The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  I am grateful for being unable to remember most of that awful night, but I do remember the supper. The table in the formal dining room was clothed in white linen and set with crystal, silver, and bone china. We sat bolt upright, leaning our forearms delicately against the table's edge. My friend's father sat at the far end, wearing a crisp gray suit. His mother sat at the opposite end with her back to a hotplate on which our supper awaited, a small silver bell by her right hand. She gave it the most peremptory tinkle and the maidservant wafted in from the kitchen to serve us.

  The meal was something revolting to me at the time - sweetbreads or pigeon in aspic. Whatever it was, it provoked my friend and me into making surreptitious grimaces of disgust at each other across the table. This was inappropriate behavior; my friend knew it, but I didn't (it would have seemed perfectly normal, even restrained, in my home). I persisted and was reprimanded with an icy stare from Madame. My friend's sister was in the middle of telling a story of heartbreak or academic difficulties. I grew nervous, flustered, and overcome by hysterical giggling, which I managed to suppress only partway through her account, so that, when I could contain myself no longer, it appeared that I was mocking her suffering. I was asked to leave the table and finished my supper in the kitchen, with the maid. The sister never talked to me again. I wet the bed that night. I was not invited back.

  It is an ugly but undeniable truth that everybody has someone they can't invite to the party. Quirky traits and tics that may be endearing to or at least accepted by a friend suddenly become awkward and embarrassing when that friend is a host. We may love this eccentric dearly and enjoy an intimate and confiding friendship with her, but she just doesn't know how to behave in company. She talks about herself obsessively, she is easily offended by offhand remarks, she is too loud, she is too quiet, she is suspicious of strangers, she is too aggressive, she is too picky an eater. We think twice about inviting her, this old and loyal friend of ours. Can she really be trusted to keep her temper? Will she really fit in this group? Who can we sit her next to? Does she understand the rules?

  Maybe the truth is simpler. Maybe she understands the rules perfectly well but just can't be bothered to obey them. There is, after all - as I remember very well - a certain perverse satisfaction in wetting the bed, especially someone else's.

  In 1648, France was engulfed in a four-year civil war known as the Fronde. The conflict began as a revolt of the Parlement against the king's powers of taxation, but was later complicated by the ambitions to power of a cabal of aristocrats led by the prince de Conde, a noble of the highest lineage and cousin to the Dauphin Louis. When Conde was arrested, his supporters rose up. The prince was released and Chief Minister Mazarin dismissed, but Louis's mother, Anne of Austria, succeeded in dividing Conde's party and he was indicted again in 1651, leading to another uprising in which the prince successfully held Paris for a time. The royalists, led by the great General Turenne, eventually turned the tide and Condé fled to Spain. Louis, now king, returned to Paris in 1652 at the age of fourteen, and Mazarin was recalled shortly thereafter.

  For the rest of the 1650s, as France warred with Spain, Louis spent his time much as any teenager would, to the extent possible for a king of France with the eyes of all Europe upon him. He stayed up late with his friends, danced a great deal, flirted scandalously with his brother's wife. A famously expert shot, he hunted tirelessly at his chateâux outside Paris - including a modest lodge built by his father in the small village of Versailles and indulged an almost inexhaustible appetite for sex with the many willing ladies of the court, single and less so. Given the disarray of his finances, the corruption of state officials, and Mazarin's tight fist, his hospitality was necessarily limited, at least in comparison to what it would be a decade later, but he nevertheless managed to stage some memorable events, such as the great carousel of 1656, at which three teams of knights, Louis at the head of one in crimson and white and a plumed helmet, competed at spearing a golden ring.

  Still, throughout this time Louis stayed close to Mazarin, absorbing his advice and eagerly learning the intricacies of statecraft and kingship. Mazarin could not live forever, and Louis had never forgotten the bitter lessons of the Fronde or his humiliation at the hands of the self-serving nobility, including his close relatives. He remembered only too well their greed and fickle allegiance; how he had been compelled for lack of funds to wear the same ratty dressing gown and sleep in the same worn sheets for three years straight; how, one night in 1651, he lay shivering in bed, feigning sleep, as his mother - in an effort to allay rumors that the royal family was planning to abandon Paris - had exhibited him to the mob that had entered the Palais Royal; how, when they did flee to Saint-Germain, he and his court had had to bed down on cots and straw in the empty, echoing palace. Even at that tender age, Louis had held a deep conviction in his divine right, and his keen sense of the outrage done then to his person and his position was in no way blunted by a carefree adolescence - nor, indeed, by the subsequent decades of unparalleled glory. It had been the kind of childhood that breaks most people and tempers a very few, providing them both with their obsessions and with the strength and will to pursue them.

  In 1659, a peace treaty was signed with Spain, ending twenty-four years of war, and ratified the following year with Louis's marriage to the infanta Marie-Thérèse. In 1661, Mazarin died and Louis assumed full control of the government, declining to replace the chief minister. That same year, Louis ordered the arrest and trial of Nicolas Fouquet, his superintendant of finances, on corruption charges. He hired the now unemployed trio of geniuses who had built Fouquet's chateau at Vaux - the architect Le Vau, the painter Le Brun, and the landscaper Le Nôtre - and set them to rebuilding his hunting lodge at Versailles.

  It is not clear how long Louis had been planning to make Versailles the crucible of his experiment in autodeification, but he had certainly been toying with the idea long before Mazarin's death. It had always been his favorite house, while the Louvre had the double disadvantage of being far too small, capable of housing a bare few hundred courtiers, and of being in central Paris, vulnerable to the mob. Shortly before his arrest, Fouquet had been foolish enough to host a fete at Vaux that was so lavish entertainment by Moliere, music by Lully, poetry by La Fontaine - as to throw his financial and cultural superiority over the king into stark relief to everyone present, and it may have marked the decisive indignity that sealed Louis's determination. In any case, with the establishment of peace and the speedy regularization of his finances, Louis was now free to turn his very focused attention to building his dream home and mapping out a system that would transform Versailles into the most luxurious and escape-proof gilded cage ever conceived, and to forge his hospitality at Versailles into the ultimate tool of authoritarian government.

  From 1651 onward, Louis was the sole source of power and advancement. Shutting out the entire noble estate, including his own brother, he appointed only commoners to his tiny council, and then only to advise - never, under any circumstances, to take decisions. Every significant preferment, every sinecure, every military appointment, every grant, and every loan - even minor matters once lucratively assigned to venal undersecretaries - now went directly through him. It is true that Louis worked harder, and enjoyed his work more, than any French monarch had before him, but he devised a relatively simple basis on which to make his decisions. If the king were to give you anything, he had to know you and to like you, both by reputation and by sight. And in order to know you, he had to see you every day - in his hallways, at his games, in his bedroom, in the chapel, at his entertainments. For any nobleman with even a modicum of ambition, attendance upon the king was virtually compulsory.

  When the court had been in the capital, every nobleman had kept his own town house, along with his privacy, within easy reach of the palace. This was no longer possible. Versailles the village offered no suitable lodgings and Paris, some fourteen miles away, was too far for a daily commute. The chateau itself had apartments for
some one thousand courtiers and ancillary lodgings for four thousand of their attendants, but the competition for quarters there was fierce, despite the fact that it was notoriously drafty and cold in the winter. Family apartments, handed down from one generation to the next, were usually subdivided, sometimes into tiny airless cubicles with barely enough room for a cot and a chamber pot. Since the ceilings were so high, the larger apartments were often divided horizontally as well, creating two floors of cramped, smoky, windowless warrens hidden behind a pair of magnificent gilded doors on a main corridor.

  Still, as the due de Saint-Simon discovered to his chagrin, "to live at the Court without a lodging, or even to frequent it, was intolerable and impossible." He sums up the dilemma common to every courtier: "The care of my patrimony required my constant presence at the Court, for there would always be the possibility of its being removed from me in anger." When, through carelessness, he loses the reversion of his apartment to his own brother-in-law, he finds himself in despair.

  The greatest trouble for me . . . was that I had no lodging at Versailles, for not only did that entail the fatigue of journeys to and from Paris, but it curtailed the social activities that imperceptibly brought one great advantage.

  "I never see him," the king would say of an absentee courtier, and it was not meant, and never taken, as a casual remark. It was an almost certain forewarning that, some time in the not-too-distant future, the king would strip the delinquent of his reversions, his command, or his hereditary post, all of which had to be paid for and renewed at intervals. The doomed man would find his friends melting away, his invitations evaporating, his reputation sullied. He would soon have little option but to slink off to his provincial estates, his career and social prospects gone, to mingle with the lowly local gentry, the "bonne noblesse," a term he would have used at court not long before with utmost contempt. There was no recourse, no appeal. Louis was a stubborn and opinionated arbiter - though he often bought his opinions wholesale from the mistresses and courtiers who had his ear - and he rarely reversed a bias once he had made it known. "His Majesty does not like you," Turenne told one disconsolate courtier, "and when he has a poor impression of someone he never sets it aside." Even more rarely did the king find himself compelled by public opinion to tolerate someone he actively disliked, such as the charming prince de Conti, whom "the courtiers could not easily dispense with." Louis ultimately made an exception in the case of Conti (who was, after all, his own grandson), but "was much relieved when he died."

  The painful issue of lodgings was a problem surpassed only by that of financing a life at court. Versailles was prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest aristocrats, making regular attendance, with its potential for securing favor, pensions, and appointments, all the more necessary. Since most Versailles residents spent their days either attending the king or roaming the hallways and gardens, appearances had to be kept up at all costs. The burden of keeping servants, stables, and carriages; travel and entertainment expenses; the constant gambling and gift giving; and, above all, the cost of clothing and wigs, kept many on the verge of penury and in hopeless debt. Costumes, of the finest silk, gold, and silver thread, with buttons and jewelry of the most precious metals and gemstones, were changed several times a day. The king was said to dress "in utmost simplicity" he hardly ever wore his diamond-encrusted coat worth twelve million livres - but when he ordered new clothes he was likely to set off a near riot of shopping among his courtiers. The wedding of Louis's grandson, the due de Bourgogne, to Marie-Adelaide of Savoy set Saint-Simon back twenty thousand livres (about ninety thousand dollars) in clothing costs and established a standard in rapacious rivalry for tailors that even the king had cause to rue.

  This, of course, was all as Louis intended. It served several of his purposes. First, it made his the most glittering court in Europe, concentrating all the country's wealth and glamour in one place. Then, too, since the grounds and staterooms of Versailles were open to any decently dressed member of the public, it provided a show for the masses, dazzling them with the glory of France, filling them with patriotic pride and awe of their sovereign. Above all, however, was the dependency of the nobility. Poor courtiers were submissive courtiers, far from the power and the financial bases in the provinces that had underwritten their earlier rebellions. If the haughtiest and most belligerent Frondeurs, such as Conde and the due de Beaufort, could now be seen trotting abjectly down the Hall of Mirrors at Louis's heels; and with rich, less rich, and heavily indebted alike engaged in heated sartorial competition with one another, instead of in intrigues and cabals; and with the entire court a fishbowl under Louis's watchful eye, "discovering the most secret views of our own courtiers, their most hidden interests which come to us through the play of contrary interests," who was there left in all of France to rise up and challenge the regal authority? No one, that's who.

  The beauty of it was that Louis had no need to enforce his will through terror. On the contrary, any nobleman favored enough by birth or talent to be a member of the Sun King's court counted himself among the most fortunate beings on earth. Anxious though they might be over money and social advancement, very few courtiers had any more sense of being put upon, suppressed, or manipulated by their sovereign than do the angels in heaven. Like anyone who has ever given away something that cannot be retrieved, they were perfectly thrilled to be able to live in the comforting fiction that what they had lost was of little value.

  It goes without saying, though, that Louis gave his courtiers scant leisure or motivation to dwell on this side of things. He knew that they must be entertained and distracted, given the long hours of enforced idleness between public functions, and that he himself was the principal source of entertainment. His life, accordingly, was played out almost entirely in public, from the moment he awoke at eight-thirty A.M. to some one hundred noblemen milling in his bedchamber, separated from the royal bed by nothing more than a wooden barrier; through the supposedly private family meals and the public grands couverts, during which throngs hung anxiously goggling at every sip of the royal broth; to his ritual couchee at eleven-thirty P.M., an equally crowded event.

  His love life, too, was a matter of public record, the position of titular mistress being formally recognized and compensated. He cheated openly on his mistresses, who were not always as tolerant as the queen. Each of his three official mistresses - Louise de la Valliere, the marquise de Montespan, and Mme de Maintenon was eased in and out of his favor with an exquisitely slow and painful deliberateness that kept the court gossips (i.e., everyone) keen-eyed and limber-tongued for years. When he eventually took Mme de Maintenon as his lover, he housed her in rooms directly behind those of Montespan, to whose royal bastards she had once been governess. By appearing to enter Montespan's apartment, only to slip out the back into Maintenon's, the king was in principle protecting her feelings and prerogatives, but since everyone at court knew all about the ruse, he was in fact undermining and serving her up as a rather corpulent sacrifice to court scandal. In the same way, when he humiliated the hapless Marechal de Gramont - by first reading him a madrigal, which he encouraged the old man to disparage, and then revealing it as his own - it was most certainly in full view and earshot of dozens of idle rumormongers. Dainty titillations went a long way at Versailles when tendered by the king.

  The members of his family were expected to assume their share of the burden of public life. The king's brother, known in court as Monsieur, made no attempt to conceal his passion for the handsome and callow chevalier de Lorraine, on whose behalf he begged Louis for the reversion of two abbeys. When the king refused, Monsieur left the court in a huff-Olivier Bernier points out that Louis XIII's brother would have started a civil war in similar circumstances - and the chevalier was clapped in jail. Humbled, Monsieur came crawling back and, when the chevalier was released, collapsed on the floor and embraced his brother's knees in gratitude. All this was played out on the public stage.

  Not even the royal children were
spared the host's responsibility to entertain. As one eyewitness noted of the due de Bour-gogne's wedding: "The new King [William III of England] has made his entry into London; the spectacle was very grand, but its expense is nothing when compared to the marriage." After the ceremony and mass, a sumptuous meal was served to the royal family at a great horseshoe-shaped table, which was followed by a game of cards, a fireworks display, and another banquet. Then the entire party, now joined by the recently deposed James II of England and his queen, trooped off to the newlyweds' bedcham­ber:

  The due de Bourgogne undressed himself in the anti-chamber, and the King of England presented him his shirt; the duchesse de Bourgogne undressed herself before all the ladies who were in her chamber, and the Queen of England presented her her chemise. As soon as the duchesse de Bourgogne was in bed, it was announced to the due de Bourgogne, who got into bed upon the right side. The King and Queen of England retired. The King went to bed . . . The duchesse de Lude, and all the ladies of the duchesse de Bourgogne, remained around the bed, the curtains of which were undrawn all round . . . The due de Beauvilliers, as governor of the due de Bourgogne, remained by the bed-side while he was with the duchesse de Bourgogne.

  The duke and new duchess were fifteen and twelve years old, respectively.

  But even the travails and deflowerings of the royal family were not enough to keep the court quiescent and amused. Three times a week, the soirees d'appartementwere held in the state apartments: beverages in the Abundance Salon, delicacies in the Venus Salon, dancing in the Mars Salon, gaming in the Mercury Salon, and music in the Apollo Salon. There was theater by Moliere and Racine, music by Lully and Lalande. There were Le Notre's magnificent two thousand acres of parkland and gardens reduced, sere, and dismal today by comparison - with some twelve miles of roads and paths; hundreds of potted orange trees; fifty fountains; fifty-five acres of canal plied by Venetian gondolas; the mysterious, eternally twilit Grotto of Thetis, now gone, and the Baths of Apollo; secluded alleys, groves, and hidden trysting nooks. There were billiards and hunting and the endless composition of billets-doux. And, of course, there was conversa­tion: the refined, literate, vicious conversation that seemed to have continued unabated for generations; secretive conclaves in the corridors and stairwells; raucous outbursts in the gaming rooms; sweet plaintive pleadings in the trellised arbors; ghostly whispers in the galleries at dead of night - as inexhaustible, inescapable, and penetrating as the trickles, rivulets, and geysers of water pumped to every far corner of the vast estate.