The Sun King (12 page)

All this was bad enough, but it was not criminal. Luckily for her, the King found it easy to forgive women, whom he regarded as charming, irresponsible, inferior creatures. Mme de Montespan was not only the mother of his children but an ornament of his court. She dazzled the ambassadors. When she did not exasperate, she amused him. He burnt all the papers relevant to the affair, not realizing that La Reynie's notes were kept in the police archives (they are to this day at the Bibliothèque Nationale) and put the whole thing behind him. He may well have thought that, had Athénaïs been a poisoner, at least one of her rivals would have died or been taken ill in a mysterious way, and that she would long since have poisoned Mme de Maintenon, whom she loathed from the bottom of her soul. Mme de Maintenon, indeed, wrote jokingly to a friend ‘I am just off to Clagny which Nanon thinks
very dangerous
'. The proof of the King's belief in Athénaïs' innocence is that he kept her on at Versailles for another ten years. Nothing could have been easier than for him to have sent her to a convent, the usual fate of the discarded mistress. Those historians who attribute the end of their love affair to the part she played in the poison case have not examined the evidence; he had completely cooled after the birth of Toulouse, nearly a year before the arrest of Mme Voisin. Voltaire, with his great knowledge of human nature, put the matter in a nutshell: ‘the King had reproached himself for his liaison with a married woman and when he was no longer in love, his conscience made itself felt more keenly.'

Poor little Fontanges's day was soon done; Athénaïs had been right in thinking that she was too stupid to hold a man who only liked intelligent people, after his physical desire for her had gone. This happened sooner than might have been expected because she lost her health. A year after the liaison began, she had a baby which died. She was messed about by the doctors; never stopped losing blood; became sickly and plaintive and cried all the time. The King, who could not bear ill people, packed her off to a convent where her sister, appointed by him, was abbess. She took no possessions except a little Venetian lace to remind her of her few months of glory. The King visited her, when hunting in the neighbourhood; and when he saw what he had done to her, he had the grace to cry. Soon after that, in March 1681, she died, saying she was happy to go since she had seen the King in tears on her account. She was twenty. Perhaps rumours of poison had reached the convent, for her sister said there must be a post-mortem, and though the King was not anxious for one, it was finally held by seven doctors. It showed that her death was natural: her liver was diseased and her lungs in a bad way but the intestines, stomach and womb were quite healthy. The doctors said she had died of pneumonia brought on by loss of blood. She was the last of the King's pretty ladies from the household of Madame.

While the terrible events described in the last chapter were happening, the King, outwardly calm and unruffled, was settling into his new home. On 6 May 1682, he made the official announcement that from now on the seat of the French government would be at Versailles, and arrived there with some pomp, accompanied by his family, his ministers and the whole Court. The Court of France for ever in the country! The fashionable world was filled with dismay now that the long-expected blow had fallen. Not all the criticism was frivolous, however. For years Colbert had begged his master to abandon the project, for the obvious administrative reasons; Bossuet said that a City of the Rich needed no enemy — it carried the seeds of its own destruction. Versailles was indeed a city and the forerunner of Le Corbusier's self-contained
Unité
.

The house was still far from being ready, but the King thought he would never get the workmen out unless he moved in himself. As he was always adding to it and improving it, he probably never saw it without any scaffolding at all. Vast additions had been made to Le Vau's envelope. He had died in 1670; for some years after that his work was carried on by subordinates, but in 1679, Mansart, who had made himself a solid reputation with Clagny, became the King's architect and took over Versailles. He was now finishing the Galerie des Glaces where Le Vau's first floor terrace had been — the proportions of that façade sacrificed to the King's need for a vast reception room. However, what the house lost outside it gained inside, for this gallery is still one of the beauties of the western world. Seen at night soon after its completion, the painting and the gilding fresh and new, lit by thousands of candles in silver chandeliers and candelabra, furnished with solid silver consoles and orange tubs, crowded with beauties of both sexes, dressed in satin and lace, embroidered, re-embroidered, over-embroidered with real gold thread, and covered with jewels, it must have been like Aladdin's Cave or some other fable of the Orient. By day it had a different aspect, serving as the main street or market place of that City of the Rich. It was packed with people; servants hurrying to and fro with messages, courtiers button-holing each other for a chat, or dashing at top speed from one ceremony to the next; cows and asses on their way to provide fresh milk for little princes — all this was occasionally pushed aside so
that some royal sedan chair could get by, like the ministers' motor cars in a modern capital. Here, too, could be seen foreign visitors and tourists, easily recognizable by their strange clothes and aimless gait, looking round them in wonder. Versailles was more truly open to the public then than nowadays; anybody could wander in at any hour. There were seldom fewer than two hundred
fiacres
waiting outside, where the car-park is now. Hardly any of the rooms were banned to the ordinary citizen, but if by accident he should stray into one that was, a servant would quietly follow him, pretending that it was to draw a curtain or make up the fire, and point out his mistake in a low voice so that he would not feel humiliated. The kings at Versailles, almost unguarded, lived in a perpetual crowd, and yet, in a hundred years there was only one half-hearted attempt at assassination.

The two vast wings which flank Le Vau's envelope were finished. The one to the south was for the Princes of the Blood, the King's illegitimate children and their households; it contained fifteen flats, with another fourteen in the attics complete with shops and offices. Between this Princes' wing and the town, there was a building (now a military hospital), with kitchen, pantries and lodging for fifteen hundred servants. The stables which so beautifully join the château to the town were being built. They housed the King's horses, his Master of the Horse and the pages, and were a sort of public school for the sons of the nobility. These pages, generally out of hand, plagued the Versailles bourgeoisie for a hundred years. Stables, kennels and other dependencies of the hunt occupied more space than the accommodation of the ministries. In 1701 there were six packs of hounds at Versailles, altogether five hundred couples, belonging to the King, his sons, the Dauphin, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse and his cousin the Duc de Bourbon — they hunted the stag, the boar and the wolf. The king always kept a few hounds in his own rooms, and fed them himself, so that they would know him as their master — the hound-work interested him — out hunting.

Hundreds of courtiers were crammed into the Nobles' or north wing of the château. It was a maze of corridors, where strangers lost their way hopelessly. People could live here for years, forgotten by everybody. Madame was once in need of a lady-in-waiting who had to be a single duchess, either a widow or deserted by her husband. This sad duchess seemed not to exist until somebody remembered that Mme de Brancas, separated from the brutal, spendthrift Duke, was quietly starving to death in a garret of the Nobles' wing. Madame liked her, engaged her and treated her respectfully; the courtiers followed suit and she had a happy life thereafter.

The sedan chairs which carried people from one part of the château to another belonged to a company, like hackney cabs; none but the royal family were allowed to have their own. They were not allowed to go further into the King's part of the house than the guard-rooms and
never allowed in the Cour de Marbre. They made tremendous traffic blocks in the Nobles' wing. One of the corridors there was called the rue de Noailles, as its whole length gave on to flats occupied by that powerful but unpopular family. Such as they lived in splendour, but more humble folk could not be said to be well or comfortably lodged — in many cases the rooms they lived in had been chopped into tiny units with no regard for the façade — some had no windows at all, or gave on to dismal little interior wells. All the same, a lodging, however squalid, in the château, came to be more sought after than almost anything, as it was a sign of having succeeded in life. Those who could afford to also had houses or flats in the town of Versailles; and the very rich began building themselves seats in the surrounding country. The Ile de France is still dotted with wonderful houses built while the kings were at Versailles, although many disappeared during the Revolution and many others were destroyed by Germans.

Poorer members of the nobility were often ruined by life at Versailles. Everything there was expensive and appearances had to be kept up. The King liked to see his courtiers well turned out — elegant clothes in those days cost a fortune, although, since the fashions changed slowly, they could be worn for years. On special occasions, such as a royal marriage, he would let it be known that he would like everybody to appear in new clothes; and then there would be scramble for tailors, dressmakers and embroiderers whom the courtiers shamelessly bribed away from each other. The best embroidery was done by men; and the masters of the craft, M. l'Herminot and the brothers Delobel, had grace and favour lodgings in the Louvre. When people felt they could no longer meet the expenses of life in the château they looked to the King for lucrative sinecures or even presents of cash. These benefits were generally obtained through the mistresses, who, in their turn, took a percentage. The King did not at all mind being importuned in this way, since the people concerned were thereafter in his power. Anyhow, the courtiers who lived on their wits were in the minority: most were decent, ambitious people drawn to Versailles by a desire to get on in the army, to find suitable husbands and wives for their children, and by a very natural love of fashionable society.

Those who think of the nobles at Versailles as hundreds of idle fellows, with nothing to do but gossip, take part in ceremonies, hunt, gamble and make love sometimes forget that the able-bodied men of military age there were all serving soldiers. It is true that they led an extremely agreeable life in the winter, but as soon as the days drew out they rode off to the front to vie with each other in deeds of valour; and Versailles was left to women, old men, and those whom the King thought unsuitable for army commands. In fact the château was a general headquarters, and the town as full of barracks as any garrison town. The Court was run with military precision; the King himself was so punctual and so regular in his habits that it was said that, in any
part of the world, with a reliable watch, one would know exactly what he was doing at any particular moment. The iron etiquette, which has been made to seem so absurd, was a necessary discipline if an assembly of between two and five thousand people was to live harmoniously under the same roof. As Commander-in-Chief, he liked to keep the officers under his eye; they were the men to whom he entrusted his country's security and he wished to observe their comportment, to know them and for them to know him. Many of the couriers had lost an arm, a leg or an eye at the wars, and were lucky to be alive, since a serious wound in those days often led to an agonizing death by blood poisoning.

Superficially, it is true, the wars were fought in rather a civilized way. For one thing, nobody ever thought of campaigning in the winter. Many of the operations were sieges: the taking of fortified towns was brought to a fine art by Vauban, the engineer who became Marshal of France. As soon as a town was in French hands Vauban would set to work and re-design the ramparts, after which they were supposed to be invulnerable. His fortifications were of a supreme elegance; when the King wanted to be agreeable to Lord Portland he sent him to look at ‘our beautiful strong-places in the north'.

When Louis XIV was besieging Lille in 1667, the Comte de Brouais, the enemy commander defending the city, heard that the French had noice, so he sent some over for the King every morning. After a while, the King asked to see the officer who brought it and told him he could do with a little more. (At Versailles the courtiers required five pounds of ice a day each, in the summer.) Brouais sent a message back to say that the siege was going to last many months and as he would not like to think of the King without ice he was economizing the supply. The Duc de Charost who was there shouted out ‘Yes, and tell Brouais not to surrender like the Governor of Douai'. The King said, laughing, ‘Duc de Charost, are you mad?' ‘No, Sire, I'm thinking of my family honour — Brouais is my cousin.'

But, for all this bonhomie, the wars were bloody and many families were wiped out in them. M. de Saint-Abré who lay with his son beside him, both dying on the field, wrote to the King: ‘Sire, my son and I have lost our lives in the same battle. This is an end according to the rules and I believe that Your Majesty will be satisfied with both of us.' Nobody who had witnessed them was likely to forget the heartrending scenes when news came of Condé's successful crossing of the Rhine under enemy fire in 1672. Half the
jeunesse dorée
had been drowned or shot down in that engagement.