Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte

About this place

The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte is a Baroque château in Maincy, near Melun, in the Seine-et-Marne department, about 42 km in a straight line south-east of central Paris. It was built between 1658 and 1661 for Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV. Three masters worked together here for the first time: the architect Louis Le Vau, the garden designer André Le Nôtre and the painter Charles Le Brun. Fouquet bought and cleared three villages to make room for the estate. After a lavish party for the young king in August 1661, Fouquet was arrested within weeks, and the king took the same team on to build Versailles. The château stands on a platform ringed by a moat and is crowned by a great dome over its oval grand salon. Inside, the rooms keep ceilings painted by Le Brun. Behind it, formal gardens stretch for more than a kilometre along a single axis, with parterres, pools, canals and a grotto, laid out with clever tricks of perspective. The estate is privately owned and closed to the public roughly from January to March. On summer Saturday evenings the château and gardens are lit by thousands of candles, and at the end of the year the rooms are decorated for a seasonal event.