Following the Sun (25 page)

On my way back from one of these rambles I passed one of the cafés at Montparnasse where Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and all the other American expatriates congregated in the 1920s. One member of this troupe was a talented but eccentric writer named Harry Crosby, who was a poet and a publisher who started a journal called
Black Sun
with his wife, Caresse. Crosby was raised in the bosom of tradition in Brahmin Boston; his father had been a well-known and successful banker and clubman, but early on Harry broke from Boston, or “The City of the Dreadful Night,” as he liked to call it, and executed a flight to Paris. Here, he converted to a new religion (actually a very old religion) of his own devising—worship of the sun. He tended to identify himself with the mythic young figures who died while attempting to overreach the bounds of tradition, such as Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who during the ingenious flight from the labyrinth of King Minos dared to fly near the sun and died in the process.

Having discovered his religion, Crosby threw himself into the solar orbit with fanatical devotion. He composed poems and paeans to the sun, collected together in
Shadows of the Sun
and
Chariot of the Sun
. He invented an elaborate admixture of Christian faith in the afterlife, pagan solar rituals, Egyptian sun cults, Aztec ceremonies, Roman mystery cult practices, and “sacred” writings from other solar-influenced writers such as Goethe and D. H. Lawrence. He closely identified himself with the principles of the sun-figures in the tarot pack, the astral monarch who dispenses heat and light, and the Chariot of Fire, which carries the hero, Phaeton. Apollo was among the favorites of his gods and he was especially attracted by the rash folly of Phaeton, who dared to take the reigns of the wild horses that drew Apollo's Chariot of the Sun across the sky each day—with disastrous results for both the earth and Phaeton. No matter that the young hero died in the process, that was part of the attraction.

At the age of thirty-one, having first removed his precious golden sun-ring that he acquired at Al-Karnak in the Valley of the Kings and having stamped upon it, Harry Crosby, along with his lover, Josephine Bigelow, committed a spectacular double suicide during a visit to New York. The press was alive with stories after the event, but the flaming young sun acolyte was dead.

That evening I met Chrétien and Micheline for dinner at an odd restaurant on the Left Bank called the Garden of the Frog King. The two of them were handsome people, still in good shape, considering all the wine and food they consumed. Micheline was as pretty as I remembered, slightly fuller but with the same bright blue eyes and black hair, and that Gauloise warmth that had originally so attracted me.

We met again for a midday dinner on Sunday at the apartment of Chrétien's parents. Madame Berger, a quiet person who favored long wool skirts and cardigan sweaters, was a little grayer, but M. Berger had not aged in ten years. He still had black hair and the same twinkling bright blue eyes inherited by his son. I happened to know from Chrétien that he was in the Resistance and had seen horrendous acts of inhumanity during the war, and yet I never knew anyone who enjoyed eating and drinking and the spirit of the moment as much as he. Everything was a great adventure for him, even his bad experiences. Chrétien himself had some of the same
joie de vivre
. Madame Berger was less celebratory, “
c'etait affreux!
”—it was horrible—was one of her favorite phrases, often affixed as a coda to one of the long adventure stories from M. Berger.

I related stories from my pilgrimage, and in contrast to many of the people I had met along the way, they all heartily approved of my plan to go to Scotland, a place that virtually all southern Europeans seemed to hold in horror, as if it were the repository of all the cold ills of all the frozen worlds. Chrétien and his family thought it a great lark.

“Instant death,” Chrétien shouted. “Wonderful. It's a good place for you to die. You will freeze. It is said to be a painless death, freezing.”

“But before you die you will have to eat sheep belly stuffed with oatmeal,” M. Berger said, laying a finger aside his nose. “That will be worse than death.”

“That's what will kill him,” Chrétien said.

“No, no, he will die of cold,” Madame Berger said. “He will have to wear a kilt.”

“But no underpants,” Micheline said.

They opened a bottle of champagne—and this before the midday meal—to celebrate my safe return to Paris. They always knew I would come back someday for a Sunday dinner, Madame Berger said. “We have missed you.”

After that we shared some tiny crab pǎté she had prepared, and then went to table.

Here was the usual fine setting. M. Berger brought out a bottle of Côte de Beaune, winked at me in a conspiratorial manner, and drew the cork. And then we set to: first a clear consommé and then a serving of mushrooms stuffed with a liver pǎté, followed by a poached trout, and then a plate of fresh-picked asparagus with a refined Hollandaise sauce, followed by a salad with chives, and then a board of cheeses, and then a flan, and along with all this, another bottle of Burgundy, and bottles of sparkling waters with the salad, and finally a café, followed by a tiny glass of
calvados
. By then it was three o' clock and time for a stroll on the Champs-Elysées, with Madame and Micheline linked arm in arm, and Chrétien and I walking side by side, and leading the troop, glancing this way and that and nodding to his familiars, Monsieur Berger himself, his hands clasped behind his back—the contented
bon vivant
, who had experienced the worst that the world can throw at itself and, having survived that, the best that the world can offer, or at least the best that he could suck from the world in that unfortunate age.

“This sun pilgrimage of yours,” Chrétien asked as we strolled along. “What about the Sun King himself?”

“What about him?”

“The great solar palace of Versailles. You must go see it. You must.”

Three days later, having lost even more days from my theoretical schedule, Chrétien, Micheline, and I drove out through the fresh green tunnel of the beech forests to the great main gate of the palace, where, arranged around the
Court d'Honneur
, were the giant statues of the distinguished statesmen and marshals of the age, and looking over them on his horse the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, who occupied the throne of France for seventy-two years. At either side rose the impressive walls of the architectural masterpiece of what is generally held to be the most brilliant era of French history, a golden age of letters and arts, and the darkest age of the French peasantry. Here, in this singular place, are the creations of the architects Jules Mansart and Louis Le Vau, the murals and decorations of Charles Le Brun, portraits by Pierre Mignard, the sculptures of Antoine Coysevox, and, most impressive of all, the great stretching gardens of André le Nôtre. This court, in its glory days during the seventeenth century, was the seat of government and, until the coming of the Revolution, the haunt of some of the greatest sycophants, decadents, and courtesans, as well as writers and artists of the age—Molière, Racine, the famous courtesans Louise de La Vallière, Mesdames de Montespan, de Maintenon, de Pompadour, and du Barry, and Queen Marie Antoinette, and all the other members of one of the most hedonistic, pleasure-loving, and extravagant courts of one of Europe's most dissolute and profligate and absolutist kings. It was, after all, Louis XIV who is credited with the motto
l'état c'est moi
.

Michéline and Chrétien, promoters of the new Europe and the then aborning Common Market, were indifferent, even dismissive. They had grown up with the myth of France and were unimpressed by glories of the past. After a few turns around the Hall of Mirrors and other extravagant splendors, since the day was lovely, we retired to the gardens to stroll and reminisce.

The sponsor of this garden, Louis XIV, ruled France from 1643 to 1715, having inherited the crown at the age of five upon the death of his father, Louis XIII. The regency, confided to his mother, Anne of Austria, the much despised “
Austrienne
,” was marked by a period of rebellion known as the Fronde, which was instigated by the nobility and later taken over by the urban commoners and eventually suppressed. The boy king, it was rumored, was both humiliated by the arrogant nobles and threatened by the people of Paris—and would someday have his revenge.

There are political kings and decadent kings, and power-mongering kings, and kings who are interested in the arts and culture and kings who are interested only in sex. Louis XIV was all of these and then some. Under his reign France experienced an extraordinary blossoming of music, writing, architecture, decorative painting, sculpture, and even the sciences—it was during his reign that the French royal academies were founded, including, in 1661, creation of the Académie Royale de Danse in a room of the Louvre, the world's first ballet school.

Louis XIV was one of the few kings who had a genuine interest in dance and he was himself a skilled performer. The young king made his ballet debut as a boy, but in 1653 when he was still a teenager he appeared in his most celebrated performance.

Cardinal Mazarin, the king's closest advisor, had promoted Italian influences in the French court spectacles that eventually gave birth to the ballet, and had imported the musician Giovanni Baptista Lulli from Italy, who was rechristened Jean Baptiste Lully for work in France. Lully was a skilled dancer as well as a composer and became one of the king's favorites. Together they arranged a series of court dances called Le Ballet de la Nuit. For the final piece in the group, the young king attired himself in a golden mask, a golden, Roman-styled corselet, and a kilt of golden rays. Thus costumed he strutted onto the dance floor, bowing and dipping and performing his finely executed
pas de chat
and
jetées
, to play the part of Apollo the god of the sun.

It was a memorable performance. The sycophants and the courtiers applauded daintily, the ladies swooned, the grand dames fanned themselves, and the marshals and the ministers and the lords and the financiers schemed and bowed and glanced at one another sidelong. And then they gave the boy a new epithet. After that night, they referred to him as the
roi soleil
, the Sun King.

His majesty was well pleased.

Louis XIV adopted the name and soon chose the sun as his emblem and Apollo, the god of peace and the arts, the god who gave life to all things, as his personal god. Louis, one suspects, imagined himself to be very like Apollo. He brought peace to France, he was a patron of the arts, and, like the benevolent sun, he dispensed his bounty throughout the courts, if not throughout the land. Furthermore, Louis assumed a certain celestial regularity in his work habits. His ritual morning rising, his
levée
, was associated with certain set ceremonies and formulas. His retirement at night, the
couchée
, was equally ritualized, and in between the day proceeded with set times for various events, including the pleasure of the gardens, the boudoir, and the hunt. The metaphor of the solar transit was reflected and imitated as a theme through the palace, the decorations combining images and attributes of Apollo in the form of the laurel, the lyre, and the tripod. The sun king's portraits and emblems, the royal crown, and the sceptre are fixed with solar symbols. The great Apollo Salon, the main room of the Grand Apartment, was originally the monarch's state chamber, and the path of the sun was the organizing principle for the layout of le Nôtre's famous gardens.

Versailles garden is without question the grandest, the largest, and the most ambitious garden in all of Europe, rivaled only by Caserta outside of Naples, which attempted, but failed, to outdo Versailles. The gardens were cut from an earlier royal garden. But the grounds here were hardly suited to the creation of a grand garden; they were without woods, marshy, and underlain by sandy soils. The earth was so low in the area that tons of soil had to be imported from afar and then graded and leveled and shaped according to the grand design of le Nôtre and his assistants. Aqueducts and a new road from Paris were laid out, and some 36,000 laborers and 6,000 horses were employed for construction. It was, according to the perhaps uncritical French historians, the condensed genius of the whole culture of France embodied in a garden, a formal and orderly landscape of flower beds, sparkling waters, and marble, and all of it arranged in a schematic and harmonious geometrical figure that used sunlight as the unifying concept.

Straight down the center of the garden from the Basin of Latona with its red marble fountain, depicting gilded tortoises, frogs, lizards, and the white marble image of Leto with her two children Artemis and Apollo and the long green carpet of the lawn, lies the Basin of Apollo and the Grand Canal, with fountains, more lawns, flower beds to the left and right, and walks leading off in every direction past statuary in marble and bronze.

The garden of Versailles actually preceded the construction of the palace and took over fifty years to fully complete. But when the work was done le Nôtre had succeeded in creating precisely what Louis himself imagined that he, the Sun King, symbolized. The land had been completely altered and subjugated to the taste of the seventeenth century with clipped and tonsured trees and water gardens and fountains laid out to reflect the sky and catch the sparking light of the sun. It was a perfect Apollonian world, a world of order and beauty, a reflection of the divine cosmos, with the sun as its center and the sun king as its ruler.

All this was to come to an end, of course. Less than seventy years later the French began crying for liberty, equality, and fraternity and took to the streets. For those who share a solar perspective on history, it is interesting to note that the revolutionaries who crowded the Place de la Concorde, the prophets of the light of reason who instigated the Revolution, adopted as their emblematic uniform the red Phrygian cap of the sun god Mithra.