The main changes came on the park side. The two huge side wings were added, the central terrace closed and roofed in became the Hall of Mirrors, and the order of the reception rooms was fixed once and for all, although it was not until the 1690s that the King’s Bedroom was shifted to its present location, right at the center of the great hive. All, in fact, was much as it is today with one significant exception: The Escalier des Ambassadeurs, the palace’s most splendid staircase, with its marble, gilt bronze, and Le Brun frescoes, was torn down in the eighteenth century, so we can only imagine this awe-inspiring introduction to the Grands Appartements.
From then on, however, the long enfilade of salons was just as we know it. From the Escalier des Ambassadeurs, through doors sculpted and gilded against a white ground, the visitor passed through the salons of Abundance, Venus, Diana, Mars, Mercury, and Apollo, some clad in marble, others lined with rich, and often changed, gold-embroidered velvets or brocades. This enfilade, in which the rooms were separated by white and gilt boiserie doors, led to the Salon de la Guerre, all marble, mirrors, gilt bronze, and frescoes by Le Brun representing the triumphs of the Sun King; then came the Grande Galerie, the Hall of Mirrors, with its wide, arched windows opening onto the park all along one side, on the other, the mirrors, made in the new manufacture created by Colbert, and at the far end, the Salon de la Paix which led to the queen’s Apartments, running along the south side of the central pavilion.
If the geography remains, however, and the ceilings are intact, so much else has changed since the seventeenth century that it now requires a real effort of imagination to picture the Versailles of Louis XIV. Of course, we may still look up to see the gods of Olympus disporting themselves in the heavens or, in the Grande Galerie, the various glorified episodes of the king’s life, from the crossing of the Rhine to the making of wise laws. The parquet floors remain; the doors are unchanged; all the rest is gone.
In the rooms which were given marble walls, at least, more of the original look survives, but in those where the walls were covered with fabrics or tapestries, the twentieth-century replacements can only make us yearn for the lost glories of the originals. The paintings are gone, too, which once hung on those walls, and the fact that they can be seen at the Louvre does nothing to obviate Versailles’s impoverishment. Just as significant, the furniture now in place is sparse, and almost without exception, belongs to later periods. In the 1680s, besides all its other treasures, Versailles could also boast solid silver furniture - tables, consoles, chests, candelabra, and large square planters holding miniature orange trees. Add to that the gleam of the silks and velvets worn by the palace’s occupants, the fire of their jewels, and the result is quite a different Versailles from the one we know.
The park, too, its structure roughly intact, is only a ghost of its seventeenth-century self. To be sure, the grand canal is still there, as are the main fountains, but many others are gone, and the plantings are not only virtually shapeless but also dreadfully simplified. And, of course, the rule according to which flowers fresh from the hothouses were planted before the palace at dawn every winter’s day is no more, just as, indoors, the palace seemed like a fairytale castle, so outside the gardens, filled with carefully tended rare trees and flowers, were nothing short of an enchantment. Indeed, Louis XIV took enormous pride in them; he invariably led his more distinguished visitors around them and even went so far as to write a guide book for them, the Manière de visiter les Jardins de Versailles, in which the visitor is given the best possible itinerary and told when to stop and where to look.
The final settling of the Court at Versailles, while it did not exclude yearly visits to Fontainebleau, virtually eliminated the stays at Saint Germain, Chambord, or Compiègne which had marked the earlier part of the reign. And, of course, it entailed a permanent and definitive removal from Paris. Now at last, the young king’s humiliation, when he had had to feign sleep before the invading mob, was expunged. At Versailles, connected to Paris by one single easily defended bridge, Louis XIV knew he was forever safe from the great city’s hot temper, and he never again stayed at either the Louvre or the Tuileries.
It is also at this time, the early eighties, that the liveliness of the Court began to wane; as the king settled into middle age, his courtiers were expected to behave more sedately; magnificence increased with the complication of the etiquette, while the monarch’s semidivine character was tirelessly emphasized. The resulting look was no doubt impressive, but life at Court became both more tiring - all those long hours of standing and waiting - and more tiresome. In one respect that was all to the good: The courtiers’ ferocious disputes about minor points of precedence, bred in good part by their idleness, only consolidated the king’s power; new customs, like that of bowing to the royal food as it came from the kitchens, only made rebellion more unthinkable; the ever-increasing cost of living in this gilded environment made the nobles still more dependent on the king’s bounty.
At the same time, this kind of hothouse atmosphere had real drawbacks: gambling, for instance, became an almost universal addiction, with huge sums being won and lost daily, and scenes of uncontrolled joy or unrestrained despair enacted around the tables. More important, perhaps, cliques formed and intrigued ferociously, while libel and calumny blossomed. Still, it hardly seemed to matter: Louis was apparently endowed not just with astonishing majesty but also with the power of seeing through lies and ambitious plots.
It was in the 1680s also that new notes began to appear in that essential record of etiquette, the Register of Ceremonies. Until then, great ceremonies - marriages, funerals, important receptions - are recorded along with their order of precedence and the various activities pertaining to them, but in 1683, for instance, the following entry appears: “The marquis de Vardes, after a twenty-year exile, returned to Court on May 22; he made his bow to the King in his cabinet where Monseigneur the Dauphin was also present. The King asked him whether he knew Monseigneur the Dauphin, the marquis turned to go to Monseigneur, but the King said to him: ‘Vardes, you have probably forgotten that no one else may be acknowledged in my presence.’
“This is not to note the marquis de Vardes’s return but to render manifest the respect due to the King.”201
Still, what might have become a crushing dignity was always leavened by Louis XIV’s perfect manners: To the end of his life, he took his hat off to every woman he encountered, even if she was only a maid; he knew how to say the right thing at the right time, how to praise so as to awaken lasting gratitude; and although well aware of the uses of flattery, he was capable of saying to Racine, the great playwright, after having heard the latter’s reception speech at the Academy: “I would praise it more if you had praised me less.”202 Then, too, a single remark could change his courtiers’ behavior. On April 3, 1684, for instance, “the King, at his lever, talked a great deal about the courtiers who were not taking communion at Easter and said he felt great esteem for those who did, saying he wished them to think seriously about it, and adding that he would be pleased with those who did.”203 Of course, this pronouncement was more likely to produce hypocritical compliance than true faith, but it was typical of the king’s way of controlling the courtiers’ way of life.
That Louis XIV should have paid such close attention to something - taking communion - which might well be considered a purely personal matter also shows the increasing importance of religion in his view of the world. He had always been a devout Catholic, of course, but now he began to behave as if he were also in charge of his subjects’ souls. In the early eighties he still used suasion, but from there to coercion it was only a short step.
No doubt, this concern answered to deeply felt, and on the whole benevolent, beliefs, but it can only have been encouraged by the fact that, to all intents and purposes, Louis XIV had become pope within his kingdom. He appointed all deans, abbots, and bishops, and selected those French ecclesiastics whom the pope created cardinals; the clergy was now absolutely obedient. In 1682, for in
stance, it unanimously subscribed to the so-called four articles: “That Saint Peter and his successors, the Vicars of Jesus Christ, and that the entire Church itself have received power from God only over spiritual matters concerned with salvation, and not over temporal matters … We declare in consequence that the kings and sovereigns are independent, by God’s order, from all ecclesiastical powers in temporal matters, that they cannot be deposed, directly or indirectly, by the authority of the Head of the Church, that their subjects cannot be dispensed from the submission or obedience they owe them.”204
These so-called Gallican principles were combined with a radical extension of the régale. It was the king’s right, first, to select all ecclesiastical dignitaries, subject to canonical ordination by the pope; second, to deal with the regular orders as he pleased, in some cases suppressing convents and abbeys and seizing their property, while also regulating them independently of the pope; and finally, to appropriate the revenues of all benefices while they were unoccupied, i.e., between the death of one holder and the appointment of the next. Taken together, these rights made Louis XIV virtually absolute in Church matters, and that was a good deal more than the pope could bear.
Innocent XI, who had been elected in 1676, was everything the king was not: austere, opposed to pomp, and more than a little influenced by the Jansenists,* the sect Louis XIV fought throughout his reign. Worse, he saw it as his principal duty to resist any and all diminution of the Church’s power, and popes had long claimed the very rights - over temporal matters, over sovereigns, to depose, to dispense from obedience - denied them by the Assembly of 1682. Naturally, then, Innocent refused to accept the French bishops’ declaration, even as he objected to the king’s extension of the regale, most particularly where it affected the regular orders. So from April 1682 on, he refused to ratify Louis XIV’s appointments to vacant sees. By January 1688, thirty-five bishoprics were (at least theoretically) vacant.
In other, less settled times, this conflict would have been an almost impossible weight for the government to bear; now, it simply demonstrated the thoroughness of the French Church’s submission: Not one bishop took the pope’s side, and all went on as if the elderly gentleman in Rome counted for nothing. Even more remarkable was the peace in the king’s conscience: The early eighties, after all, were marked by a strong increase in Louis’s piety, but, firmly separating dogma and administration as he had been taught to do by Mazarin, it never occurred to him that opposing the pope or extending his power over the Church even began to put his salvation in danger. In this regard, as in all else, he governed his realm as he thought it best.
Indeed, he was almost alone in remembering what had now become the distant past: The new dispensation had come to seem the normal order of things, and the many panegyrics which emphasized the king’s absolute power praise him more for exerting it wisely than for conquering it. Nothing, no one, it seemed, could resist him: This certainty was proved yet again when his government invented a brand-new form of war.
Because peace treaties over the centuries had deprived France of various towns Louis XIV wanted, and because it was unquestionably easier to swallow them one by one, a new organization, the chambres de réunion, was created. Its task was to search the archives in order to make lists of territories in or near the Trois Evéchés (Metz, Toul, Verdun) and Alsace which, though they had once belonged to France, were now lost to it. Once these compilations were completed, Louis XIV cited the various foreign sovereigns and in short order simply reappropriated the lands in question. For the most part, they had belonged to small German princes like the elector of Wurttemberg, but they also included, on September 30, 1681, the thriving city of Strasbourg, which had been an imperial fief.
Taken one at a time, these aggrandizements, which also included the purchase of the fortress of Casal, in northern Italy, from the duke of Mantua, were not enough to justify a European war. Besides, after the Peace of Nijmegen, while Louis XIV had kept his army intact, the emperor and his allies, including William of Orange, had disbanded theirs. It would thus have required a major effort to resist these successive nibbles, and it was not made. That, of course, confirmed the prevalent opinion, in France at least, that there was nothing the king could not do, while, abroad, he came to be regarded as the most dangerous and insatiable of conquerors. There was never any telling how or where he would strike next: The only certainty was that he would surely strike, and so grave and lasting enmities were created.
Even if Louis was aware of these, however, he regarded them simply as the unavoidable consequence of his success, a feeling constantly reinforced by Louvois. Now in control of the War Department, that admirably intelligent, effective, and hardworking minister was also mad with ambition; clearly, he mattered more, had greater influence and power, when France was at or near war. Very naturally, then, he encouraged the king’s expansionist tendencies and presented constant aggrandizement as the easiest of policies. When, for instance, Strasbourg became French without a single cannon shot, it was in large part because the unprepared city woke up one morning to find itself surrounded by 20,000 French troops. The operation, which was wholly successful, had been planned by Louvois to the last detail, and short, perhaps, of invading Holland again, the king began to believe that no one could resist him.
Oddly enough, even Louis’s distrust of prime ministers helped Louvois’s ascendancy: Because he made the decisions himself, because Colbert, whom Louvois hated, remained a powerful minister, the king thought himself uninfluenced, but he never came closer to abandoning his independence of judgment.
It was at this time, in fact, that he almost began to believe his own myth. For twenty years all had gone well; his achievements were immense; he had created a new form of monarchy to which his people had responded with wild enthusiasm: He was, after all, a little more than human. No wonder he announced that he wished his timetable to be so inflexible that anyone, in the remotest reaches of Europe, would know at any time what the king of France was doing. Like the sun, his course was even, dazzling, and unchanging, and not by coincidence, a new kind of Court memoir now appears, wholly centered on the king’s every movement and every word. Never before in the history of France had the person of the monarch been considered interesting enough to warrant a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account of his life; now a devoted courtier, the marquis de Dangeau, started to do exactly that. And in 1690, he was supplemented by a writer of genius who, being a duke, also lived at Court, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon.
That Dangeau should have decided to set down a typical day in 1684, therefore, is hardly surprising, and today still it is well worth reading. Here, detail by detail, is what so fascinated Louis XIV’s contemporaries.
“He usually rose between eight and nine; as soon as he was dressed, he closeted himself with his ministers and stayed with them until twelve-thirty; at that hour, he came out of his study, had Mme la Dauphine* warned that he was ready to hear the mass, and the whole royal family went to mass, where the music was very beautiful. The mass usually ended between one and two and the King went to visit Mme de Montespan† until his food was ready. His Majesty then took his dinner [sitting at the head of a square table] in Mme la Dauphine’s antichamber [the Salon de la Paix]. The appointed noblemen served him. Monseigneur, Mme la Dauphine, Monsieur and Madame, Mlle and Mme de Guise‡ ate with the King and so, occasionally, did the princes of the blood royal.
“After dinner, the King visited with Mme la Dauphine for a moment, then he either closeted himself to work or went out. At seven or eight, he went to Mme de Maintenon’s and stayed there until ten; then he took his supper at Mme la Dauphine’s; as he arose from the table, he spent a few moments with her, bade her good night, and went to Mme de Montespan’s, where he usually stayed until midnight; and the petit coucher was ordinarily over by twelve-thirty or one at the latest.
“On the days of appartement,* one went into the [State] Apartments at seven. The King played at billiards until nine with M. le duc de Vendôm
e [an illegitimate grandson of Henri IV], M. le Grand [the Grand Equerry, a prince of the House of Lorraine], the duc de Grammont and M. Chamillard [one of the secretaries of state]; after billiards, the King went into his cabinet with Mme de Maintenon or visited her in her apartment until supper. Mme la Dauphine watched the King play for a few minutes, then went and listened to the concert for a quarter of an hour and then opened the ball. Monseigneur usually played at lansquenet or cul bas [card games]; and on days when there was not appartement, Monseigneur played cards with Mme la Dauphine or attended a play with her.
“On Sundays, there was a meeting of the Council of State attended by the King, the Chancellor [in 1684, Le Tellier, Louvois’s father], M. de Louvois, M. de Croissy [Colbert’s brother, in charge of Foreign Affairs] and M. Pelletier,* Controller General of the Finances. On Mondays, again Council of State. On Tuesdays, Council of Finances [of lesser importance], attended by the King, Monseigneur [who never opened his mouth], the Chancellor, M. le maréchal de Villeroy, the Controller General, M. Pussort, and M. Boucherat. Wednesday, Council of State. Thursday, Council of State. Friday, Council of Conscience [concerning Church affairs] with the Archbishop of Paris first, then with the Père de La Chaise [the King’s confessor], each separately. Saturday, Council of Finances. Every other week on Monday was held a Council of Dispatches [once the most important Council, it was now concerned with secondary current affairs], and on those days there was no Council of State; this Council was attended by the King, Monseigneur, Monsieur, the Chancellor, M. le maréchal de Villeroy, the four secretaries of state, who present reports, and the Controller General. On Sunday, a quarter of an hour before the Council, the Controller General brings His Majesty a list of disbursements, which the King authorizes. On Tuesdays, the Chancellor hardly stays at the Council of Finances because that day he holds his own [High] Court. M. de Seignelai [Colbert’s son and the Minister of the Navy] alone attends with the King the Council of the Navy after dinner; twice a week in ordinary times, sometimes more often, M. de Louvois is granted private audiences after dinner during which he accounts for the army, the forts, and buildings in general. On Monday after dinner, there is a Council for the Affairs of the Protestants; the King does not attend it, but he is given an account of any important business transacted there.”205
Louis XIV Page 27