To know by heart!

This is one of those books you would like to learn by heart, as it is bright and intelligent, lightweight and strong, like a thrilling adventure story, and solid as a university thesis, as it is full of beautiful pictures, happy formulas , Funky shortcuts. Some xenophobic impulses spoil some pages, and portraits of the King and Colbert are somewhat responsible and blackened, but we feel that Morand loves his character undivided love, as we love a great ideal brother, to which all is forgiven and makes you hate everything the dessert.

A book that is less a biography moreover, in the sense of chronological narrative, a huge portrait of 180 pages, moral and psychological portrait, historical and cultural human Fouquet, the pretty and attractive man, the Financial conjurer, the carefree Minister of the infallible esthete, the true creator of a style and an era, it is in any case the thesis of Paul Morand, and one is tempted to follow this route, as Fouquet seems, indeed, to have embodied a decade (1650-166O), a pivotal decade between Fronde and Absolutism, between baroque Italianate and French classicism, between carefree aristocratic and bourgeois stiffness. For the Sun King is a very bourgeois king behind his pomp with his attendance at work, his ability to conceal his taste for the facade of respectability.
Fouquet closes a time, Louis XIV opens another. There was not room for two contradictory personalities as; the dilettante and laborious, reckless and stuffy, the creator and the copier, the second which must hate the first of which he felt the unsurpassed superiority.

A book that fills much the history buff than fine literature, but, of course, is not the first book to read on Fouquet or the takeover by Louis XIV, Paul Morand considering the subject and adventures as known, is not embarrassing details of time and always up to the crucial, to the bottom of things and events.