Featured: The Triumph of Fidelity
Five times a year, I share my writing in Cultivating, a lovely publication offered by Cultivating Oaks Press. Each edition is an absolute feast for the soul. Here are the opening few paragraphs of my essay about my grandpa’s example of faithfulness for the Autumn 2025 edition exploring Fidelity. You can read the full version of my article exclusively in the online edition. While you’re there, I hope you will enjoy the thoughtful, deep work of my fellow Cultivators. They are kind, wise, and stay close to Jesus’s side, and they have beautiful words to offer. Enjoy!
During the reign of French King Louis XIV, one of the king’s courtiers, Nicholas Fouquet, used his family’s immense wealth to build a grand chateau in hopes of garnering the king’s favor. He designed the chateau with the lofty ambition of reflecting the glory of the king and of France, and with the hope that his extravagant loyalty would be richly rewarded with a more influential position for himself. With lush gardens, Baroque architecture, and interiors that were, floor to ceiling, a work of art, his Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte was an influential and enviable achievement of architecture and grandeur.
To some, though, it all seemed just a little too luxurious and impressive. A political rival of Fouquet wondered aloud to King Louis XIV how exactly Fouquet, who in addition to his family wealth had unequaled access to the king’s treasury as Superintendent of Finance, had afforded a home of such opulence. The insinuation was clear, and though there was no evidence against Fouquet, the seed was planted in the king’s mind.
On August 17, 1661, in an over-the-top gesture of flattery and loyalty to the king, Fouquet arranged for a grand fête at the chateau in his honor. The unmatched lavishness of the party was all the evidence the king needed to see, and, at the repeated prompting of Fouquet’s political rival, he ordered Fouquet to be arrested for embezzlement. Fouquet was later sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire, who was in attendance at the party, later wrote:
“On August 17, at six in the evening Fouquet was King of France. At two in the morning, he was nobody.”[1]
The fated fête that marked Fouquet’s fall from grace, his calculated display of loyalty gone terribly wrong, took place under the frescoed ceiling featuring the Charles Le Brun painting that Fouquet had commissioned, which was named, ironically, “The Triumph of Fidelity.”[2]