The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  Poorer members of the nobility were often ruined by life at Versailles. Everything there was expensive and appearances had to be kept up. The King liked to see his courtiers well turned out — elegant clothes in those days cost a fortune, although, since the fashions changed slowly, they could be worn for years. On special occasions, such as a royal marriage, he would let it be known that he would like everybody to appear in new clothes; and then there would be scramble for tailors, dressmakers and embroiderers whom the courtiers shamelessly bribed away from each other. The best embroidery was done by men; and the masters of the craft, M. l’Herminot and the brothers Delobel, had grace and favour lodgings in the Louvre. When people felt they could no longer meet the expenses of life in the château they looked to the King for lucrative sinecures or even presents of cash. These benefits were generally obtained through the mistresses, who, in their turn, took a percentage. The King did not at all mind being importuned in this way, since the people concerned were thereafter in his power. Anyhow, the courtiers who lived on their wits were in the minority: most were decent, ambitious people drawn to Versailles by a desire to get on in the army, to find suitable husbands and wives for their children, and by a very natural love of fashionable society.

  Those who think of the nobles at Versailles as hundreds of idle fellows, with nothing to do but gossip, take part in ceremonies, hunt, gamble and make love sometimes forget that the able-bodied men of military age there were all serving soldiers. It is true that they led an extremely agreeable life in the winter, but as soon as the days drew out they rode off to the front to vie with each other in deeds of valour; and Versailles was left to women, old men, and those whom the King thought unsuitable for army commands. In fact the château was a general headquarters, and the town as full of barracks as any garrison town. The Court was run with military precision; the King himself was so punctual and so regular in his habits that it was said that, in any part of the world, with a reliable watch, one would know exactly what he was doing at any particular moment. The iron etiquette, which has been made to seem so absurd, was a necessary discipline if an assembly of between two and five thousand people was to live harmoniously under the same roof. As Commander-in-Chief, he liked to keep the officers under his eye; they were the men to whom he entrusted his country’s security and he wished to observe their comportment, to know them and for them to know him. Many of the couriers had lost an arm, a leg or an eye at the wars, and were lucky to be alive, since a serious wound in those days often led to an agonizing death by blood poisoning.

  Superficially, it is true, the wars were fought in rather a civilized way. For one thing, nobody ever thought of campaigning in the winter. Many of the operations were sieges: the taking of fortified towns was brought to a fine art by Vauban, the engineer who became Marshal of France. As soon as a town was in French hands Vauban would set to work and re-design the ramparts, after which they were supposed to be invulnerable. His fortifications were of a supreme elegance; when the King wanted to be agreeable to Lord Portland he sent him to look at ‘our beautiful strong-places in the north’.

  When Louis XIV was besieging Lille in 1667, the Comte de Brouais, the enemy commander defending the city, heard that the French had noice, so he sent some over for the King every morning. After a while, the King asked to see the officer who brought it and told him he could do with a little more. (At Versailles the courtiers required five pounds of ice a day each, in the summer.) Brouais sent a message back to say that the siege was going to last many months and as he would not like to think of the King without ice he was economizing the supply. The Duc de Charost who was there shouted out ‘Yes, and tell Brouais not to surrender like the Governor of Douai’. The King said, laughing, ‘Duc de Charost, are you mad?’ ‘No, Sire, I’m thinking of my family honour — Brouais is my cousin.’

  But, for all this bonhomie, the wars were bloody and many families were wiped out in them. M. de Saint-Abré who lay with his son beside him, both dying on the field, wrote to the King: ‘Sire, my son and I have lost our lives in the same battle. This is an end according to the rules and I believe that Your Majesty will be satisfied with both of us.’ Nobody who had witnessed them was likely to forget the heartrending scenes when news came of Condé’s successful crossing of the Rhine under enemy fire in 1672. Half the jeunesse dorée had been drowned or shot down in that engagement.

  The King was regarded as the Viceroy of the Almighty. In his chapel he worshipped God; and the courtiers, their backs turned to the altar, worshipped him. They treated him like a God, a father, a mistress — the mistress element was very strong. The King has not looked at one for two days. This is bad, but might be due to an exterior circumstance — if the two days are extended to eight there must be some sinister reason. One then asked for an audience in the hopes of finding out what was wrong (though of course in the heart of hearts one generally knew). If the quarrel was made up, the repentant lover embraced the King’s knees. The look, out of half-shut eyes, was bestowed every day on hundreds of people all of whom the King knew all about. He knew their genealogies by heart. Absentees were noticed at once; it was most unwise to play truant and leave the château without asking permission, which was granted fairly readily to those who wanted to go and see their estates but not often granted to those who thought of having two or three days’ jollity at Paris. He hated the courtiers to go to Paris. In order to keep them at Versailles he arranged a constant flow of entertainments, amusing in themselves and absence from which would be social death. Events in the King’s own family, births and marriages and even deaths rated high as entertainment and in the ceremonies which marked these occasions most of the courtiers had some part to play. The great nobles were tied down by the daily ceremonies, the King’s lever, coucher and débotter (when he changed after hunting), his dinner (always in public) and the procession to the Chapel, which took a long time as then petitions and also outside people who wanted to pay their court were presented. Once a week the foreign ambassadors, who lived in Paris, came to visit him, using the beautiful staircase which Louis XV was to destroy.

  In 1682 the King’s day at Versailles was as follows. He got up in the presence of Princes of the Blood and certain courtiers, with a good deal of ceremony, between eight and nine; and when he was dressed he went straight to the room next to his bedroom, where he worked with his ministers. They were few in number, never more than three or four. This was to prevent leakages of information and to exclude the Princes of the Blood. Monsieur was only allowed to attend an unimportant council which took place every other week. The Dauphin was kept out of everything. At twelve-thirty, the King went to Mass in a temporary chapel with the Queen and the whole Court. This took an hour and when it was over he visited Athénaïs de Montespan and stayed with her until dinner time at about two o’clock. He dined alone with the Queen, eating a meal composed of four plates of different soups, a whole pheasant and a whole partridge or chicken or duck (according to what game or poultry was in season) stuffed with truffles, a huge quantity of salad, some mutton, two good slices or ham, a dish of pastry, raw fruit, compotes and preserves. His appetite astounded the onlookers and frightened the doctors. Mme de Maintenon said if she ate half as much as he did she would be dead in a week. (At his autopsy, he was found to have a vast stomach and bowels twice the usual length.)

  On hunting days he either heard Mass early and went out afterwards, or hunted after dinner until sundown — he hunted more in summer than in winter and in warm weather was out of doors nearly all day. When he came in, he went to Mme de Maintenon, spending more and more time with her as years went on. He supped with the Queen at about ten-thirty and then went back to Athénaïs where he stayed until midnight or later, but was never alone with her after the birth of Toulouse. When there was Appartement, which began at seven, he spent about two hours there and then went to Mme de Maintenon. On Good Friday and Easter Day, the royal family were in church all day.

  In writing about the Versailles of Louis XIV, it
seems impossible not to speak of the destructions and alterations which have so greatly spoilt his beautiful creation. Apart from the lifelessness in a place intended to be occupied by an elegant, bustling crowd, which makes it seem like a house which has been too long to let, with the tourists and their guides in the rôle of prospective buyers being shown round by knowledgeable housekeepers, the material damage through the ages has been incalculable. What we see today is but the shadow of what has been. For instance, there are only three hundred jets of water in the gardens now, as compared to fifteen hundred in the time of Louis XIV. The King himself very soon sent his silver furniture to be melted down to pay for national defence. It was not an economically sound thing to do: the furniture, having cost ten million livres in the first place, only fetched three for the metal and many people thought he would have done better to sell his diamonds. But he never would do that; he liked to see the women of his family covered with them, more covered as the financial situation deteriorated, as a sort of defiance to the foreign visitors and the ambassadors. The King also destroyed the Grotte de Thétis, an exquisite folly which he had built in the very early days and whose place was needed for the North wing.

  Louis XV, though most respectful of his great-grandfather’s house — surprisingly so for somebody whose chief interest and pleasure was building — did not leave it entirely alone. He put a flat for his daughter, Mme Adélaïde, where the Ambassadors’ staircase had been and gutted Louis XIV’s private suite on the Cour de Marbre to make rooms in the new taste for himself and his family. These Petits Appartements are so exquisite that he must be forgiven, but his architect, Gabriel, made unfortunate additions to the east front, and would have completely altered it if money had not been short. Little harm was done by Marie-Antoinette, also mercifully short of cash. But at the Revolution all the furniture and furnishings were sold, and dispersed to the four corners of Europe, in a public sale in the château which lasted a year. Worse was to come. Louis-Philippe saved the house from being pulled down, and that is to his honour, but then what dreadful work ensued! The bedevilment of the view from the town, first impression of most visitors, begun by Gabriel, is completed by a horrible nineteenth-century equestrian statue in the Cour Royale; by a lowering of the level in the Cour de Marbre so that the marble columns of Louis XIII’s château are suspended in mid-air instead of having their feet on the ground; and by the removal of the railings between the two courtyards. Inside the château, wherever the stodgy monogram LP appears instead of the lovely Ls, it means that the Citizen King has passed that way. He gutted the flats of the princes and the nobles, who had vied with each other in the beauty of their decoration; he destroyed the Dauphin’s and Mme de Pompadour’s apartments, tearing down the walls to make huge, boring picture galleries. He had intended to make a museum in Paris for the boiseries which he ripped out but after the revolution of 1848 many were sold; the rest were eventually burnt in stoves by German soldiers billeted at Versailles in 1871. Louis-Philippe put a vile staircase where there used to be a courtyard, making nonsense of the windows which look over it. He tried to reconstitute the furnishings of Louis XIV’s bedroom from memory. These had been piously kept by Louis XV and Louis XVI so that, as a young prince at the Court of Louis XVI, Louis-Philippe had known them well. But he had no eye whatever and the result was a joke.

  8. THE GRAND DAUPHIN

  C’est un terrible avantage de n’avoir rien fait mais il ne faut pas en abuser

  RIVAROL

  When the King moved into Versailles for good he was in his early forties and the pattern of his life was changing; he was soon to be a grandfather. Louis XIV’s only legitimate child, his first-born, was known as the Grand Dauphin and addressed as ‘Monsieur’. Grand meant tall, not Great as in the case of the Grand Condé. He was more like an Austrian archduke than a French prince, fair, handsome until he got fat and naturally good. His servants adored him but he was shy with the upper classes and therefore not well known to or appreciated by them. After a dreadful childhood, the Grand Dauphin probably led the most agreeable life of any human being since the world began. Although, once he had escaped from his cruel masters, he never opened a book or read anything but the births and deaths in the Gazette, he was by no means a fool, and was quick to notice absurdities including his own. His philosophical attitude was remarkable and he was exactly the son to suit Louis XIV. He knew quite well that his father would never allow him any say in public affairs, so he was careful not to show the slightest interest in them — he arranged his existence to suit himself. He loved and patronized music; all novelties were played first to him. He had a passion for works of art and collected them with taste and knowledge; when he went to Paris, which he did two or three times a week, it was to attend the Opéra and rummage in what were then called the curiosity shops. The King’s present to him on his twentieth birthday, in 1681, was fifty thousand écus with which to buy pictures. Very soon his collection of bibelots, furniture (especially Boulle) and old masters became one of the attractions at Versailles and nobody could pretend to have seen all the glories there unless he had visited the cabinets of the Dauphin. Indeed they became so popular that he was obliged, for the sake of privacy, to arrange other rooms for himself, giving on to an interior courtyard. One of these, where he used to play cards, was called his caveau; it communicated with his father’s room by a little secret stair in the wall dating from the time of Louis XIII.

  The Dauphin’s apartment, on the ground floor facing south and west, was the most desirable of any in the château. His prospect was all light and air and pleasure, decorative vases, orange trees, sky reflected in water, woodland in every direction as far as the eye could see. Elegant people strolled about in front of his windows, their gossip and laughter mingled with country noises: the fountains, the frogs, the cuckoo, owl and nightingale and gardeners grunting over their work. The rooms were a marvel of decoration; one of them was entirely by Boulle, including the parquet which was designed round the Dauphin’s monogram; the walls and ceiling were of looking-glass, framed in ebony and gold. His bedroom was gold, white and blue, with Poussin’s Triomphe de Flore over the chimney-piece. Mme de Montespan gave him curtains for it, specially embroidered at the Convent of St Joseph, in which she took an interest.

  The Grand Dauphin liked campaigning in his youth and the soldiers loved him — he was brave and generous, truly interested in their well-being. He gave money, whenever he could, to improve their condition. It was known that when he wrote to the King, he expressed concern at the wretched state of the foot-sloggers and that he never forgot to mention those officers who had distinguished themselves in action.

  Best of all he liked riding to hounds. He went out after the wolf, accompanied as often as not by his aunt, Madame, every day as soon as Mass was over; sometimes he would stay out long after nightfall and ride home in the early hours. He killed all the wolves in the Ile de France so that before his own death the species was extinct there; he once accounted for six in a single day. One famous old wolf, however, was too cunning for him: he went after it at least nine times but it always escaped. So, in these pleasant, enviable ways he passed his existence, while tranquilly waiting to become the greatest king on earth.

  The Grand Dauphin had his eccentricities, one of which was his preference for ugly women. His father naturally wanted him to marry as soon as possible, but there was no obviously suitable princess available — luckily for his posterity no female Spaniard, which was what the King would have liked, since genetic considerations seldom influenced royal alliances. The Spanish royal family was now in full decadence; Queen Marie-Thérèse of France and her sister the Archduchess of Austria were really its last sane members. Philip IV, their father, had not been exactly normal. When Louis XIV went to Saint-Jean de Luz to fetch Marie-Thérèse away, the news had gone round that the Spanish King could only digest human milk. The French courtiers, who never could take anything very seriously, flocked to his dinner table pretending to hope that they would find h
im struggling with his wet-nurse. It was a miracle that the Dauphin, whose mother and grandmother were both of that stock, turned out quite all right.

  The King was obliged to look to Germany for a daughter-in-law. He had a treaty with the Elector of Bavaria, whose daughter, Princess Victoire, was of a marriageable age. Her mother was a Savoy and she descended from Henri IV in the same degree as the Dauphin; she seemed eligible. Colbert de Croissy, a clever, worldly man, at one time ambassador to the English king, was sent off to have a look at her. As Louis XIV needed heirs, it was essential that the Dauphine should not repel her husband; he particularly enjoined upon Croissy to tell the truth about the girl and her looks. Croissy’s report was a masterpiece of tact. He began his letter to the King by saying that there was nothing absolutely shocking in her appearance. Her skin was rather sallow, with brown stains on the forehead, but no doubt she was not yet very clever at making up her face. Her eyes were not a salient feature — they were neither large nor small, neither sparkling nor languorous. Her hands were red, but her lips were not; her teeth fairly regular but rotten. The fatness of her nose, which was bulbous at the tip, was not exactly a deformity. On receipt of this letter, the King sent his painter, de Troy, to Munich with instructions to make a truthful portrait of the young lady. In due course the picture arrived; the whole of the royal family gathered to look at it; the verdict was, ‘not bad at all’. Unfortunately there was also a letter from Croissy saying that the portrait was absurdly flattering. The nose, he repeated, was fat.

  The King was now inclined to get out of the marriage. But the more the Dauphin heard about the fat nose, the brown stains and the red hands the more determined did he become to marry Princess Victoire. Last month, says Madame, he had no wish to marry; now he thinks of nothing else, it is very strange. Probably he wanted his own establishment, to get away from his tutors. At last he overcame his father’s hesitations and the Princess was duly sent for (1680). When she arrived, word went round that the King wished her to be admired, so no more was heard about the fat nose. She was certainly very ugly and this was bad luck on her, in a Court where nearly all the women were beauties, but there were some admirable qualities. She was well-educated, spoke perfect French and Italian, was a good, graceful dancer and a clean eater. The King appointed Mme de Maintenon to be one of her ladies — an unfortunate choice because as Germans always are, the new Dauphine was implacable on the subject of birth. She leagued together with her cousin, Madame, to make the lives of various courtiers who had an insufficiency of ancestors a misery to them; and they both firmly refused to be civil to Mme de Maintenon.