Because Versailles is so huge, we tend to imagine it filled with crowds, but while that was certainly the case on special days or evenings, the numbers, on the evenings of appartement that Dangeau describes, generally did not exceed 300 or so; on July 19, 1684, for instance, there was a “big supper to which forty ladies sat down at two tables.”206 Of course, the men, and some of the less important ladies, simply stood, but it is a good indication of size nonetheless. Again, at Marly, the following year, the king was surprised because the unusually large number of 108 ladies showed up; to those women, of course, we must add the men; then, the royal family, the princes of the blood, and their households, numbered some fifty more people.
On those evenings, besides the music, the dancing, and the card-playing - a major occupation - there were also special events: Now and again, for instance, the king held a lottery at which every ticket carried a prize, or there might be the first performance of a play or an opera. Even so, for courtiers who spent their entire days and nights at the palace, this immovable succession of predictable pleasures palled, and boredom was often the order of the day, a fact which was carefully concealed from the king. In 1685, for instance, the letters opened as a matter of course by the post office included one from the princesse de Conti, the king’s daughter, to her husband in which she complained about the deadly boredom of the festivities at Court.207 The king, naturally, read it, called in the princesse, and gave her one of those scoldings which inspired such abject terror in his children: It was almost as if she had betrayed her country. And in a way, she had: Complaining about the dullness of the Court undermined the effectiveness of one of Louis XIV’s most important tools of government.
One other element comes out very clearly in Dangeau’s account, the number of hours the king actually worked with his ministers. The Council of State was the mainspring of government, the place where major problems were debated, and it met four times a week, but that in no way precluded Louis XIV from meeting with individual ministers, sometimes as often as every day. In any event, unlike most modern leaders, he never took a day off. That would have been hopelessly exhausting had he not so enjoyed the exercise of power, but he did, all the more that he had had over twenty years of virtually uninterrupted success.
Working is one thing, but even after Louis had spent several hours, every day, dealing with the affairs of state, he still had unceasing obligations. A president of the United States, at the end of the afternoon, can retreat to the privacy of his second-floor quarters; the queen of England, busy though she may be, has long holidays and more than a few free evenings; the Sun King, once he had finished governing, remained permanently on show. All his meals were taken in public, as were his lever, his coucher, his walks, his hunts, and virtually all his amusements, a practice his less robust successors found harrowing in the extreme.
That this most secretive of men enjoyed being constantly on display, however, cannot be doubted, especially because it also served a useful purpose. Since to be seen by the king was everything, ambitious courtiers were obligated to be constantly present, and there was no such creature as an unambitious courtier. Still, the unchangeable rhythm, as well as the pomp of life at Versailles, took its toll, and so did the golden palace’s discomfort. In those days when all the heat came from large, ineffective wood fires, the great, high-ceilinged rooms were freezing in winter, especially since many windows let in icy drafts. Conversely, in the summer, Court dress was immensely heavy and hot; by 1685, the park itself, which was open to the public, had become intolerably crowded. “The King, who could no longer walk in his gardens without being mobbed by the multitudes which came from everywhere, and especially Paris, ordered the guards to allow only the courtiers and their guests to enter. The populace which had come in before had spoiled many statues and vases.”208
Even this new restriction, however, was not enough. Louis XIV now decided he wanted occasional moments of relative privacy. He had always liked pavilions: There had been the Grotto of Thetis and the Trianon de Porcelaine, a small house clad, on the outside, with Delft tiles. Both, however, aged badly. By 1682, the king wanted some new retreat, and this time, he decided it must be a place where he could actually stay overnight if he chose. Of course, the privacy he was to enjoy there would still be our idea of a crowd: There would be his Household, his large family with their households, and a number of especially favored courtiers. But that still meant, obviously, far fewer people than at Versailles and, most important, some of the more inflexible constraints of the etiquette could be relaxed. There was obviously to be no change in the respect shown the monarch, but otherwise, he would treat his guests almost as if he were just the owner of a country house.
It was Louis XIV’s gift that he knew how to bring together architects, artists, and craftsmen so as to create an integrated look in which the harmony of the ensemble was reinforced by the perfection of the details. Almost more important, perhaps, his buildings were timely as well as dazzling: To see them (or hear about them) if you were a foreign prince was to yearn for their equivalent, which was, surprisingly, as true of his smaller projects as it was of Versailles. All monarchs, after all, could feel they needed a grand and impressive palace, but Marly, the king’s next project, was built purely for pleasure - a pleasure the rest of Europe (including William of Orange) soon realized it could not live without.
Aside from Marly’s new and different kind of splendor, one that was seen even more outdoors than in, what most amazed the contemporaries was the site the king had chosen: a small, dank and unpromising valley. Saint-Simon, for one, never got over it. In his love-hate relationship with Louis XIV, the madness of building at Marly loomed large, but it is significant that when, after the king’s death, the government considered razing the site to save on upkeep, it was the then influential duc who saved it on the (wholly rational) grounds that it was one of the nation’s great artistic treasures.*
In fact, unpromising as the valley must have originally looked, it had a good deal to recommend it. It was close to Versailles - only some four miles away; it was near the Seine, from which water could be drawn; it had abundant springs of its own. Given the fact that Louis XIV wanted a garden with pavilions, as opposed to a palace with a park, and that, in seventeenth-century France water was an essential and ever-present element of any good garden, Marly made sense, as did the fact that the very shape of its valley kept it private.
What, by 1684, had become visible, in fact, was a vast and ornate garden in which water slept (in basins), ran (in cascades) and spurted (in fountains), all in a decor of sculpture lightened by carefully shaped trees and bushes, and, as usual, there were flowers everywhere. It was a place to stroll, amid the sweet scents and melodious plashings, so much so that carriages - unlike at Versailles - were not allowed in the gardens, only sedan chairs or little three-wheeled chairs pushed by one of the Swiss Guards. It was also in a constant state of flux. Improvements never ceased, but they were thoroughly tested before being carried out. First, a watercolor rendering would be made and modified until the king was satisfied; then a full-scale model would be built; only then would the new design be implemented.
On the entrance side, Marly began as a court with a chapel on one side and the Guards’ house on the other, with the castle in the middle; on the park side, six pavilions on either side of a wide alley served as lodgings for the Court - women on one side, men on the other; indeed, these were built before the château itself, and Louis XIV rejected Le Brun’s more elaborate design in favor of Mansart’s simple rectangular pavilions adorned on the outside with polychrome frescoes and linked by arbors of jasmine.
Even the king’s own, central house remained simple. It was a square building, with a frescoed exterior, pilasters, and a triangular pediment; behind the façade, however, at roof level, a shallow dome rose above a windowed drum, so that the central salon, the main, octagonal, reception room, utterly windowless at ground level, was lit entirely from above.
This area was reached
by four antichambers, one in each side; then, along the façades, there was, in each angle, a three-room apartment, with two service rooms behind; these rooms were used by the king - he had red damask on his walls, Mme de Maintenon (in blue), Monsieur (in green), and Madame (in pink). All the mantelpieces were made of carved marble topped with a mirror; between the windows was carved and gilded paneling.
In the central salon, where the king met his guests to chat, listen to music, play cards, or even dance, the walls were given a rhythm of pilasters with composite capitals; above the doors, the arms of France were held by trumpet-playing figures of Fame. There was an elaborately carved cornice above the pilasters, and from it rose carved figures. At that level, there were windows on four of the sides held up by spread-winged eagles and surrounded by carved attributs, while on the other sides were paintings of the seasons by Delafosse, Coypel, Jean Jouvenet, and Louis Boullongne: These artworks, in fact, hid the flues, since, unlike earlier pavilions, Marly was meant for winter use; then, at the base of the ceiling, four more large oval windows opened in line with the doors.
Of course, the floor was parquet, here with a marble edge; a huge chandelier, surrounded by eight smaller replicas, hung from the ceiling, and the furniture consisted of card tables, banquettes, ottomans, and armchairs (for the ladies) upholstered in crimson damask. A stage could be rapidly set up or taken apart and fit on one side of the salon.
The king’s own bedroom had walls covered with panels of crimson damask and gold-ground brocade with gold flowers and multicolored arabesques; the curtains were of white damask with gold fringes. Upstairs, the four apartments were reserved for the dauphine (and later the duchesse de Bourgogne), the princesse de Conti, the duchesse de Chartres, and the duchessse de Bourbon.
All this decor was both cheerful and grand: Color, in fact, was the key element at Marly, indoors, with its profusion of carved gilt furniture and its intense damasks and brocades, on the polychrome frescoed façades and in the gardens where the flowers vied with the changing tones of the waters, the white of the stone and the gold of the bronze sculptures. No wonder even Saint-Simon was impressed: It must all have looked very like paradise.
All that cost money, but as usual, not as much as people thought. In 1681 and 1682, when work was mostly done on the gardens, the total came to a mere 300,000 livres a year; with the building campaigns of 1683 and 1684, the yearly total hovered around 460,000 livres, while in 1685, the highest year of all because of the interior work, the expenditure reached 677,000 livres; in 1686, however, it dropped to 418,000 livres, and in 1687, to 246,000. By 1690, the figure was down to some 80,000 livres, and it remained fairly constant after that. Given the fact that the budget accounted for some 100 million livres yearly, even the highest figure, 677,000 livres, only took two-thirds of 1 percent. And if the cost of building the houses and gardens is added up over a period of ten years, upkeep being included in the figure, it still comes to only 3,381,000 livres, not a very large sum at all.
That this unique blend of ease and luxury should have immediately appealed to other European monarchs is hardly surprising; in France itself, Marly became not just the king’s retreat but yet another way of rewarding certain courtiers. Any person presented at Court could be present at Versailles; only those specially chosen by the king as his guests ever came to Marly; an invitation there was a clear proof of the royal favor, but it was not to be had without humiliation. When the king had decided to go to Marly, the fact was announced. Ambitious courtiers then gathered near the king’s bedroom; the door would open; Louis XIV would look out as the would-be guests shouted: “Marly, Sire, Marly!”; the king would then retire and dictate the list of the elect. By June 1684 already, the gardens were almost complete; in 1685, the king started the frequent visits, lasting from two days to two weeks, which, henceforth, were such a part of his life.
It was also typical of the change in Louis’s feelings that while Mme de Maintenon was from the first given an apartment on the same level as the dauphin, Monsieur, and Madame, there was no room for Mme de Montespan at all. It was now her turn to endure what La Vallière had once suffered; more and more, she retreated to Clagny, until, by the nineties, she had virtually given up appearing at Court. Already in December 1684, she lost her apartment on the main floor at Versailles and was moved downstairs and away from the king: There could have been no more sure or visible signal of disgrace.
As for Mme de Maintenon, her situation was becoming clearer day by day. On May 29, 1684, the dauphine’s dame d’honneur, the duchesse de Richelieu, died. That very evening, the king offered the office to Mme de Maintenon. That in itself was startling enough: Normally, only a duchess, and a very grand one at that, would be considered for so considerable a position. Offering it to the widow Scarron, recent marquise de Maintenon though she might be, was nothing short of revolution. That, however, was only the beginning of it: To everyone’s stupefaction, Mme de Maintenon refused the position. At that, “Mme la Dauphine went to Mme de Maintenon’s room to ask her to accept the office of dame d’honneur, but was unable to sway her. Mme de Maintenon received with respect this obliging request but remained unmoved; she had asked the King not to mention the honor he had done her in offering her this office, but His Majesty was unable to refrain from talking about it and told the story after his dinner.”209 And as if these startling events were not clear enough an indication, the king then appointed the duchesse d’Arpajon, whose only qualification was that her brother had once been a very close friend of Mme de Maintenon’s.
Although there can be no doubt that the marquise had been the king’s mistress for a while, the relationship changed dramatically as a result of the queen’s death on July 30, 1683: Although a simple adultery was better than a double, still the king was unquestionably sinning with Mme de Maintenon. Given his new, stronger religious feelings, not to mention the marquise’s extreme piety, this arrangement was, to say the least, awkward. It is true that Mme de Maintenon had been encouraged to give in by her confessor since she was to be the instrument for ending the scandal of the king’s liaison with Mme de Montespan while steering him closer to the arms of the Church, but the situation was far from ideal. With the queen’s death, however, new, dazzling possibilities opened up. There was only one problem: A marriage between the king of France and the widow Scarron, aside from making Louis the laughingstock of Europe, seemed, to the rigidly stratified society of the seventeenth century, quite impossible, even if it brought about no issue.
The marriage, however, would appease Louis’s conscience and his sensuality at the same time, not a minor consideration. There seems little doubt that Bossuet, still the most influential of the bishops, strongly urged the king to remarry; it is quite certain that the proud autocrat himself was truly and deeply in love with Mme de Maintenon. Here was no mere sexual attraction: The king respected Mme de Maintenon for her psychological and intellectual qualities.
Given all these problems, one solution, and one alone, was possible: The king must marry, but in secret. Thus he would sin no longer; he would give the woman he loved a far more secure position; by never acknowledging the marriage, valid though it was in the eyes of the Church, he also precluded the devastating mockery that would have followed an openly declared union. Obviously, every possible advantage was found here; so at an unknown date, most probably in 1684 since Louis would not have offered the marquise the position of dame d’honneur if they had already been married, the Sun King, in the deepest of secrecy, before Louvois, his confessor, his valet de chambre, and the marquis de Montchevreuil, one of Mme de Maintenon’s relatives, was at last wed to the widow Scarron.
Of course, Mme de Maintenon kept her name; still, it was noticed not only that the king paid more attention to her than ever but that she remained sitting in an armchair in the presence of the royal family, something which, until then, only the queen could do, and that she attended mass sitting in the queen’s box. As for her scoldings when the princesses misbehaved, they were to become a
s feared as they were famous; even so, the marriage was never acknowledged.
Among Mme de Maintenon’s many attractions - physical beauty, unfading, perennial youth, intelligence, wit, common sense - one, no doubt, counted for much with the king: She was the most discreet of women. It is, in fact, posterity’s irrecoverable loss that, after Louis XIV’s death, she destroyed every scrap of paper she had ever received from him. But in the 1680s, and, indeed, for the rest of the reign, the king knew he could rely on her never to reveal a secret; as a result, he soon developed the habit of working with his ministers in her apartment and in her presence. That, however, did not mean that she influenced policy: Although he frequently consulted her, Louis almost never followed her advice, a fact of which she was painfully aware. It was, for her, the most difficult of positions: With all the appearances of power, she had none; although treated by the king with the utmost respect, she was nothing. Only a woman of exceptional gifts could have prospered as she did.
That she now had influence when it came to Court appointments is, however, clear. The king had always felt this privilege was one of his mistresses’ perks; thus, the elevation of the duchesse d’Arpajon to the high office of dame d’honneur was typical. In the same way, Mme de Maintenon’s old friends tended to do well, but in all other respects, the Court remained unchanged. The dauphine moved into the queen’s apartment and took over most of her duties; the etiquette surrounding the king was, if anything, reinforced, while the person of the monarch appeared more splendid than ever. On December 2, 1684, for instance, Louis XIV changed after the hunt, into a suit sewn with over 12 million livres’ worth of diamonds, which must, indeed, have been as dazzling as the sun.
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