The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  More serious objections were put forward by Colbert, the King’s chief political adviser. Backed up by Chancelier Séguier, a grand old man for whom Louis had considerable respect. Colbert wanted to see the King of France living in his capital. Quite naturally, in that age of building, Louis XIV would want a modern country residence, but why choose Versailles? In the early days Colbert had no notion of what the house would become; even so he grudged the money and the manpower which, in his view, ought to have been used to make the Louvre a fitting residence for a great King. But Louis had no intention of living in Paris. He was not afraid of the Parisians as has sometimes been said — fear was left out of his nature. Nor did he neglect Paris; on the contrary he lavished care and attention on all aspects of its development, turning it from a medieval slum into a beautiful and supremely habitable city. True he had no intention of allowing another Fronde, the civil war between the great nobles which had raged during his childhood putting him, his mother and his brother in awkward, if not dangerous, situations. Too much stress may have been laid on the traumatic effect the Fronde had on the King’s young psychology; no doubt it was his policy to keep power out of the hands of the aristocrats, and he liked to have them under his eye, but with his dominating personality he could have done so wherever he chose to hold his court; that was not a question of geography.

  Louis XIV was a country person. He excelled at all sport and could hardly bear to be indoors; he spent hours every day hunting or shooting. The year before his death he brought down thirty-two pheasants with thirty-four shots, a considerable feat with the primitive gun of those days. He thought nothing of riding from Fountainebleau to Paris, going to see the building in progress at the Louvre and Vincennes, dining with his brother at Saint-Cloud, inspecting the improvements there and riding back to Fountainebleau. In old age he became more and more interested in gardens. Such a man would have been miserable, cooped up in a town.

  Having fallen in love with Versailles the King never made the mistake of improving away the very atmosphere which had attracted him in the first place. He built the greatest palace on earth but it always remained the home of a young man, grand without being pompous, full of light and air and cheerfulness — a country house. Indeed it is called le Château, never le Palais. (Château in French means gentleman’s seat, a castle is château-fort.) To begin with he did more work in the gardens than in the house, following the lines already laid out by Louis XIII, greatly enlarged and elaborated and with the addition of much water; he added more and more green rooms which led off the central alley or tapis vert and which he used for ever larger, more elaborate parties. These had nothing in common with the fêtes champêtres of the next century; there was no whiff of hay, the farmyard played no part in them; nature was kept in her place and the trellised drawing-rooms were decorated and furnished with oriental luxury. It may be imagined how passionately invitations to these parties were desired; the King had already begun to enslave his nobility by playing on the French love of fashion. In 1664 he gave a fête called Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchantée which lasted from 7 to 13 May. This really caused more pain than pleasure for the guests had nowhere to sleep and were obliged to doss down as best they could in local cottages and stables. In 1665 he was spending one day a week at Versailles, generally coming over from Saint-Germain to see how the work was getting on, to hang a few pictures in the house, run round the gardens and then divert himself with his friends.

  This was the time of Bernini’s visit. He was invited to France to make plans for finishing the Louvre which was then an amorphous cluster of buildings, of many different dates, more like a village than a palace. The King was bent on tidying up Paris and he succeeded with the town but there has always been something unsatisfactory about the Louvre, beautiful as are many of its component parts. Bernini’s plans were not liked; the King thought them too baroque, unsuitable for the sober skies of northern France, while Colbert raised practical difficulties such as where would the servants sleep? How was the food to be brought from the kitchens? The King got on well with Bernini, cleverly allowing him to think that his failure was all Colbert’s doing; but Bernini was rude and arrogant with the French artists, architects and civil servants, whom he thoroughly disliked and who loathed him — the old story of Frenchmen and Italians unable to appreciate each other’s merits. After some months he went home, loaded with money and thanks; his voyage would have been a waste of time had he not made a bust of Louis XIV which is one of the greatest treasures of Versailles and the only effigy to illustrate contemporary descriptions of the King’s appearance.

  Unfortunately the pictures of Louis XIV are not attractive, possibly because of the periwig which always seems frowsty, very different from the flowing curls of the bust. If one looks carefully at the face it often has a humorous and kindly aspect (for instance in the Mignard of the Louvre) but is never handsome — in some portraits it is decidedly oriental (Louis XIV most probably had both Jewish and Moorish blood through the Aragons). But the many people who wrote about him at first hand, either, like the Venetian ambassadors, to describe him to their governments (a physical description of those in power was considered important) or in diaries or memoirs intended to be published after his death, if at all, or in letters, do not seem to have noticed an alien or exotic look. They agree that he was tall and dark, with an excellent figure, perfect legs, feet and hands, small but brilliant eyes which he hardly ever opened wide but which gave the impression, truly, of seeing everything. The salient feature was his nose; it was a good shape, though rather pinched above the nostrils; it only became Jewish when he was old. All speak of his noble look and extraordinary grace; he never made an ill-considered or meaningless gesture so that he seemed like a deity (or, according to some, an actor of genius ever on the stage). These characteristics are evident in Bernini’s bust and such was the appearance of Louis XIV. It is to be hoped that his strange character will emerge during the course of this book.

  He was delighted with the bust and commissioned an equestrian statue of himself which Bernini was to create at his leisure when he got back to Rome. It arrived at Versailles some nineteen years later and was unpacked in the Orangery. The King hated it. He prided himself on his excellent horsemanship and thought that he was portrayed as sitting all wrong in the saddle. He wanted to break up the statue. In the end he got Coysevox to make a few alterations so that it appeared to represent, not the Sun King but a Roman emperor and banished it to the end of the Pièce d’Eau des Suisses where it still is, gloriously beautiful in spite of a near-by railway line, much litter and the scribblings of Versailles plebeians. It is too seldom visited.

  The King’s existence as a grown-up, independent man only began in 1666 after the death of Anne of Austria. She was old enough to have been his grandmother, having been married for twenty-three years when he was born, and was a highly civilized, polite person whom he greatly admired. She held a court better than any queen in Europe and had always been too lazy, or too clever, to have anything to do with politics. During the long minority of Louis XIV, who came to the throne when he was five, she had left the conduct of affairs entirely in the hands of Cardinal Mazarin who was perhaps her lover, possibly her husband. It was a measure of Louis XIV’s own exquisite politeness that he waited to become the ruler of France until the Cardinal had died in 1661 — unlike his ancestor, the Emperor Charles V, in similar circumstances. He was careful, too, never to shock his mother or hurt her feelings — his mistress and bastards were carefully kept out of her way. He knew that she feared petticoat influence for him.

  Anne of Austria’s death was distressing; she was eaten with cancer. At the end, when the King and Queen knelt, weeping, by her bed she murmured: ‘Such children—.’ But really they were both twenty-eight, not children at all. Queen Marie-Thérèse had good reason to cry, her best friend was leaving her. She was Anne’s brother’s daughter and the King’s first cousin twice over since her mother was the sister of Louis XIII; Anne was fond of her, perhaps
the only person in France who was, and always took her part. The King, with whom, unfortunately for her, she was in love all her life, was not bred to be a faithful husband, either on the Spanish or on the French side. The family tree of the Aragons is an amazing succession of illegitimacies while in France it had long been the custom for the King to have a wife and a declared mistress who was almost a second queen. Henri IV’s bastards, powerful dukes, were a living proof of this as they swaggered about the Court; the last of his sons only died in 1682.

  As soon as his mother’s sufferings were over, the King stopped crying. (In the whole of his long life he was only to be affected by one death, that of the Duchesse de Bourgogne.) He immediately recognized Mlle de La Vallière as his titular mistress, made her a duchess and legitimized their baby daughter, Marie-Anne. Their first child had just died at the age of three; he had been called Louis de Bourbon, with no title. Modest Louise, who blushed to be a mistress, a mother, a duchess, was now brought into the glare of public life; it did not suit her. She was a woman to be kept hidden away, visited by moonlight at her house in the rue de la Pompe, at Versailles or encountered as by chance in some forest glade while the hunt went crashing by — a simple country girl, an excellent rider, puzzled and perplexed in the Byzantine atmosphere of the Court, though by no means averse from the financial benefits to be picked up there. She is supposed to have been responsible for more placets (petitions to the King usually concerned with obtaining some lucrative sinecure, which were a feature of Court life), on all of which she took a comfortable percentage, than any of the other mistresses. In the early days of love, when she ought to have been happy, since the King, whom she worshipped, was at her feet, her large blue eyes used to fill with tears for no particular reason. Then her tears had melted his heart; now they bored him. Inadequate in the rôle of declared mistress, she was not the mate for a Sun King.

  The King seems to have put off his major schemes for Versailles until after his mother’s death. This occurred during the Guerre de Dévolution with which he sought to implement his wife’s claim to the succession of the Spanish Netherlands. Having conquered Flanders and signed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) he set to work in earnest on his house. He gave a Divertissement to say good-bye to the old establishment, during which Molière produced his George Dandin for the first time. Three hundred of the women present were invited to a sit-down supper. Louise de La Vallière, pregnant, melancholy and dull, was next the King; his look was not upon her but on another table which the Marquise de Montespan and Mme Scarron, her great friend, were keeping in a buzz of laughter. They were the two liveliest women in society at that time. Years later, people remembering the Divertissement said it had contained the past, the present and the future.

  The pattern of the King’s three principal love affairs was the same, the new mistress was provided unwittingly by the existing one. When his flirtation with his sister-in-law Madame (Henrietta of England) began to cause gossip she told him to pretend that he was courting one of her ladies, Louise de La Vallière for instance. The pretence became reality. He had not cared for Mme de Montespan at first but Louise could not be without her. He saw her every day and she was determined to conquer him; she stirred up Satan himself and triumphed. As she was the most beautiful and most brilliant woman at the Court she ought to have been able to succeed without the help of such a compromising ally, but it is a curious fact that she was making no headway until she brought him into the affair. Then Mme Scarron, the future Mme de Maintenon, was thrust upon the King by Mme de Montespan. He could not endure her but she stirred up God and triumphed in her turn, though she took longer. Louise de Le Vallière was the youngest of the three, three years younger than Mme de Montespan who was six years younger than Mme Scarron. None of these women really shared the King’s aesthetic tastes. Mme de Montespan patronized artists in a desultory way; the others took no interest in the arts — indeed Mme de Maintenon grudged the money which was spent on beautifying the King’s houses; Louis XIV never had a Mme de Pompadour.

  A few days after the Divertissement, Versailles was given over to workmen and what was called the enveloppe put in hand. The King had decided, with the collaboration of Le Vau, to envelop his father’s house, like a precious jewel, in his own. Le Vau left the east front of brick and stone as it was, flanking it with wings and leading up to it with pavilions which were to house the ministers. For the west, or garden side, he designed a new stone front in a more majestic manner, to consist of two wings joined by a terrace on the first floor. The King also turned his attention to the town. It was laid out by Le Nôtre and land was given to people who undertook to build houses to an approved specification. Three wide avenues starring out from the Place d’Armes were planted.

  During the years which followed the Divertissement of 1668, the King gave himself over to his favourite occupations, war and building. Having bought the alliance of his English cousin Charles II, he set about conquering Holland. In those days it was hardly realized that if two rich countries lived side by side in peace, greater prosperity for both could result. A state of war was the natural condition of nations; during the whole of the seventeenth century there were only seven years of peace in Europe. As soon as trade began to expand, it was choked off by cut-throat quarrels.

  Co-operation with the Dutch did occur to Louis. He offered his baby daughter Marie-Anne to be the wife of William of Orange and received a humiliating rebuff. William said that in his family one married the legitimate daughters of kings, not their bastards. (He was the son of one Mary Stuart and about to be the husband of another.) So Marie-Anne stayed at home, married the Prince de Conti and became an ornament of her father’s court. Louis XIV, always touchy on the subject of his illegitimate family, never forgave William the insult. He had three further reasons for disliking the Dutch: the republicanism which seemed ingrained in their character, their Protestantism and their pamphlets. His own press was strictly censored, but disagreeable observations on himself, his policy and his family never stopped coming off the printing presses of The Hague and Amsterdam. Furthermore he was always obsessed by the Rhine. His foreign policy never altered in its main objective which was to secure, as France’s frontiers, the Rhine, the mountains and the sea. Leibniz was forever saying that Louis XIV had no need to fight for France to become mistress of the world and rich beyond dreams, he only had to stay quietly within his existing frontiers; but that if he must go to war, to occupy the young men, why not do so in other parts of the globe? Egypt, Asia and America were all waiting to be conquered, far more interesting prizes than a few German villages. But Louis cared not a fig for these exotic places and who, nowadays, can blame him for that? It was the frontiers that interested him, the mountains and above all the Rhine. Each time his eye slid down this river on the map he was annoyed to be reminded of little Holland. He put on his feathered hat and went off with his great generals Condé and Turenne to bring her down. When he thought he had succeeded and was within sight of Amsterdam, the brave Dutch opened the dykes and the King found himself at the edge of an inland sea. Holland was saved, though at a dreadful cost. Various countries now came to her assistance and the tide turned very slightly against the French. Under the leadership of William of Orange the Dutch were never conquered, though there were at least two occasions on which Louis seemed to have them in his power. Each time he turned away at the crucial moment: as usual with him there was no explanation. The year 1675 saw the death of Turenne, killed in battle to the despair of his soldiers who loved him so much that the whole French army was sobbing and crying that night. This loss was followed by the retirement of Condé. The Peace of Nimeguen, 1679, gave Louis XIV Franche-Comté and most of the Spanish Netherlands; it marked the apogee of his military glory.

  Meanwhile Versailles had become an enormous workshop. The house was covered with scaffolding and buried in dust: the gardens were like a quarry, full of mud, stones, drain-pipes, men and horses. Thousands of good-sized forest trees were being planted; those w
hich died, about half, were immediately replaced. Marble and bronze statues lay about waiting for the King to say where he wanted them. He was in such a hurry to see the results that the building still suffers from hasty, ill-completed work. He dragged the Court there from time to time; the courtiers slept where they could and he himself was not comfortable. By the grandeur of the new schemes it was beginning to be clear that Versailles was intended to be one of the main royal residences.

  At this time France, in the words of Lord Macaulay, had ‘over the surrounding countries at once the ascendancy which Rome had over Greece and the ascendancy which Greece had over Rome’. Louis XIV’s great house was to be the outward and visible sign of that ascendancy.

  2. THE BUILDERS

  C’est la voix de génie de toutes les sortes qui parle au tombeau de Louis; on n’entend, au tombeau de Napoléon, que la voix de Napoléon.

  CHATEAUBRIAND

  There were four men without whose collaboration the King could never have built Versailles: Colbert, Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun. They were all much older than he, must indeed have seemed to him like old men; remarkable as they were, he dominated them and was the spirit of the whole tremendous enterprise. He knew exactly what he wanted; his eye had been trained by Mazarin who had surrounded him in childhood with beautiful objects, and he had a personal taste which developed and improved year by year, stamping itself on everything he undertook.