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A Surgeon With 300% Mortality Rate From a Single Operation and Other Historic Screwups

Khalid Elhassan October 11, 2020 32 min

Robert Liston - Surgery — Dr. Robert Liston operating. Wellcome Images

13. A Minister’s Mistake

Vatel’s first aristocratic employer, Nicolas Fouquet. Wikimedia

In 1661, Francois Vatel supervised the grandiloquent inauguration fete of Fouquet’s chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte – now a famous tourist site southeast of Paris. Vatel did an amazing job, and the fete was a splendid affair. It was a triumph for Vatel, but a catastrophe for his employer, Fouquet. The festivities turned out to be too splendid, and that was a mistake: King Louis XIV grew jealous of his finance minister’s opulence. The king fired Fouquet and threw him in jail, charged him with maladministration of state funds and lese majeste, and kept him locked up until his death in 1680.

The Grande Conde, who hired Francois Vatel after the chef’s previous employer was imprisoned. Wikimedia

Out of a job, Vatel did not remain unemployed for long – apparently, throwing a party so great as to arouse the Sun King’s jealousy and ruin one’s boss was a CV plus in the French aristocracy’s eyes. He was quickly snatched up by Prince Louis II de Bourbon-Conde, also known as the Grand Conde, who made Vatel his master chef and majordomo.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.