A minister’s château between its forecourt and a garden that runs on one axis for half a mile to a canal and the forest; a plausible estate modelled on Vaux-le-Vicomte, not a survey of it.
Between 1656 and 1661 Nicolas Fouquet, the king’s superintendent of finance, had Louis Le Vau build him a château at Vaux, Charles Le Brun decorate it and André Le Nôtre lay out the garden. It was the first complete statement of the French formal garden, and the king, who arrested Fouquet a few weeks after the great feast of August 1661, took all three men to Versailles. What they did there had already been written down in part: Boyceau on parterres seen from above, Mollet on the order of the parts from the avenue to the groves.
The approach comes down a long avenue of double rows of trees to a half-moon and a railing, into a forecourt between the stables and offices, and over the moat to the château. On the far side the whole garden is laid out on the axis of its domed salon. Parterres of embroidery lie under the windows, where they can be read from above; beyond them come grass parterres, basins and a long sheet of water, then the groves either side of the tapis vert, the canal across the garden in a hollow that is not seen until one reaches it, and three avenues fanning out into the forest beyond.
Everything near the house is low and everything far from it is tall, so that the garden is seen whole from the house and discovered by stages on foot. The village and its church at the end of the avenue, older than all of it, were left as they were.