising loans on his own credit when the crown had none. That was the mechanism of his rise and the substance of the case against him: royal and private money ran through the same hands, which was the ordinary practice of the office and became a crime when it was convenient. In August 1661 he received the twenty-two-year-old king at Vaux-le-Vicomte, a chateau built by Le Vau, decorated by Le Brun and landscaped by Le Notre, with a play by Moliere, music by Lully, a supper for hundreds and fireworks over the canal. Louis had nothing to match it. Colbert, who wanted the post, had already assembled the evidence, and d'Artagnan arrested Fouquet in Nantes on 5 September. The trial ran three years, the judges voted banishment, and the king changed the sentence to perpetual imprisonment - the only time a French monarch increased a sentence. He died in the fortress of Pignerol after nineteen years. Louis took his three artists and used them to build Versailles. Vaux survives and is open to visitors, which Versailles has rather overshadowed. La Fontaine, whom Fouquet had been paying a pension, wrote in his defence and was lucky not to suffer for it. The identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, who was held at Pignerol during the same years, has been attached to Fouquet's case by speculation ever since and rests on nothing.

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