Vaux is one of my favorite palaces, and there are many reasons for that:
1) it's beautiful and unique.
2) you can really picture yourself in it.
3) it's open 7 days a week (from April to October), it's never on strike and the staff is always friendly and smiling!
This last point can be explained by the fact that this palace is still privately owned by a family which is concerned about each visitor's well being and who trains his staff to be concerned and to be polite as well, something you don't often get from a regular civil servant... (with exceptions to the rule of course!)
Vaux was built by Nicholas Fouquet, the minister of finance of Louis XIV. He was a man of great taste and a remarkable patron of the arts. He discovered (among many others) the "dream team": the architect Le Vau, the painter Le Brun and the garden designer Le Nôtre. Fouquet's mistake? He built a palace more beautiful than the king's and he invited Louis XIV to admire it! He was arrested by d'Artagnan (who really existed) and he spent the last 18 years of his life in jail because of it. Was this an exaggerated reaction of the king? Yes... and no... Fair? Unfair? It's debatable... Anyway, after he was put in jail, Louis XIV appropriated the dream team for his own use. He told them something like : "I want another Vaux-le-Vicomte, but bigger". It became Versailles. You could easily say that Vaux was the prototype for Versailles. But only at Vaux can I focus on the genius of Le Nôtre (combined with Le Vau and Le Brun as they worked as a real team), because at Versailles:
1) I have too many other things to tell you about.
2) the scale is too big.
3) if we stay for the full day at Versailles, we will spend most of our time in Marie Antoinette's English-style garden and Le Nôtre was not involved...
At Vaux you can easily venture into all the gardens (two miles round trip = easily walkable) (or we can rent
a golf cart) so that you can discover what is invisible from the palace... and almost every step will surprise and charm you... And I can be there to explain to you how they achieved everything and what gigantic tasks were involved...
Even though nature can't be tamed, I sincerely believe that, before (and since) Vaux-le-Vicomte was created, nature was never so well domesticated in order to please the eyes and the senses...
Vaux goes to my head because it speaks both to my cartesian mind and to my poetic inclinations...
And it's not only about beauty and optical illusions, I believe there's a litlle magic involved...
Yes, that's what Vaux can do to you...
The drawback of Vaux? It's farther away from Paris than Versailles (and not in the same direction) so it's difficult to make it a half-day tour like most travel agents offer. Even though it's only 60 kilometers (37 miles) outside Paris South, it's a one hour drive after you have left the South limit of Paris. If you just want to see the palace (and not venture far into the gardens), I guess we could do it in 5 hours round-trip... but I highly recommend that you make it an 8-hours full day by either staying the whole day there (that would give us proper time for the gardens + the cafeteria is quite nice) or we could drive from there to Fontainebleau which is only half an hour drive away (farther South) thus creating a busier day.
Vaux closes during the winter (generally from November to March) but it re-opens around Christmas and it's one of the best times to go there because they really go out of their way with the Christmas decorations: it's just magnificient!
Another thing which is quite unique that you might want to do : on Saturday evenings, from May to October, the palace is all lit up with candles (like back in the days) from 7 pm until midnight, with fireworks at 11 pm! You can find all the exact dates and info here.
One final surprise: at Vaux, like at Saint Marguerite's island on the French Riviera, we can talk about "the Man in the Iron Mask" because Fouquet's fate made him meet that man (who really existed) before he was to wear his iron mask. Just saying...
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