Samuel Bernard (financier)

His family was Protestant, but his father, according to the apocryphal memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, "had embraced the sect of Arminius [and] had been forced into exile."

In order that the King would not have to stoop to receive the financier in an audience, the Controller-General of Finances, Nicolas Desmarets (1648-1721), carefully choreographed a meeting which took place at Marly.

I wasn't the only one who admired this trick by which the King, so miserly with his words, prostituted himself to a man of Bernard's kind.Bernard returned dazzled from this walk, and Desmarets secured from him all the funding that he needed.

On December 29, 1719, he had effectively acquired the land of Coubert (Seine-et-Marne) with its château, which he had rebuilt from 1724 to 1727, possibly by Germain Boffrand.

Samuel Bernard was first married to Magdelaine Clergeau, then remarried in 1720 to Miss de Saint-Chamans, sister of one of his daughters-in-law.