Colbert was committed to maintaining Paris as the centre of power, and for years he had been urging the King to fix and finish the enormous Louvre. At first the King had complied, though without much conviction. A covey of architectural wizards had been brought in to present their plans, most famously the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini, reluctantly venturing from his beloved Rome to chilly Paris—nothing but “a heap of chimneys,” to his sophisticated Italian eyes. As might have been predicted, Colbert had found Bernini too “artistic,” Bernini had found Colbert too practical, Louis had found Bernini arrogant, and Bernini had found Louis the same: the result was the gradual abandonment of the Louvre to lesser mortals.
In later days it would be said that it was not the Louvre but the city of Paris itself that Louis had rejected, reminding him, as it must have done, of his precarious boyhood during the years of the Fronde. “Paris being the capital of the kingdom and the seat of the King, it is certain that it sets the pace for all the rest of the country,” Colbert had insisted to his son. But in absolutist France, it was not Paris or any other city, but simply wherever the King was, that set the pace. Where the court went, so went the life and soul of the country. The difficult, gloomy, unfinished Louvre was undoubtedly a factor in Louis’s decision in favour of Versailles, and certainly, apart from demolishing it completely, which was several times considered, it could never have been remodelled according to his taste. But also, the Louvre was an urban palace, inescapably planted in the middle of the “heap of chimneys” and everything else that made up the ever-expanding city, and Louis was quintessentially a man of the country, physical, sporting, loving the open spaces, knocking down walls and throwing open windows wherever he went. Early and prolonged anxiety about political disorder had overlain his natural egotism with a mania for control, but, the planning and plotting behind him, he was happiest outside, a good horseman, a passionate hunter, but also a connoisseur of the delights of a simple afternoon stroll in park or garden.
The Tuileries palace had a garden, a very fine garden, in fact, which Louis had once planned to extend with avenues of trees stretching to “the heights of Chaillot”—two miles or more through existing crop fields, whose owners had been warned to expect no compensation. But even with its garden, the Tuileries was still in the city, subject to disturbances, perhaps, but more surely, subject to competition from other centres of political or artistic ambition. Paris “sets the pace for all the rest of the country,” Colbert had written, but Louis wanted to set the pace himself. A court based in Paris would inevitably be surrounded by satellites of power and interest: too many great men had their own great houses there. There were too many rich men, too many men who wrote books, men with their own ideas about statecraft, men with their own courts of artists and society people, too many little Fouquets altogether.
Louis could never have controlled them. To ensure his preeminence as ruler and as patron, as dictator of high culture and director of the nation’s future, he needed a court isolatable from any other centre of power, isolatable geographically, perhaps, but more importantly, isolatable conceptually, and he had decided that the pretty maison de plaisance at Versailles, set in unpromising marshland, “the most sad and barren of places, with no view, no water, and no woods,” was going to provide it. “It will not be possible to create a great house in this space,” Colbert had warned, “without a complete upheaval and without incurring a prodigious expense.” Louis had been undeterred, receiving architects and decorators every Thursday morning, annotating their plans with his own hand—“and don’t do anything until I get there.” As for the “prodigious expense” Colbert had warned of, that was his problem.
And so it had begun. There had been work going on at Versailles, particularly in the gardens, almost from the start of Louis’s personal reign, after Cardinal Mazarin’s death, in 1661. But from the later 1670s, following the King’s decision to make his premier residence there, the scale of the work had increased phenomenally. Expenditure was huge: within three years of the official move in 1682, construction at Versailles was eating up six million livres a year, almost 6 percent of the kingdom’s entire revenue, though rumour had it to be much more: as Primi Visconti relayed to a friend, “I heard Monsieur [the King’s brother] say that the King has already spent a hundred million francs on it, and there’s not the tenth part of it done yet.” Years before it became the building of the century, Versailles was the building site of the century, the disorder and expense both greatly inflated by the lack of any overall plan, and by the King’s tendency to impulsive alteration and even demolition. With the court already in residence, there were still, as the marquis de Dangeau recorded, “22,000 men and 6,000 horses at work here every day.”
The working day for most of the 22,000 men began early: for the construction workers, at five in the morning in the summertime (until seven in the evening), and at six in wintertime (until six). But they had two good pauses during the day, from nine to ten in the morning (when they ate their “dinner,” the main meal of the day) and from two to three in the afternoon. Sundays were days of rest, and the Church dictated many more holy days, up to half the days of the year, on which no work could be done—and of course no money earned. The vast scale of the Versailles project encouraged exceptions, all the same: local priests sometimes permitted work after mass on a Sunday morning, against the objections of the masons’ and plasterers’ guilds and, perhaps surprisingly, at times even of the King himself. Those not working on the actual construction of the buildings, notably the architects and other designers, but also some of the craftsmen, often carried on through the night. “We have two teams of fine carpenters at Versailles, one working in the daytime and the other at night,” reported Colbert, general supervisor, as usual, of everything and everyone involved.
Colbert’s customary attention to detail ensured that wages remained stable for all workers throughout the many years of their labour on the great project, though his less than perfect mastery of economics meant that their money periodically lost value in terms of what it could buy. The technicians and master craftsmen—engineers and surveyors, carpenters, masons, gilders, and so on—were in fact paid fairly well, around 1,000 livres per year. Skilled workers such as plumbers, tilers, locksmiths, or general carpenters earned only about thirty livres per year, wages which in fact had been fixed at the same level for centuries, though they were greatly augmented by middleman takings from labourers whom the skilled workers brought in with them. Labourers were paid by the day or for a particular job: digging or carting might earn a man two hundred livres per year, of which certainly half would be spent on bread—not food, but simply bread—for himself and his family. Meat was a luxury: Louis’s men at Versailles would have worked a ten- or twelve-hour day to pay for two pounds of beef.
“Consider how many poor workingmen I’ve fed by giving them work on my buildings,” the King recorded in his Mémoires, in a piece of too hasty self-congratulation. In fact, by contemporary standards, Louis’s workmen were generally held to be poorly paid, their wages kept down by a great number of even lower-paid soldiers seconded to augment their ranks, and this at a time when, even on average wages, a vast number of working people were “teetering constantly on the edge of starvation.” The workmen at Versailles may have had some idea of the pay scales of their masters, or perhaps they were simply too remotely high to make much sense to them: Colbert’s annual salary as Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, for instance, was 21,000 livres, though this represented only a part of his income, since, like many others in the King’s service, he held a number of high-level posts simultaneously. The premier architecte at Versailles earned 6,000 livres per year, the equivalent of Françoise’s pension, while maître jardinier Henry Dupuis earned almost three times that sum—less two hundred livres one particular year, when he had his wages docked for not doing the job to royal satisfaction. Among the workmen, and the maîtres, for that matter, if they knew of it, the forty million livres lost (and luckily, rewon) by At
hénaïs in that single evening at cards must have passed for the stuff of legend.
By now, Athénaïs herself was passing into legend. She remained Louis’s maîtresse déclarée and surintendante of the Queen’s household, though now obliged to ride two carriages behind the King. For a while she retained a sumptuous apartment at Versailles (twenty rooms on the second floor, while the Queen herself had only eleven on the third), but Françoise’s ascent was unmistakable. Her own apartments had been among the very first to be built, and though she had insisted they should not be too large or too grand, they were nonetheless on the second floor, near to the King’s, in the château’s new south wing. From her windows she overlooked the orangery, its exotic trees still as yet concealed beneath the magnificent double stone staircase, but soon to be on full display: palm trees and citrus trees (twenty-two varieties), pomegranates, cloves, and oleanders, all kept warm during the winter months with fires of English coal.
Françoise might have envied them: most rooms inside the château had no fireplace at all, and those which did were frequently filled with dirty smoke. Always susceptible to the cold, she had requested wooden shutters for the windows of her apartments, but Louis had refused, insisting that shutters would disturb the appearance of the south façade. “So we can perish in symmetry,” Françoise noted wryly, rugged up in the little niche, just big enough for a few armchairs and a set of padded screens, which she had constructed in one of her rooms—the warmest shelter available within the palace of an aesthetically purist king.
Louis did relent a little, all the same, permitting her to add double frames (painted gold) on the inside of the windows, so keeping out at least some of the draught—and indeed the smell, for just beyond the orangery lay the pièce d’eau des Suisses, so called for the Swiss Guards who were digging the lake at this very time. It was a matter of removing water before water could be added: the ground, swampy and stinky, had first to be drained, and many a good Swiss soldier lost his fever-racked life in the process. By bizarre contrast, at the little Trianon palace, built in the same years within the château’s great park, the sweet fragrance of tuberoses was “so overpowering that no one could stand in the garden, even though it was enormous.”
Beneath Françoise, on the ground floor of the south wing, Liselotte and her husband, Monsieur, had their own fine apartments, not quite so blessed with the orangery view, though equally cursed with the swampy stench. By now they had agreed that their mutual dynastic duty might be considered fulfilled. Their first son, Alexandre, “so terrifically big and strong,” had died at the age of just three, but there remained eight-year-old Philippe, duc de Chartres, and six-year-old Elizabeth, marquise de Chartres, who together now provided their mother with her principal comfort and interest in an otherwise rather lonely life. The talented Monsieur, barred from any serious work by his autocratic brother, had been reduced to a life of more or less continuous partying with his many “Italian” (homosexual) friends, and Liselotte had been reduced to keeping herself warm at night “with six little dogs wrapped around me,” as she admitted to her aunt. “No blanket will keep you so warm as a good little dog.”
The royal family and their attendants in the south wing of Versailles were gradually joined by dignitaries and courtiers and servants in a new north wing, then in two huge flanks on the eastern side of the château, facing the town, and finally in the vast semicircle of écuries, officially stables, but in fact the abode of the 120 royal musicians and numerous other court followers content to bed down with the grooms and pages, or even beside one of the King’s six hundred horses—“which are better housed than I am,” as the Elector of Hanover was to remark. Versailles was never really finished, but while Louis lived there, it eventually contained 452 bedrooms, some of them squeezed onto hasty mezzanine floors, 226 apartments of varying sizes (the King’s own numbered forty-three separate rooms), plus various corners and cupboards, altogether housing some 3,000 people, at least part of the time. Spreading out from the château itself were dozens, then scores, then hundreds of further buildings, with the little brick pieds-à-terre thrown together by the keenest courtiers in earlier Versailles days gradually giving way to handsome stone hôtels particuliers, and all the shops and taverns and trades and services of a busy new town sprouting around them.
For it was not just the premier royal residence that Louis had moved to Versailles. The seat of government had moved as well, and in absolutist France, with its deliberately weakened regional powers, this meant the whole apparatus of a fast-expanding state—the ministers, the military men, the diplomatic corps, counsellors and administrators at every level, city planners, senior churchmen, and all the aristocratic hangers-on, not to mention the tailors, milliners, jewellers, armourers, the moneylenders of high and low degree, and everyone else who created the appearances which the grands seigneurs so desperately needed to keep up. When the King was in residence, some 10,000 people thronged the courts and corridors of Versailles—and this did not include the workmen, 36,000 of them at their peak, still labouring inside and outside, and sleeping in temporary shelters thrown up for them in the château’s vast grounds.
The grounds, in fact—a large domaine comprising a series of gardens (les Jardins), the open park and mile-long canal (le Petit Parc), plus the hunting forest (le Grand Parc)—were probably the most successful aspect of the whole gigantic project. Overseeing it all was the King’s premier jardinier, André Le Nôtre, now seventy years old and the indisputable master of the elegant, geometrical jardin à la française, which, though no one cared to remember it now, was in fact, like so much in the grand French style, essentially Italian. Le Nôtre had begun work on the gardens in the 1660s, modelling them on those he had already designed at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the country seat of the imprisoned minister Fouquet. Though twenty years had passed, few trees had been allowed to grow to a natural maturity in the marshy Versailles soil; instead, the impatient King had insisted on massive transplantations from other parts of France. On ground quite bare a week before, complete fluffy forests appeared, torn from Fouquet’s former parkland and stuck into the earth by a new mechanism of pulleys and levers. In one year alone, some three million hornbeam trees were dug out of the Lyon forest to provide instant hedges for Le Nôtre’s charming bosquets, secluded groves for concerts and dancing, and for lovers’ trysts. No one at Versailles seems to have worried about depriving the Lyonnais of a major source of firewood, though recent winters had been so harsh that the water and wine at the King’s own table had frozen, and the beautiful porcelain tiles enveloping the little Trianon palace in the park had begun to crack in the frost (Louis held Colbert responsible).
The King himself did not feel the cold at all, which may explain his lack of empathy with those, like Françoise and Liselotte, who did. Louis’s bedroom windows were kept open all night, regardless of the season. His perverse love of even the coldest fresh air may also explain the absence of any real ballroom or banqueting hall in the huge new château: most of the grand entertainments were expected to be held outdoors. Even the splendid long Galerie des Glaces was more of a reception hall, almost a throne room, than a place for dancing or staged performances. Le Nôtre’s gardens, with their bosquets and allées great and small, were in effect “an open-air extension of the palace,” designed to provide ever-changing scènes de théâtre for the glittering social life of a royal court.
The results in any case were wonderful. The domaine, though “a place naturally without water,” as the English philosopher John Locke recorded after his visit there, “hath more jets d’eau and waterworks than are to be seen anywhere, and looking out…one sees almost noe thing but water for a whole league forwards…” Locke was referring to the Grand Canal, more than a mile long, which stretched out from the end of the formal gardens. Three hundred men had spent twelve years digging it out, working in tragic relays, with many of them dying from malarial fevers contracted from the mosquitoes that flourished in the marshy soil. “The water is put
rid,” wrote Primi Visconti in 1680. “It infects the air; in August this year everyone fell ill, the dauphin, the dauphine, all the courtiers, everyone. The King and I were the only ones who didn’t.” Françoise had escaped as well. She was away in the eastern region of Lorraine, with the King, in fact, inspecting Vauban’s defensive fortifications on the country’s eastern border, though Visconti had forgotten this. Far from being feverish, Françoise was able to report to her brother that, in health and in spirits, spending every day in the King’s company, she was “feeling very well indeed.”
During the day, the Versailles gardens were open to the public—a first guidebook for sightseers had been printed as early as 1674, and Louis himself was now penning his own Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles, though admittedly this was meant only for the most distinguished visitors, who in addition were provided with “fifteen rolling chairs upholstered in damask of various colours,” in case they should be feeling less than royally energetic: the whole domaine measured almost thirty square miles. But even without any rolling chairs of their own, “the public” loved the gardens, and they came in droves. Anyone reasonably well dressed and reasonably well behaved was admitted. “The King…has ordered that all the fences around the groves are to be removed. All the gardens and all the fountains are to be for the public,” the marquis de Dangeau recorded. Louis’s maître jardinier, Henry Dupuis, oversaw the work, as he was to oversee the planting and pruning of the royal gardens for more than forty years. As the Versailles gardens became established and the numbers of “the public” increased, the King often made a tactical escape to the newer grounds of Marly, where “he preferred to watch the gardeners working.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 30
