Louis XIV's Architect: Louis Le Vau, France's Most Important Builder

Preface

Louis Le Vau’s achievement was obscured at Versailles by the work of his successor but one, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who added the enormous north and south wings to the palace, to say nothing of the Hall of Mirrors, the wonder of its time. He was also overshadowed in Paris, where his work on the eastern Colonnade of the Louvre was compromised by having, on Colbert’s instructions, to draw up plans for it in committee with Charles Le Brun and Claude Perrault – after a visit to Paris by the internationally celebrated Gian Lorenzo Bernini – and tradition gave the credit for it to Perrault. The College of the Four Nations, later established as the Institut de France by Napoleon I, facing the Louvre across the Seine is, however, his creation, finished after he died in 1670 by his faithful pupil François d’Orbay.

And yet his status as a great architect was again compromised by charges of embezzlement brought against him for diverting funds from the building of the College into a project he had undertaken in the Nivernais for making tinplate to replace lead as a roofing material and cannon for Colbert’s expanding navy. He had been a speculator ever since the time he was working with his father and site managers on the Île Saint-Louis during the building boom of the 1630s when he was a young man becoming a businessman architect by practising as one.

He never went to Italy, yet the college built with Mazarin’s legacy to honour the cardinal’s place as Louis XIV’s chief minister, godfather and mentor is his baroque masterpiece, with all its imitative originality and, just by turning your head through 180 degrees while standing in the middle of the Pont des Arts, you can see that Le Vau could embrace the distinctions between that style and classicism without diminishing either by mingling them.

There do not seem to be any extant personal letters, there is not even a portrait of him.¹ He was too active on commissions and in commitments and there was no calm retirement to allow him to write memoirs, even had he been disposed to do so. He has not been the victim of any continuous account of his life, despite the countless articles written about particular aspects of his work that have accumulated in the last hundred years.

He lived for fifty-eight years, and we shall follow the progress of his career as an architect and speculator who met the needs of state officials and bankers who wanted to have mirrors turned inwards upon their newly found enormous wealth. He then worked for one particular state official, Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances, who made the mistake of turning his mirror outwards in his palace of art and culture at Vaux-le-Vicomte designed for him by Le Vau in all its extravagant beauty – as well as committing the more important error of fortifying a harbour for his private navy to protect his overseas commercial interests on Belle-Île, off the Breton coast, which had all the appearances of treasonable behaviour.

After Fouquet’s trial and official disgrace and a decent interval, Le Vau made the enveloppe for the late Louis XIII’s little palace, built originally as a hunting lodge for his inner circle of courtiers and for giving hospitality to ambassadors, turning it into the first stage of what was to become the capital of France. This gave rise to the misleadingly persistent legend that the nobles would be subdued to Louis XIV’s style of monarchy by the necessity to take part in the inner circle or lose their influence. As an American historian of culture says, ‘Versailles [was] revolutionary not despite its bourgeois roots, but because of them.’ The palace was to become Louis XIV’s ‘laboratory of absolutism’.²

Louis Le Vau was an autodidact from among the tribe of stonecutters (literally, ‘tailors of stone’) who gathered every day in the place de Grève in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris to be taken on for work.³ The craft of an architect was not yet closely defined by the standards of a recognised profession – the Academy of Architecture was not founded until the year after his death and it was his younger brother François who profited from being a member of it. Young Louis learned his craft from the overseers of the building sites he worked on, along with his stonecutter, then master mason, father. He moved, also with his father, into the market in building land in his twenties and, by 1637 when he was twenty-five, became autonomous – or as autonomous as you could have been – as an architect to the King. It was not long before he was living in his own hôtel particulier (for which an acceptable translation is mansion), where members of his extended family lived together.⁴

Thereafter, he was close to the King’s ministers, Mazarin, Fouquet, and then Colbert, and this meant that the King was his client too. The King set the tone and for a time the architect set the style. When the First Architect to the King, Jacques Lemercier, who was responsible for designing the clock tower at the Louvre, died in office in 1654, Louis Le Vau, who had been assisting him there, took his place in what seems to have been a seamless handover: one day Lemercier was signing contracts, and the next, Le Vau.⁵ In contrast with what happened to Fouquet, the only way for Le Vau was upwards – until the posthumous corruption charges from which his death saved the man himself, but not his family nor his memory.⁶

A continuous account of Louis Le Vau’s life has not yet been compiled, though some have been undertaken without being completed. A great deal of material exists, however, digested in morsels, by as many writers who are listed in numerous bibliographies. There are the plans he sketched and had made into drawings and engravings in the agency that he set up in his successive homes or, once his buildings were in being, by artists such as Israël Silvestre and Jean Marot. Enough of these buildings survive to enable an assessment of the quality of his vision.

The flesh and blood man is difficult to find but gradually, as books from the last hundred years make their presence known – books from art historians and architects like Louis Hautecœur, Anthony Blunt, Hilary Barron, Maurice Dumolin, Jean-Claude Le Guillou, Alexandre Cojannot, Alexandre Gady, Cyril Bordier – as well as books by commentators of his own time, including André Félibien, who was at Fouquet’s Vaux-le-Vicomte with him, or in the next century such as Henri Sauvel and Jaques-François Blondel – the man appears in his own setting. In the history of culture, the observation made by Ardis Butterfield, a historian of music, that the past has a special allure when it is imagined as present, is an authentic one.⁷

To stand in the quadrangle of the Louvre looking at the inner facades of the east and south wings, and through the carriage entrance across the Seine to the dome and portico of his building that houses the Institute of France on a strangely rare quiet Sunday afternoon in autumn was for me an occasion to share Louis Le Vau’s vision of the majestic grandeur that Louis XIV wanted from him. Colbert, after one of the extravagant fêtes held by the King before any large-scale permanent building began at Versailles, said that Le Vau and Le Nôtre were the architect and garden designer only for the King’s divertissements, while what was needed was an artist who could express of his Grandeur. What Le Vau eventually did at Versailles to enhance the King’s and Queen’s apartments does not assert itself against later versions what Anthony Blunt was acerbic enough to call ‘that most expensive of toys’,⁸ while at the Louvre, behind the facades that emerged from Le Vau’s drawing office, there is a sense of cheerful awe, enhanced nowadays by the performances of young musicians and the enthusiasm of their small, impromptu audiences.

Whatever could or should be said against absolute monarchy, it cannot be criticised for the beauty that appeared as its setting. Once Versailles was in being, the Louvre could do no more than echo a majesty that had decided not to live there any longer.

Chapter 1

A Family in the Building Trade

Henri IV brought religious toleration into being with his edict of Nantes, political stability with his establishment of the Bourbon dynasty, and urbanisation of Paris with a building programme carried out from the time he entered his capital in 1589 until he was assassinated in 1610.

The establishment of a new ruling dynasty was an essential element in the new-found stability of the French state. The Papal Curia allowed the King’s marriage to Catherine de’ Medici’s daughter to be annulled. Queen Margot received a generous financial settlement. She and Henri had no children together, and an heir was needed to establish a dynasty in the name of the Bourbons without any Valois participation. Within a year, Henri IV had married again: this time with Marie de’ Medici – a distant relative of his ex but nobody seemed to mind. The Medici of Florence were Henri’s principal creditors and Marie brought a substantial dowry with her. An heir – the future Louis XIII – arrived a year after the marriage. Other children followed, including the troublesome Gaston of Orleans and Henrietta-Maria, who would marry Charles I of England.

Henri IV was stabbed while in his carriage by François Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic, and died from the wound, but he had provided opportunity in the capital for an ambitious building programme by unleashing investment in his building projects. The subsequent careers of architects like Jacques Lemercier, François Mansart and Louis Le Vau fitted into the new conditions. New stability brought the realisation of a new artistic potential: there was to be stylish, even beautiful, building. Henri IV’s interest in Paris is the most significant domestic feature of his reign.

One of his first decisions after gaining access to his capital in 1594 was to order the repair and continuation of the Louvre Palace and join it to the Tuileries, a process already begun under Catherine de’ Medici. Jean de Fourcy was his Intendant des Bâtiments, part of a hierarchy responsible for all the King’s buildings, and he held an adjudication on 7 January 1595 about the construction of the gallery that the King wanted to build along the right bank of the Seine from the Tuileries to the Louvre.

The author of the original design had been Pierre Lescot. He remained as architect to François II and Charles IX, who wanted their father’s project finished. Lescot died in 1578, and the work was taken over by Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau, whom Henri III ordered to keep to Lescot’s design. All had been brought to a standstill by the wars of religion, during which what had been built fell into ruin. So Henry IV undertook a policy of making good before beginning on his own project. In Louis XIII’s reign, all this continued on Pierre Lescot’s design, and not until Louis XIV began his career of personal rule in March 1661 was the plan modified for completion.

Henri’s next building project was to be the Place Royale (known since 1800 as the Place des Vosges), which was, at first, part of an economic project designed by the King himself to allow French capital, currently being spent lavishly in Italy to pay for silk, to remain in France. Great encouragement was exerted on French agriculturalists towards the development of mulberry tree plantations and upon the mercantile class to import silkworms so that the weaving of gold and silver threads into the silk to make an even more luxurious product would be achieved in Paris.

To this end, silk manufacturing was established in the Place Turenne. The King acquired extra land there and gave it to aristocratic developers, who would build three sides of a square, leaving the silk weavers in occupation of its north side. The other sides had their facades developed in a uniform pattern on nine pavilions, each four bays wide, with arcades at street level, behind which there were to be shops, two higher floors, and high roofs incorporating an attic with lucarnes. The developers had to preserve the uniformity of the fronts, but they could do what they liked with the interiors of the pavilions.

The design in brick and dressed stone with dark slate roofs was realised with a certain anonymity, perpetuated by an almost complete absence of ground plans and elevations. It is surmised that the most likely designers were the usual royal architects of the reign: Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau and Louis Métezeau, with possible participation in the King’s Pavilion by Salomon de Brosse – designer of the Luxembourg Palace for Marie de’ Medici.¹ The King hoped to develop the Place Royale for clearly designated purposes, expressed in his edict of July 1605.

The Place Royale was intended to support his venture into silk manufacturing, providing accommodation for skilled artisans, most of whom would have to be enticed to Paris from other countries with the double bait of prestigious housing and association with the crown. The King’s second intention was to provide a large and attractive open space for the city population to enjoy a leisurely stroll, described as ‘a distinctively urban recreation’ in an area of increasingly dense population since ‘strolling required an architecturally defined space.’ This was not merely for those who lived in the quarter: it was to be for the whole of Paris. It was also to serve as a marketplace, again, not a local one, but serving as a ‘city-wide magnet for trade in precious goods’. The final purpose for the Place Royale in the King’s plan was as a setting for court ceremonies and public celebrations for which space would be needed.

‘The appropriation of public space for the periodic staging of royal ceremonies was hardly an unusual practice, but what is distinctive here was the crown’s interest in sharing the space with the ignoble pursuits of manufacturing and trade. In effect the crown was lending its prestige to commerce: that identification of the monarchy with artisanal activity distinguished Henri IV’s court and his urbanism from that of the Valois kings who preceded him and the Bourbon kings that were to follow.’²

Unfortunately the nobles did not share this vision, and in April 1607 the plan to develop silk manufacturing there was abandoned, and the pavilions were developed as dwellings for royal office holders and other members of the noblesse de robe.³ Prominent among these was Pierre Fougeu d’Escures, who held a post in the administration of waterways in Sully’s government. He had been granted a building plot next to the royal pavilion in 1605, on which he provided shops in the arcades, as was originally intended, and stables in a courtyard behind the house. He did not intend to live there, but to let it out to shopkeepers and traders. It cost him a sum that he could afford but the artisans could not have. Then, in March 1607, he was given five plots on the west side of the square as a reward for his rapid construction of his first house. He used two of these to provide a larger house for his own use, and sold the other three, together with the one he had finished, to pay for it. A year later, he closed the shop arcades off, in the interests of improving his house as a private dwelling, and then sold it at a profit. With the money, he bought another property comprising two pavilions in the square and enlarged its garden behind it. He lived there until his death in 1621. What had been intended as housing for a bourgeois became a nobleman’s hôtel particulier.

There were five artisan homeowners, but it was the royal office holders who predominated. The rich owners of the silk workshops who had begun the project, men like Pierre Sainctot and Charles Marchant, still developed properties, but profited from letting them to others. After Henri IV’s death, however, the Bourbon court preferred the Louvre as its Paris base, and the officials lost interest in the Place Royale.

The construction of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine at the western tip of the Île de la Cité was another stage in Henri IV’s urbanisation of his capital. The last Valois, Henri III, had made plans that were changed more than once for the bridge, but the outbreak of civil war in 1588 prevented them from being carried out. Henri IV decided to take them up again ten years afterwards, though he would abandon the idea of building houses on it in order to make it a vantage point for the expanded Tuileries, the Cité and the river. Marie de’ Medici would order the equestrian statue of him in the middle of the bridge from Florentine artists, but the Florentine element was not influential in the King’s vision for his project of urban development in the capital while he intended to settle in the Tuileries. His design to create the Place Dauphine at the end of the island emerged over the next seven years.

Construction of the bridge recommenced in 1599 under the direction of the masons François Petit and Guillaume Marchant. The quays on the island were to be developed to enhance their aesthetic appearance and the buildings to be raised above them were to have a monumental aspect, despite the later tendency to regard them as too small for that purpose – more recently rectified by their restoration. The Pont Neuf was opened in 1604 and completed in 1606. The statue was erected in 1614 and became the King’s memorial.

On 10 March 1607 the King gave the western tip of the island to President Harlay of the Parlement as a reward for his loyalty during the wars of religion, with the proviso that he would carry out plans drawn up by Sully for a tribute to the heir to the throne, Louis XIII, who had been born in 1601, and have them completed within three years. Harlay was empowered to sell the building lots, transfer the requirement of speedy completion to the new owners and keep his profits from the sale of the land.

The form of the place was dictated by the irregular, triangular site, with its point at the side of the Pont Neuf and its two arms diverging eastward to the street that was to bear Harlay’s name. According to a drawing made by Robert de Cotte nearly eighty years afterwards in 1685, while he was making recommendations to realign the statue with the place, there were fifty-eight independent buildings there. The two new quays in front of these buildings had the purpose of directing the expected increased traffic to the commercial centres on the island and to the law courts, the cathedral and the hospital, while preserving calm for the people who would occupy houses that should be ‘public on one side and private on the other’.⁴ The appearance of the buildings depends upon the same materials as were used in the Place Royale: the stone arcades in front of the shops and the brick with stone decoration on the higher floors, and the high roofs in slate, which previously had elegant chimneys also in brick and stone.

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Besides these projects undertaken on the King’s initiative there was a new phenomenon during the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII in the adoption of the town mansion (hôtel particulier) by wealthy royal officials and the new financial class. The new situation was exemplified under Louis XIII on the Île Saint-Louis with its stone embankments lined with mansions and its internal shopping streets – a mixture of medieval survival and contemporary style for businesses and large houses incorporating garden spaces.⁵

The development of the Île Saint-Louis is what concerns us most for this study of Louis Le Vau. It began in 1614 and it went on for thirty years. The way it was developed by speculating builders followed the success of the Place Royale and of the Place Dauphine under Sully’s administration, the impulse of the growing demand for housing for courtiers now that the monarchy was stabilised in the Île de France, and a vigorous market in real estate.⁶ In 1600 there were two islets in the Seine to the east of the Île de la Cité, one called Île Notre-Dame and the other Île des Vaches, divided from each other when a north–south ditch was dug between them for defensive purposes under Charles V for a chain to be drawn across the river at night. The two islets remained uninhabited even after the chain disappeared, used only for storing trade goods for the port Saint-Paul close by or let to a butcher as pasture for his beef on the hoof. They were the property of the canons of Notre-Dame. Many a duel took place on them.

In 1600, the only bridges across the Seine were from either bank to the Île de la Cité. Otherwise there were ferries large enough to take carts and carriages at Neuilly, Chatou and at Pecq. There was nearly a national disaster on the Neuilly ferry on 9 June 1606 when Henri IV, Marie de’ Medici, the Duke of Montpensier and the Princess of Conti were nearly drowned as their heavy carriage slid into the river.

Christophe Marie, a financier who would later be responsible for all the bridges of France,⁷ proposed a system that he claimed to have been his own invention to the King for constructing wooden bridges capable of carrying all loads – even artillery. One like it could be built over a great river in no more than four months, he said, and he offered to build it at his own expense in return for a concession of twenty years’ rights of tolls equal to those of the ferry that it would replace. Henry IV accepted the proposal by letters patent with any future disputes about the matter to be referred to the Parlement. Marie completed the Pont de Neuilly by September 1611. His outlay was 42,000 livres and it brought him in 12,000 a year, which he had to share with the associates he had accrued during the two years it took to complete. Moreover, there would be financial complications involving claims by local landowners for the rest of Marie’s life.

As early as 1577, in Henri III’s reign, there had been a plan to construct a bridge to take the pressure of traffic away from the Île de la Cité that would reach from the Celestins to the Île des Vaches with houses on it, and continued from the Île to the Pont de la Tournelle on the left bank. It was not selected at the time but kept for future consideration and re-emerged when Henri IV had completed the Place Royale. Its construction was entrusted to Christophe Marie. Henri IV’s assassination on 14 May 1610 put everything on hold for several months. Marie then formed an association on 7 February 1611 with Lugles Poulletier, commissaire des guerres, who took on the part of banker to the enterprise.⁸

The two islets that were going to be united by filling in the ditch between them were the property of the canons of Notre-Dame, and as soon as they heard of the project, they took up the cudgels against it. Christophe Marie had offered to build the bridge to the left bank within a year at his own expense in return for the concession yielded to him and his inheritors of the first sales of building plots on the united Île Saint-Louis. He was to build houses on the bridge, together with six water mills in places where boat traffic would not be hindered.

Experts, including Louis Marchant, visited the sites but the choice was regarded with disfavour because of the sloping banks of the island, which would make the bridge too long, the creation of obstacles for boatmen, the likelihood of flooding and the losses to the established ferrymen. Nevertheless, Marie persuaded the traders of the quartier to support his proposals unanimously in an agreement dated 12 March 1612 on condition that the bridge was built of stone and not of wood. Marie agreed that the pillars should be high enough not to hinder the boats. Measurements and costings were made in August. Louis XIII granted the islets to Marie, all except for the roads, and he was to have local taxes for sixty years. ‘Sieur Christophe Marie, entrepreneurgénéral des ponts de France, living in the rue des Prouvelles’, signed his contract before the notaries on 19 April 1614. A year later, François Le Regrattier was associated with Marie and Poulletier in the project. Poulletier held a half share and Marie and Legrattier a quarter each. Marie was regarded by the other two as the technician.

It was all very well for the King’s Council and the echevins to have given their approval – the King and Queen laid the first stone of the bridge on 11 October 1614 – but two major opposition groups remained: the boatmen and the canons of Notre-Dame, who had not been consulted. They intimidated potential purchasers of building plots on the island and the three entrepreneurs had to bear all the costs of construction of the bridge without yet having made any sales by which they would have been recompensed. The canons of Notre-Dame began their offensive even before the stone laying in June 1614 and after a year they threatened to have destroyed whatever had already been built. The Paris Parlement supported them.

Their arguments against the project were that unnecessary floods would be provoked and that, as the former owners of the islets, compensation was due to them for their loss of revenue. The Royal Council decreed that Marie should construct dressed stone quays around the islets to keep flooding to a minimum, and that, after the sixty years of revenue granted to him and his heirs, those revenues should revert to the Dean and Chapter. The canons demanded that this should be rescinded, especially since Marie was planning to build a huge hexagonal commercial enterprise on the bridge that would disfigure the environs of the old city.⁹

The dispute dragged on and on until Marie’s associates could no longer cope with their creditors calling in their loans. In 1624, the King’s Council took away Marie’s contract and awarded it to a speculator named Jean de La Grange and his associates, Philippe de Coulanges and Claude Charlot, who undertook to finish the bridges and the quays by 1629.¹⁰ They were awarded the same recompenses as Marie, also for sixty years, in return for indemnities for work already done, but this was too expensive for La Grange, and the contract reverted to Marie and associates by a decree of 24 July 1627 with the same stipulations as before.

The works went ahead, despite disputes among the triumvirs about the appointment of builders for the plots that were sold for building. Meanwhile, the canons accepted an indemnity of 50,000 livres for the loss of their revenue at Richelieu’s suggestion in 1634. Disputes were not at an end, but the Pont Marie was open to traffic and potential purchasers of building plots were reassured. One of these was Claude de Ragois de Bretonvilliers who, in February 1635, ordered the construction of his huge hôtel particulier to the designs of Jean Androuet du Cerceau at the eastern point of the island. This was the signal for the intensive development of the plots that gathered momentum from then onwards.

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Louis Le Vau’s father, also Louis, was designated in legal documents signed in the presence of notaries between 1622 and 1634 as ‘a stonecutter living in Paris’, and so held a subordinate position in the building trade. He cut the stone received from the quarry on the orders of the master masons who carried out the construction, but it is not known in which sites or for which employers he worked before 1634. He signed himself as Louis Le Veau.

Only one of Louis Le Veau’s relations is known by name: his sister Claude, who married a companion carpenter called Pierre Moret in 1603. She had been a servant in the household of Guillaume Marchant (a member of the entrepreneurial dynasty that has already appeared in this narrative), who sold pigs in the Paris market, and she was not able to sign her name. Her parents (and therefore her brothers) are not mentioned in her marriage contract. Louis Le Veau was witness to Moret’s second marriage in 1628 after his sister had died. The inventory made after her death speaks of her modest possessions.¹¹

There is no surviving contract for Louis Le Veau’s own marriage to Étiennette Louette in the papers found after her death in 1648, nor after his own in 1661, which in itself is another clue to their working-class status that did not warrant such niceties. On their mother’s side, the Le Veau children were descended from country people living in the Vexin near Beauvais. Their grandfather was Charles Louette, a blacksmith, owner of several parcels of land and part of a house at Montagny-en-Vexin, which enabled him to buy fifty-one vines when he sold it. It is assumed that on their father’s side the Le Veau children came from a family with roots in Paris reaching back for several generations and living in the parish of Saint-Jean-en-Grève. Proof is lacking that Louis and Étiennette lived in Paris before 1620, but tradition maintains that their eldest son (of three) was born there in about 1612. The date is vague because young Louis’s birth certificate from the parish church was lost in a fire, but enough antiquarians recorded it before it was lost to vouch for its existence.

His mother apprenticed Louis to another stonecutter, Marin Louette, probably his uncle, at Montagny. Marin had bought the family house there in 1628. A further family connection in the building trade was that his Aunt Claude, Mme Moret, was married to a master carpenter in Paris, so there was a link with the powerful Marchant family who owned a building firm. The Marchants seem to have been pleased to help Claude because they gave her a dowry of 130 livres between them when she married the carpenter. The head of the firm, Guillaume, seems to have gone on from selling porkers after 1603 to play a major role in the urbanisation of Paris under Henri IV and Louis XIII, eventually holding the eminent post of Master of the King’s Masonry Works. His gift to Claude might suggest larger patronage to the Le Veaus. Perhaps her brother worked regularly for him on his sites. The family unit and its wealthier patrons were the usual building blocks of business in the organisation of work in the trade in this epoch.

Until the mid-1630s, Louis and Etiennette Le Veau lived near the Hôtel de Ville – made apparent by contracts in the National Archives for his work – in a rented property in the rue de Saint-Jean-en-Grève, where tortuous narrow roads crossed, and the address for the same building changed regularly. It was in the neighbourhood of the former rue de La Mortellerie, which recalled the medieval word for masons, mortelliers, and it was near the place de Grève, where the builders took on the tradesmen for their various sites.

There are signs that Louis Le Veau’s ambitions were the forerunners of those of his eldest son. When the building boom had started, he made his own modest speculation by means of the purchase of a building plot near the Porte Saint-Denis by a deed drawn up with the sisters of the Filles-Dieu Convent on 10 October 1622. This was in a new quarter called Villeneuf-sur-Gravois, so-called because it was where masons used to deposit the rubble that they took away from the sites