or twice in the hunting season, sometimes
with his brother, sometimes with his prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin.

Returning in 1652 from an interview at Corbeil with Charles II of
England, then seeking refuge in France, Louis XIV dined at Versailles
with his mother, Anne of Austria. In October, 1660, four months after
his marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain, he brought his young queen there.
The future of Versailles was assured. The King had decided to set his
star and make his palace home where his father had established a hunting
lodge.

The year 1661 was one of the most important in the history of the
monarch. On March fifteenth, eight days after the death of Mazarin, the
great Colbert was named Superintendent of Finances. It was he who was to
give to the reign of Louis XIV its definite direction; his name was to be
lastingly associated with the founding of the greater Versailles, and
with the construction of the Louvre, the Tuileries, Fontainebleau and
Saint-Germain. But Colbert's task in the enlargement of Versailles was
no easy one, nor did he approve of it. He opposed the young King's
purpose obstinately and expressed himself on the subject without reserve.
"Your majesty knows," he wrote to the King, "that, apart from brilliant
actions in war, nothing marks better the grandeur and genius of princes
than their buildings, and that posterity measures them by the standard of
the superb edifices that they erect during their lives. Oh, what a pity
that the greatest king, and the most virtuous, should be measured by the
standard of Versailles! And there is always this misfortune to fear."

But the King, like many another great monarch, had dreamed a dream. He
was not satisfied with Paris as a residence. So he told Colbert to make
his dream of Versailles come true--and Colbert had to find some way to
pay the cost.

An irritating cause of the King's purpose lay in the fact that he was
incited by the splendors of the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built by his
ill-fated minister, Fouquet. Louis determined to surpass that mansion by
one so much more elaborate as to crush it into insignificance. Nicholas
Fouquet had employed the most renowned masters of this period--among them
Louis Le Vau, the architect, Andre Le Notre, the landscape gardener, and
Charles Lebrun, the decorator. These were the men the King summoned to
transform the modest hunting villa of his father. At the truly gorgeous
chateau of his minister