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The photo was taken one month ago. The castle at the background is a famous french castle : Vaux Le Vicomte. Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance, assembled the triumvirate of Le Vau, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre (architect, artist, and landscaper) to build Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1641. On August 17, 1661, upon the completion of what was then France’s most ornate château, Fouquet threw an extravagant party in honor of the Sun King. Louis and his mother Anne of Austria were among the 6000 guests at the event, which premiered poetry by Jean de la Fontaine and a comedy-ballet, Les Fâcheux, by Molière. After novelties like elephants wearing crystal jewelry and whales in the canal, the evening concluded with an exhibition of fireworks that featured the King and Queen’s coat of arms and pyrotechnic squirrels (Fouquet’s family symbol). But the housewarming bash was the beginning of the end for Fouquet. Since his appointment to the office in 1653, the ambitious young Minister of Finance had fully replenished the failing Royal treasury. His own lavish lifestyle, however, sparked rumors of embezzlement that were nourished by jealous underlings like Private Secretary Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Fouquet’s eventual successor as master of Vaux-le-Vicomte. The August 17 revelry gave 22-year-old Louis XIV an opportunity to publicly question the Minister’s source of income, and shortly after the fête he ordered Fouquet’s arrest. In the words of Voltaire, “At six o’clock in the evening, Fouquet was king of France; at two the next morning, he was nothing.” In a trial that lasted three years, Fouquet was found guilty of embezzlement and banished from France (just barely escaping a death sentence). Louis XIV, however, overturned the sentence in favor of life imprisonment—the only time in French history that the head of state overruled the court’s decision in favor of a more severe punishment. Fouquet was to remain imprisoned at Pignerol, in the French Alps, until his death in 1680.The Fouquet intrigue has been repeatedly dramatized by the popular and literary imagination: Alexandre Dumas, for example, retells the story in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Some have postulated that Fouquet was the legendary “man in the iron mask." Thanks for viewing and commenting.