Le Vau came out of a Paris family of master masons and made his name on the Île Saint-Louis, building hôtels for financiers before Nicolas Fouquet handed him Vaux-le-Vicomte. There he assembled the team — Charles Le Brun for the painted interiors, André Le Nôtre for the garden — that Louis XIV would take over intact after Fouquet's fall. Appointed Premier architecte du roi in 1654, he rebuilt the court of the Louvre, raised the domed Collège des Quatre-Nations on the opposite bank of the Seine, and wrapped Versailles in the stone envelope that turned a hunting lodge into a palace. His plans push oval and domed salons straight through the depth of the block, so that the centre of a building swells outward and can be read from the garden in a single glance.
