The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  When Mazarin died he left his fortune to the King, saying that the pictures, the books, the houses, the eighteen enormous diamonds known as les Mazarins and the money (even, he might have added, the nieces) were nothing — the precious legacy was Colbert; and so it proved. He was the most remarkable minister in the history of France. If the French are divided into Franks and Gauls — Franks, serious and rather cold, the builders, and Gauls, adorably frivolous, the destroyers of this nation — Colbert was the very type of the Frank. He was born in 1619, the son of a wool merchant of Rheims. His emblem was the humble grass snake — the antithesis of Fouquet’s squirrel which can be seen climbing higher and higher, all over Vaux-le-Vicomte. Unlike Fouquet who was a jolly man of the world and a great lover of women, Colbert concealed his brilliance beneath a dour reserved manner — he frowned more often than he smiled, and never tried to charm. But people knew where they were with him; and those who, hoping to get off paying some tax, went behind his back to the King, to be received with infinite grace and told, with a delightful laugh, ‘Sir, you will have to pay!’, would say they rather preferred Colbert’s frown. Early in life he saw that economics are a sure if unspectacular road to power; he began his career by putting order into the private affairs of Mazarin which he found in an incredible muddle; then, still under the Cardinal, he turned his attention to the national finances and established them on a solid foundation. When the King was a boy he taught him to keep accounts; he was the first king of France who had ever done such a thing. Colbert made him write down how much money he had got at the beginning of each year and then subtract expenses from it. When it ran out too soon, as it always did, he would borrow for him, from Mazarin! He realized that a new world was dawning in which a country must export or die; and he instituted a Council of Commerce, presided over by the King, which met every fortnight. He hated Versailles, but he alone was capable of producing the enormous sums of money which it swallowed and as soon as he saw that the King was determined to live there he bowed to the inevitable and began to think of ways in which the house could be made to further French commerce.

  The prestige of Louis XIV and the fame of Versailles mounted year by year; other European princes and magnates wanted a Versailles of their own, down to the smallest details of its furnishings; Colbert exploited this fashion to help his exports. He erected a rigid customs barrier, nothing was allowed to be imported that could be made in France. Factories were set up to supply the linen, lace, silk, glass, carpets, jewellery, inlaid furniture and other articles of luxury that used to come from foreign lands, mostly from Italy; all these were soon of a superior quality to any that had been seen, since French craftsmen, then as now, were the best in the world. The finest examples of their work went to Versailles and were shown to the foreign visitors who flocked there; the château became a shop window, a permanent exhibition of French goods. It made an enormous contribution to French supremacy in the arts, as nowadays some great aeroplane, not in itself a paying proposition, can advance the technical progress of aeronautics. But soon there were not enough workmen so Colbert took measures to increase the working population. Families of over ten children were exempt from tax. He thought too many young people were taking religious vows and raised the age at which they might do so. Workmen were forbidden to emigrate and foreigners, especially Protestants who were persecuted in their own countries, were encouraged to come to France. He always said that the men should not be too strictly directed but allowed to do what they thought best. He had difficulties with the Gauls however. The great nobles refused to invest in his companies for trading overseas; the workmen were not easy, they refused to give up their sixty public holidays a year (apart from Sundays), and there were strikes. He himself worked fifteen hours a day seven days a week and his holographs would fill a hundred volumes. Though his only real interest was commerce, he ran every government department except that of war. His work bore fruit; in the ten years between 1661 and 1671 the national revenue was doubled. In 1683 it was four times that of England and nearly ten times that of the Venetian republic. But the richest of all European countries was Holland. The prosperity of this tiny state, troubled by England beyond the sea, by the sea itself and by its European neighbours (the Spanish menace hardly over when the French menace began) was a perpetual source of wonder. Colbert, like his master, but for different reasons, was obsessed by Holland. The Dutch had two citizens to one peasant, and that one produced heavier crops to the acre, fatter pigs and higher yielding cows than were to be found anywhere else. Like bees, the Dutch seemed to gather honey from all around them: Norway was their forest, the banks of the Rhine and the Dordogne their vineyard; Spain and Ireland grazed their sheep; India and Arabia were their gardens and the sea their highway. Their enormous riches and enviable way of life were achieved by commerce, banking (the Bank of Amsterdam dates from 1609), insurance, printing and the fact that they were a seafaring nation situated between the new world and the old. Also there were no Gauls in Holland. Colbert would have loved to rule such a land! His greatest handicap was the war that raged on the frontiers during the whole of Louis XIV’s reign. A hundred and fifty thousand men were kept under arms even in peace time — men whom Colbert could have employed over and over again on different schemes for enriching the country. He hated war, and not out of humanity, for he had none in his make-up. He did little or nothing to help the French peasants through a period of agricultural depression; indeed low farm prices suited his policy of cheap exports. The gap between the peasantry and the rest of the population first became serious under Colbert; it was not bridged, as in England, by country gentlemen. He encouraged the slave trade and though he did insist on certain humanitarian measures, this was only to keep down the death rate of such valuable cattle. Worst of all, perhaps, he increased the number of galleys in the French navy from six to forty, each containing two hundred unhappy souls. Since black people were useless for manning them (they had no stamina and died at once) he employed French criminals and Turks caught in the Barbary wars. When the Turks were worn out they were sold in America for what they would fetch. Young, solid Frenchmen accused of capital offences were often sent to the galleys for life instead of being executed. Minor criminals, if they were able-bodied, were never released at the end of their sentences — they could only be freed if their relations could afford to buy a Turk to replace them. Colbert thought that too many of his galley slaves died — the Intendant of the Galleys swore that they were well fed but said they died of grief and boredom. We can imagine these two rich, comfortable courtiers conversing together on the subject in some golden drawing-room.

  A profound knowledge of literature, science and the arts was part of this extraordinary man’s make-up, though possibly he regarded them as an adjunct to trade, part of the French prestige which was to attract the world markets. He was a member of the Académie Française and the famous fauteuils there were due to him. (The fauteuil had an almost mystical significance in seventeenth-century France. The only people ever allowed to sit in one when the King was present were his wives, King James II of England and the King’s grandson, Anjou, when he became King of Spain.) Some noble Academician brought one for himself to the Académie when it was in session; next time he came he found that Colbert had provided fauteuils for all forty Academicians. Colbert created the French school of painting and sculpture in Rome; the Observatory in Paris, bringing the astronomer Cassini to work there; he founded the Académie des Sciences; he brought quantities of books to add to the royal library. Finally, as Surintendant des Bâtiments, he directed the works at Versailles.

  Colbert had one expectedly romantic side to his nature: he was a snob. His ancestors, the wool merchants, bored him and he began to look for something better. To the general merriment, the Northumbrian St Cuthbert was brought into play and Colbert deposited various old deeds with d’Hozier, the King’s genealogist, which were supposed to prove that he descended from the saint and his ‘Scotch wife Marie de Lindsay of Castlehill, Inverness’
. Unkind people said that these deeds looked as if they had been at the bottom of the sea for years, they were mildewed and illegible; however they served their purpose and the genealogy was duly registered. (It only took him back to the wool trade after all — one wonders if Colbert knew that St Cuthbert was the son of a shepherd.) Then he removed his grandfather’s tomb at Rheims, on which the word ‘wool’ figured, and replaced it with an old stone inscribed, in the language of a former age, with the virtues of one Colbert, of Scotch descent: ‘Cy gist ly preux chevalier Richard Colbert dit l’y Ecossois. Priez pour l’âme de ly. 1300.’ Some time later the great man and his three sons-in-law, all dukes, were seen kneeling by it in fervent prayer. Nevertheless, Mlle d’Aligre whom the King forced to marry Colbert’s eldest son, the Marquis de Seignelay, died of a broken heart at having made such a mésalliance. Colbert had six sons; they were a worry to him in youth but after their father’s death turned out well. Seignelay was Ministre de la Marine, the Marquis de Blainville, Surintendant des Bâtiments; there were three soldiers, all killed in battle, and the Archbishop of Rouen. They were all rather lazy. Of his brothers, one was a bishop, one a general and the third, Colbert de Croissy, an able diplomatist.

  Though Colbert was twenty years older than the King he was deeply in awe of him. When he left his country house, Sceaux, to go to Versailles, this powerful, authoritarian personage before whom all France trembled, would take a piece of bread down to his park and throw it at the canal. If it got to the other side it meant that Louis XIV would be in a good temper; if it fell in the water Colbert knew that the day would be stormy.

  Colbert’s hatred of war was only equalled by his hatred of Louvois, the war minister. This horrible man was the King’s evil genius. He and Colbert were obliged to meet and collaborate every day under the eye of Louis XIV, who used their rivalry for his own ends and was not above teasing them. On one occasion Louvois, who wanted the Foreign Ministry for himself, ruined the existing minister, Pomponne, by stealing letters he had written to the King, and then pretending that the King had purposely been kept in the dark as to their contents. Louis knew quite well what had happened; but he used the affair to get rid of Pomponne who was not very brilliant. Then, to the fury of Louvois, he gave the ministry to Colbert’s brother, Colbert de Croissy.

  At the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, the French army was a disorganized mob which had never been taken in hand since feudal times. It was turned into the first-class fighting machine with which the King implemented his foreign policy, by two men, Le Tellier and his son Louvois, who became his father’s chief assistant, at a very early age, in 1654. Able as he was, Louvois was not a genius. If he had been, he would have reformed the army from top to toe; but he winked at many abuses which grew worse and not better and which finally became a stone round the neck of Louis XV. For years the King, who thoroughly understood the art of war, kept him well under control; unfortunately as they both grew older Louvois began to conceal things from Louis who, perfectly truthful himself, was always too much inclined to believe what he was told. The two greatest scandals of the reign, the atrocities in the Palatinate and those committed against the Protestants in the south-west of France, were the responsibility of Louvois. When Louis XIV found out the horrors which were going on in the Palatinate he went for Louvois with the fire irons of his room. Probably he never really knew the full extent of the Protestant persecutions. Louvois had a part in the building of Versailles since, at the death of Colbert in 1683, he took over as Surintendant des Bâtiments.

  Le Brun was born the same year as Colbert, and worked with him most of his life. The two men shared the capacity for turning their hand to any job. Le Brun was found at the age of ten by the Chancelier Séguier, painting scenes from the Apocalypse, on vellum. The Chancellor put him into Vouet’s studio. At fifteen he was already painting for Cardinal Richelieu and at twenty-three he and Poussin went to Rome together; Poussin stayed there for most of his working life but Le Brun returned to France after four years, having been profoundly influenced by the Carracci gallery in the Palazzo Farnese. His first important commission, in 1649, was the decoration of the Hôtel Lambert, the Paris house of a rich magistrate. Then he worked for Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte; in 1662 he was appointed the King’s painter-in-chief and put in charge of the decorative art at Versailles. He was director of the Gobelins, the great factory which made not only the tapestry but nearly all the furnishings for Versailles. Le Brun was never more than a second-class painter but he was a decorator of genius. He himself designed everything for the château, chairs, tables, carpets, panelling, silver and tapestries, even keyholes; he painted the ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces and those of the Salons de la Guerre et de la Paix, and the façade of the King’s little house at Marly; he decorated the prows of galleys and the settings for fêtes. He also found time to paint immense pictures with religious and mythological subjects. He loved allegories and battle scenes and was rather indifferent to nature.

  Le Brun and Le Vau worked in perfect harmony. Le Vau’s best-known buildings are Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Hôtel Lambert and the Collège des Quatre Nations which was built to his design after his death by Darbay. Most of his work at Versailles has been covered up by that of Mansart but the inspiration is his, greatly enlarged and one must say not improved. His château, when the enveloppe was finished, was a gem.

  Of these men, the greatest charmer was Le Nôtre. He was born and bred to be a royal gardener; his grandfather spread manure in the parks of Marie de Médicis; his father was head gardener at the Tuileries and his sisters were married, one to Anne of Austria’s nursery gardener and the other to the man who tended her orange trees. Le Nôtre thought he would like to be a painter and started life in Vouet’s studio but he soon went back to gardening. He succeeded his father at the Tuileries and gave a new aspect to the gardens there. Fouquet then took him off to Vaux where Louis XIV saw the quality of his work and immediately made him director of all the royal gardens. We owe him not only the park of Versailles but also those of Chantilly, Saint-Cloud, Marly, Sceaux, the celebrated terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, many private parks and gardens, Bossuet’s garden at Meaux, in the shape of a mitre, and the great sweep up the Champs Elysées from the Louvre. He also laid out the town of Versailles.

  Le Nôtre was one of the people Louis XIV liked best in the world. He felt more at ease with his servants than with the sophisticated aristocrats and pompous bourgeois by whom he was surrounded — in a way Le Nôtre was to him what John Brown was to Queen Victoria. He had a perfectly direct natural manner and never minded disagreeing with his master. In 1678 he went to Italy to study the gardens there and obtained an audience with the Pope. Somebody told the King that Le Nôtre had given the Holy Father a good hug; the King said he was not at all surprised; ‘he always hugs me when I come back from a journey’. He offered Le Nôtre a coat of arms but the idea was treated with derision: ‘I’ve got one already, three slugs crowned with cabbage leaves.’

  Le Nôtre hated flowers as much as the King loved them. He greatly objected to the parterres which he was obliged to plant in front of the royal palaces, saying they were fit for nursery maids to look at, out of upper windows. Neither nursery maids nor their charges ever got so much as a whiff of fresh air in those days, and Le Nôtre had no doubt seen white faces behind glass looking wistfully down at his bedding-out. The King’s passion for flowers led to the building of the first Trianon, a pavilion in blue and white porcelain, which was embowered in blossom. His favourites were tulips — when he was not at war with Holland he used to import four million bulbs a year from the Dutch nurseries — then came orange blossom, tuberoses, stocks and wallflowers (both of which are called giroflées in French), daffodils and jasmin.

  Le Nôtre never lost his interest in painting and the arts, and his lodging at the Tuileries was full of beautiful things, including much Chinese porcelain. When he was out, this delightful man would leave the key of his house on a nail so as not to disappoint any amateurs who mi
ght call to see his collection.

  A minor figure at Versailles was M. de La Quintinie who made the King’s kitchen garden there. He began life as a lawyer at Poitiers but his only interest was fruit trees and vegetables. His book, Instructions pour les Jardins Fruitiers et Potagers must be one of the best gardening books ever written; it makes the reader long for a kitchen garden; the instructions are so precise that a child could follow them; the work for every month is clearly set out. La Quintinie is interested in soil — he notices that when you transplant a tree it is no longer nourished by its old roots but by small new ones which it puts out. His greatest love is for pears. He lists every one of the five hundred best pear trees in the King’s garden; his favourite is Bon Chrétien d’Hiver on which he writes a poetic eulogy. For one thing there is its ancient lineage — it was already known to the Romans who called it Crustumeria; and it always figured at their banquets — then its illustrious name, given in the early days of Christianity. Thirdly, nature has bestowed on us no more beautiful fruit than this pear, so surprisingly large and symmetrical, often weighing more than a pound, and of a lovely yellow colour, with a pink blush on the side which gets the sun. It can easily be kept four or five months in a greenhouse, rejoicing the eyes of those who come to look at it, as they might visit a jewel or a treasure. As for taste, it is incomparable, with brittle, slightly scented flesh and sugary juice. It is not true to say that this pear can only succeed against a wall; M. de La Quintinie gives many reasons and much data disproving this universal belief — but he does think that if it is kept in the eternal calm of the greenhouse it will bear a great abundance of fruit. As for other sorts of pears, there are good, less good and mediocre but he does not know of any bad tempered (méchante) pear. He goes on to say that a true gardener will spend the public holidays walking round the beds with his assistants, pointing out their failures and noticing their successes.