Vaux-le-Vicomte

In an effort to see as much as possible while the weather is still wonderful, I've been taking day-trips by train to towns just outside of Paris on the weekends.  In pretty much every case, the attraction has been a 17th century château. 

Vaux is one such place.  It was built in the mid 17th century by Nicolas Fouquet.  The gardens, for which the château is justly famous, were designed by André le Nôtre, who later also designed the gardens for Versailles.

Actually, you could say that Fouquet died for this place, since  Louis XIV had him thrown in jail on spurious charges that amounted to building too lavish a palace.

French museums love to guide visitors through a specific route, which got a little strange at Vaux as there were a number of mannequins dressed in period costume and animated by video projectors and a soundtrack for the purpose of reenacting Fouquet's arrest. Now I wish I had pictures of that to show.