The Sun King (2 page)

Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de La Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life. For years before he lived there it was never out of his mind. When he was at the seat of government or away on hunting visits or with his army at the front he had to be sent a daily report on the work in hand on his house down to the tiniest details; and he never stopped adding to and improving the place while there was breath in his body. This ‘undeserving favourite' as the courtiers called it is part of his legend but in fact the Sun King only lived there during the meridian and the sunset years: in his great morning he held his court, consisting of a few dozen officials, at the Louvre and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was born, with visits to Chambord, Fontainebleau and Vincennes. Like a feudal king, he was always on the move, generally at war, and his court was a bivouac between two campaigns.

Nobody ever knew when this secret man first conceived the design by which his father's little hunting lodge was to become the hub of the universe, perhaps as early as 1661 when he began to give parties in the gardens there for his young mistress and a band of friends, whose average age at that time was nineteen. He was twenty-three, had been married for a year and already had a son, but his kingdom had hitherto been governed by Cardinal Mazarin his godfather; and his behaviour was still regulated by his mother, Queen Anne of Austria. He liked to disport himself away from the eye of the older generation and Versailles was a perfect place in which to do so, though the parties there had to take place in the garden; the house was much too small. The weather was always fine in those happy young days, the freshness of evening a welcome change from the heat of noon.

Louis XIII's house at Versailles had some twenty rooms and one big dormitory for men. It was perched over a village which clustered round a twelfth-century church, (where the Orangery is today; the Pièce d'Eau des Suisses was the village pond). Some poor little hamlets in the neighbourhood were called Trianon, Saint-Cyr, Clagny. Versailles, on the main road from Normandy to Paris, was more prosperous than they were; farmers and their cattle passed through it and it possessed three inns. The surrounding country was full of game, and Louis
XIII who, like most Bourbons, practically lived on horseback, so often found himself at Versailles after a day's hunting that he built the house to save himself the choice between staying at an inn or riding home to Saint-Germain after dark.

No doubt Louis XIV's famous visit to Vaux-le-Vicomte gave him his first idea of what Versailles might become. Like many people of mixed blood he was a strong nationalist; at the newly-built Vaux he first saw the perfection of contemporary French taste, free from that Italian influence which had hitherto been fashionable. Its master, Nicolas Fouquet, gave a house-warming there, 17 August 1661, and invited six thousand people to meet the King. It proved to be his own farewell party; the King, with mingled admiration and fury, examined the establishment in all its sumptuous detail and decided that Fouquet's ostentation (
luxe insolent et audacieux
) was unsuitable for a subject and intolerable for a minister of finance. He did not modify this view as the evening wore on and such gifts as diamond tiaras and saddle-horses were distributed to the guests. Louis returned Fouquet's hospitality by clapping him in gaol and we seldom hear of other people giving parties for the King. Mazarin had just died and Fouquet's real crime was ambition: he was intriguing to make himself head of the government. Had Louis XIV been the man everybody supposed him to be Fouquet would have ruled both King and country; Louis however had other ideas and to put them into practice he was obliged to get rid of this clever, unscrupulous statesman. He thus gave a second indication of his own implacable ambition, the first having been his marriage with Marie-Thérèse of Spain when the wife he wanted was Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. She said to him as they parted ‘You are the King; you love me and yet you send me away'. He was always to be the master of his mistresses and of himself, as well as of France. Marie-Thérèse eventually brought the crown of Spain to the Bourbons — who shall say that Mazarin's brains would not have been a greater prize? They were to prove a precious legacy to many another family.

So Fouquet went to his long martyrdom in the fortress of Pignerol. His sins were not visited on his children. His daughter, the Duchesse de Béthune, was always kindly received at Court; under Louis XV, his grandson the Maréchal de Belle-Isle became a rich and respected soldier while his (Belle-Isle's) son, Gisors, was a French Sir Philip Sidney. But the King took a certain amount of loot from Vaux-le-Vicomte and thought himself justified by the fact that its contents had been paid for out of public money, in other words his own. Archives, tapestry, brocade hangings, silver and silver gilt ornaments, statues and over a thousand orange trees found their way to the royal palaces. The orange trees alone represented a considerable sum; a sizeable one even nowadays costs a hundred pounds. The King was passionately fond of them and had them in all his rooms, in silver tubs. (Perhaps if one were exiled from France the single object most reminiscent of that celestial land
would be an orange tree in a tub.) Eight of Louis XIV's own trees still exist in the Orangery at Versailles to this day. He also appropriated the three remarkable men who had created Vaux: Le Nôtre the gardener, Le Vau the architect and Le Brun the artist of all work. He needed them to help him in the realization of a project which was now beginning to occupy his thoughts.

Louis XIV seems to have known that he would live to be old. His plans, both artistic and political, were for a long term; they ripened slowly and were confined to nobody. Why, having decided to build himself a house, he chose Versailles as a situation remains mysterious. The material difficulties of building on a large scale there were considerable. He insisted on keeping his father's little lodge, poised on a sandy knoll whose surface was forever shifting, and building his own mansion round it. As the house became more and more vast the hill itself had to be enlarged. The water supply, too, was always a problem. Then why, as he wanted a house of his very own, to be a monument to his reign, did he build on to an existing one, whose style had become unfashionable? His architects all begged him to pull down the old house because it made their work so difficult. His answer was that if the old house disappeared for any reason he would immediately build it up again brick by brick. No doubt Versailles had some special charm for him; his courtiers never could imagine what it was; their complaints and criticism grew more and more vociferous as his purpose, which was to make them all live there with him, became evident. As much as they dared they even protested to his face. ‘There is no view.' But he loved the view, so typical of the Ile de France: a great cutting through woodlands quietly rolling away to the western horizon and ending in two poplar trees. It had always been the same, and though he was to lighten it with the canal he never would put statuary to replace the poplars. ‘There is no town' was another complaint. So much the better — wherever the King lives a town will spring up; this one can be properly planned and laid out. ‘It is unhealthy.' The King feels perfectly well there.

More serious objections were put forward by Colbert, the King's chief political adviser. Backed up by Chancelier Séguier, a grand old man for whom Louis had considerable respect. Colbert wanted to see the King of France living in his capital. Quite naturally, in that age of building, Louis XIV would want a modern country residence, but why choose Versailles? In the early days Colbert had no notion of what the house would become; even so he grudged the money and the manpower which, in his view, ought to have been used to make the Louvre a fitting residence for a great King. But Louis had no intention of living in Paris. He was not afraid of the Parisians as has sometimes been said — fear was left out of his nature. Nor did he neglect Paris; on the contrary he lavished care and attention on all aspects of its development, turning it from a medieval slum into a beautiful and supremely habitable city. True he had no intention of allowing another Fronde,
the civil war between the great nobles which had raged during his childhood putting him, his mother and his brother in awkward, if not dangerous, situations. Too much stress may have been laid on the traumatic effect the Fronde had on the King's young psychology; no doubt it was his policy to keep power out of the hands of the aristocrats, and he liked to have them under his eye, but with his dominating personality he could have done so wherever he chose to hold his court; that was not a question of geography.

Louis XIV was a country person. He excelled at all sport and could hardly bear to be indoors; he spent hours every day hunting or shooting. The year before his death he brought down thirty-two pheasants with thirty-four shots, a considerable feat with the primitive gun of those days. He thought nothing of riding from Fountainebleau to Paris, going to see the building in progress at the Louvre and Vincennes, dining with his brother at Saint-Cloud, inspecting the improvements there and riding back to Fountainebleau. In old age he became more and more interested in gardens. Such a man would have been miserable, cooped up in a town.

Having fallen in love with Versailles the King never made the mistake of improving away the very atmosphere which had attracted him in the first place. He built the greatest palace on earth but it always remained the home of a young man, grand without being pompous, full of light and air and cheerfulness — a country house. Indeed it is called
le Château
, never
le Palais
. (
Château
in French means gentleman's seat, a castle is
château-fort
.) To begin with he did more work in the gardens than in the house, following the lines already laid out by Louis XIII, greatly enlarged and elaborated and with the addition of much water; he added more and more green rooms which led off the central alley or
tapis vert
and which he used for ever larger, more elaborate parties. These had nothing in common with the
fêtes champêtres
of the next century; there was no whiff of hay, the farmyard played no part in them; nature was kept in her place and the trellised drawing-rooms were decorated and furnished with oriental luxury. It may be imagined how passionately invitations to these parties were desired; the King had already begun to enslave his nobility by playing on the French love of fashion. In 1664 he gave a fête called
Les Plaisirs de l'Ile Enchantée
which lasted from 7 to 13 May. This really caused more pain than pleasure for the guests had nowhere to sleep and were obliged to doss down as best they could in local cottages and stables. In 1665 he was spending one day a week at Versailles, generally coming over from Saint-Germain to see how the work was getting on, to hang a few pictures in the house, run round the gardens and then divert himself with his friends.

This was the time of Bernini's visit. He was invited to France to make plans for finishing the Louvre which was then an amorphous cluster of buildings, of many different dates, more like a village than a palace. The King was bent on tidying up Paris and he succeeded with the town but
there has always been something unsatisfactory about the Louvre, beautiful as are many of its component parts. Bernini's plans were not liked; the King thought them too baroque, unsuitable for the sober skies of northern France, while Colbert raised practical difficulties such as where would the servants sleep? How was the food to be brought from the kitchens? The King got on well with Bernini, cleverly allowing him to think that his failure was all Colbert's doing; but Bernini was rude and arrogant with the French artists, architects and civil servants, whom he thoroughly disliked and who loathed him — the old story of Frenchmen and Italians unable to appreciate each other's merits. After some months he went home, loaded with money and thanks; his voyage would have been a waste of time had he not made a bust of Louis XIV which is one of the greatest treasures of Versailles and the only effigy to illustrate contemporary descriptions of the King's appearance.

Unfortunately the pictures of Louis XIV are not attractive, possibly because of the periwig which always seems frowsty, very different from the flowing curls of the bust. If one looks carefully at the face it often has a humorous and kindly aspect (for instance in the Mignard of the Louvre) but is never handsome — in some portraits it is decidedly oriental (Louis XIV most probably had both Jewish and Moorish blood through the Aragons). But the many people who wrote about him at first hand, either, like the Venetian ambassadors, to describe him to their governments (a physical description of those in power was considered important) or in diaries or memoirs intended to be published after his death, if at all, or in letters, do not seem to have noticed an alien or exotic look. They agree that he was tall and dark, with an excellent figure, perfect legs, feet and hands, small but brilliant eyes which he hardly ever opened wide but which gave the impression, truly, of seeing everything. The salient feature was his nose; it was a good shape, though rather pinched above the nostrils; it only became Jewish when he was old. All speak of his noble look and extraordinary grace; he never made an ill-considered or meaningless gesture so that he seemed like a deity (or, according to some, an actor of genius ever on the stage). These characteristics are evident in Bernini's bust and such was the appearance of Louis XIV. It is to be hoped that his strange character will emerge during the course of this book.

He was delighted with the bust and commissioned an equestrian statue of himself which Bernini was to create at his leisure when he got back to Rome. It arrived at Versailles some nineteen years later and was unpacked in the Orangery. The King hated it. He prided himself on his excellent horsemanship and thought that he was portrayed as sitting all wrong in the saddle. He wanted to break up the statue. In the end he got Coysevox to make a few alterations so that it appeared to represent, not the Sun King but a Roman emperor and banished it to the end of the Pièce d'Eau des Suisses where it still is, gloriously beautiful in spite of a near-by railway line, much litter and the
scribblings of Versailles plebeians. It is too seldom visited.