Versailles: A Biography of a Palace

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IN MEMORY OF

G. G. MEYNELL

PREFACE

THIS BOOK is about the real Versailles: the historical reality behind a palace that achieved mythic stature almost as soon as it had been built. Versailles was once réal in a sense of a French word already antiquated when Versailles was being built: a royal palace, seat of what at the time (the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries) was the most charismatic monarchy in Europe. The atmosphere of legend around Versailles draws strength from the tragic ingredients of its royal story. A beautiful palace built by a proud king blazed with glory for a century. Then, abruptly, comeuppance arrived with a revolutionary mob that burst in and led off the king’s hapless descendants to a gory death.

There are many books about the palace of Versailles written, like this one, for the general reader. Most belong on the architectural or horticultural shelves of a bookshop. Versailles: A Biography of a Palace aims at the gap left by the absence of an up-to-date account of the human and the historical story.

Versailles belonged to a particular moment in French history. It was conceived by the French monarchy as a solution to its political problems. In the end, the palace and what it represented added to those problems. This book is by no means a political history. But ponderings on the causes of the French Revolution are bound to lurk in the background.

Building-history, it is sometimes said, is boring history. To animate royal Versailles, this book draws on the writings—worldly, funny, sharp-eyed, and occasionally moving—of a handful of figures who knew the palace intimately. These accounts preserve the authentic voices of royal Versailles. They are mainly royalty and aristocrats because these were the people for whom Versailles was built. An upper servant is occasionally heard, such as Madame Campan, Marie-Antoinette’s first woman of the bedchamber. They all wrote in the idiom of a courtly civilization that the Revolution swept away so comprehensively that when the survivors returned from exile, they found not only French customs but also the French language transformed. We should not expect these voices to speak as we do. But we can still relish their ear for a good story.

Scribing courtiers like the duc de Saint-Simon or the duc de Luynes took for granted an in-depth knowledge of the palace. Versailles has since changed so much that most of its layout as a working palace remains a mystery to the visitor, who sees nothing of kitchens, stables, storerooms, nursery, lodgings for courtiers, quarters for servants, or ministries. This book places eyewitness anecdotes and reminiscences as precisely as possible. These bring to life for the reader, not only the famous spaces like the Hall of Mirrors or Louis XIV’s bedchamber, but the byways of a complex once likened to a small town.

Versailles is an archaeological site. Today’s visitor can walk once more on the winding paths in Marie-Antoinette’s garden, which the spade has rescued from long oblivion. Another kind of excavator works with the original manuscripts from the archives of the vanished department of state known as the King’s Buildings. The French monarchy built and maintained Versailles on strict bureaucratic principles. Original inventories, estimates, orders, invoices, correspondence with palace officials and lodgers, and architectural plans, all survive, most of them in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale.

This Aladdin’s cave offsets the fact that most of royal Versailles was destroyed in the nineteenth century. Versailles has had a longer life since its drastic conversion into a museum than as a palace. The documents allow vanished royal rooms to be reconstructed not just on paper but in reality. Down to the tiniest detail of daily life, they offer glimpses of how the palace functioned as a residence and seat of government. They shed light on royal secrets.

Consulting these papers, specialists painstakingly piece together the history of the building, the ceaseless repairs and alterations, and, in recent years, the history of the individual lodgings in what was once a vast apartment block. A general book on Versailles is based on this edifice of learning, one that continually grows. But there still remains, as there will for a long time, much work to do…¹ All books about Versailles, including this one, are perforce provisional.

One of the pleasures of writing about the palace is exploring Versailles itself. The town is a historical gem that most visitors to the palace ignore. Strolling its peaceful eighteenth-century streets at night, the crowds gone, past carriage gateways and street fountains dating back to royal times, is an atmospheric experience. I am hugely indebted to the expert tours and lectures organized by the Société des Amis de Versailles. These provide a uniquely informative way of exploring the town. Above all, they open doors in the palace that normally remain closed to the public.

This book rests on the labors of others. My huge debt to the specialist scholars who write about Versailles is clear from the citations. Versailles: A Biography of a Palace could not possibly have been written without the chain of learned books and articles that reaches back to Pierre de Nolhac, nineteenth-century founder of the French school of Versailles scholarship.

Other debts are also gratefully acknowledged here. At the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et du Trianon, I am obliged to M. Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel, Directeur Général, along with M. Roland Bossard, for responding helpfully to my queries.

For help and support of various kinds, including many conversations from which I alone came away the wiser, I would like to thank Richard Archer, Simon Burrows, Jim Crow, Erica Davies, Christine Donougher, Dominique Florentin, Xavier Guégan, Rachel Hammersley, Marie-Christine Keith, Philip Mansel, Alex Martin, Cathy McClive, Elinor Meynell, the Estate of the late G. G. Meynell, Munro Price, François-Joseph Ruggiu, Rowland Smith, Lee Stannard, John Wakefield, and Imogen Walford.

I thank Yaniv Soha and his team at St. Martin’s Press for their efficiency and exactitude, and Sheila C. Severn Newton for drawing the map and plan.

Finally, I owe particular debts to Roderick Conway Morris, who generously put time aside to read the book in draft, and to my agent, Andrew Lownie, who has given unwavering support to the project since its earliest stages.

TONY SPAWFORTH

London, September 2007

PALACE OF VERSAILLES

(FIRST FLOOR OF THE CENTRAL BLOCK UNDER LOUIS XVI)

THE PALACE AND ITS DEPENDENCIES IN THE TOWN

(EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

1.

Builders of the Labyrinth

ONLY AN aerial viewpoint starts to do justice to the size of Versailles. Even then, it takes one of the delicate eighteenth-century plans of Versailles, with the royal domain delineated in a faded pink, to grasp that the palace, with its multiple wings and hidden courts, was the focus of a much larger complex scattered around the town of Versailles.

Inmates likened royal Versailles to a labyrinth: a maze of galleries, corridors, staircases, and apartments.¹ In 1838 William Talmadge, a visitor from England, confessed: The place is vast beyond all English imagination: one can hardly conceive it according to its purpose as a place of residence.²

A confusing number of French kings called Louis had a hand in the building we see today. This chapter tells the chronological story of the creation of Versailles from Louis XIII’s first house on the site in 1623 to Louis XVI’s ambitious rebuilding plans on the eve of the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, when Versailles ceased to be a royal residence.

*   *   *

When Louis XIII succeeded as French king in 1610, Versailles was a prosperous hamlet set in an upland valley as yet only partially cleared for cultivation. The name of the place, formed on the Latin word vertere, meaning to turn the soil, immortalizes the hard grind of the medieval farmers who first won a way of life here from primal woodland. In the years around 1600 a windmill topped the knoll on which the palace later rose. Two hundred or so souls made up the population.

As the crow flies, Versailles is twelve miles west of Paris. When Louis XIV moved the seat of the monarchy to Versailles in 1682, the Paris-Versailles road became one of the busiest arteries in Europe, even during the night, when, by the late eighteenth century, streetlights lit the paved surface all the way from the palace to the Paris tollgate. But, in the first instance, the sleepy village of the early seventeenth century owed its new destiny not to the nearby capital, but to the royal residence of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, six miles due north. This redbrick Renaissance château, sited on high ground above the River Seine, commands sensational views of the Paris basin—much better ones, critics would later say, than those of Louis XIV’s Versailles.

Henri IV, Louis XIV’s grandfather and first king of the Bourbon line of the French royal house, liked this old royal residence, updating it with new royal quarters and terraced gardens running down to the river. Saint-Germain remained a favorite residence of the new dynasty for most of the seventeenth century. In 1638 Louis XIII’s queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth there to the future Louis XIV.

Like all French royalty, the Bourbon kings had hunting in their blood. The chief attraction of Saint-Germain, apart from the view, was the stag. The virility and sheer beauty of this monarch of the French forests had made it a badge of royalty since time immemorial. An indefatigable animal, it was the stag that first led Henri IV from Saint-Germain to Versailles. His son and successor, Louis XIII, was only ten when he too first found himself at Versailles in pursuit of his quarry.

No one knows precisely why, but the young Louis XIII took a fancy to the spot. He started to buy up land here for a game reserve. This kind of human intervention was needed because hunting on the Bourbon scale upset the balance of nature. In the sixteen years from 1775 to 1791, Louis XIII’s descendant, Louis XVI, killed 1,274 stags. Sustaining this level of slaughter were the gamekeepers whose animal husbandry kept the royal forests well stocked. At Versailles, Louis XIII’s reserve is remembered in the quarter of the modern town still called Parc-aux-Cerfs (Stag Park).

In 1623, when he was twenty-two, Louis XIII decided to commission a simple country house on the site of the future palace. He intended it for short stays with a small entourage only. He began buying up more local land, including in due course the seigneury, or feudal estate, of Versailles, acquired from the noble family of the Gondi. As lord of Versailles, Louis now enjoyed rights of high and low justice over the local peasantry. No less important, he could now hunt at will over the seigneurial land.

Seven years passed before the king, now aged thirty, plucked up enough nerve to exile his politically overbearing mother, Marie de’ Medici. Sharing the reins of power with the formidable Richelieu, his chief minister, he now felt confident enough to rebuild his house as a medium-sized country château in the French style of the day. Walls of creamy stone rose, framing decorative panels of red bricks—in fact, simulated in painted plaster—and roofs tiled with blue slate; the color scheme echoed, deliberately one supposes, the red, white, and blue livery of the king’s household. Philibert Le Roy, the architect, added the seigneurial touch of a dry moat. This was not just symbolic; in what was then countryside, the house and its contents needed protection when the monarch was absent.

Louis XIII’s rooms are now known mainly from inventories of their contents. As was customary, they were on the first, or noble, floor. They included accommodations for his queen on the south side, with his on the north. This basic disposition of the royal quarters was preserved throughout the history of Versailles as a royal residence. It is ironic, then, that Anne of Austria never stayed the night. Not only was the marriage troubled, but Louis XIII was far from gregarious. He preferred mainly male cronies and disliked the prospect of an invasion of his retreat by the great number of women forming Anne’s household: they would spoil everything, as he once told Richelieu. In this respect as in others, his son could not have been more different.

Louis XIII went on buying up local land. By the time he died, he had laid out a modest park to the west of his château. The estate now included the stag park, outbuildings for kitchens, stables, and kennels, and a covered tennis court. Everything was inherited by his elder son and successor, the four-year-old Louis XIV.³

*   *   *

The future Louis XIV was first brought to Versailles at the age of three.⁴ Once he was old enough to hunt from Saint-Germain, he came to know the place better. But he took no special interest in his father’s retreat until 1661, when he was in his twenty-third year and had been king for eighteen years. Then he began to plough funds into what, in hindsight, became a never-ending series of costly transformations continuing until his death.

This sudden change of attitude toward Versailles is often linked with his amorous needs. At the time he was embarked on an adulterous affair with Louise de La Vallière, a young noblewoman of the court. The memoirist Saint-Simon records how Louis used to bring her to Versailles from Saint-Germain for discreet trysts out of sight of the queen and queen mother. But France and Europe were beginning to learn that Louis XIV was a king to his fingertips. At Versailles, reasons of state quickly weighed in as well.

In his twenties Louis redecorated the interior of his father’s château and rearranged the approach on the Paris side. He built new kitchens and stables. But his great passion at this time was the park. In concert with the gardener and designer André Le Nôtre, he began to invest large sums in an extremely ambitious redesign and enlargement of the old grounds, gradually extending them with more land purchases until they reached the western horizon.

Le Nôtre’s achievement is difficult to appreciate because we can no longer see the terrain as it was when he set to work. He was a landscape gardener on a grand scale. He turned ponds and streams into ornamental sheets of water. He shifted vast amounts of soil to create a terrace in front of the château, where the ground naturally slopes. He imported mature trees and relocated the villages that blocked his new vistas.

In the taste of the day, he regimented nature. Trees and shrubs were clipped and sheared. He divided the terrain into bosquets or groves with geometric shapes. With the help of artists, architects, and fountain makers he decorated these like outdoor rooms. Astonishing waterworks and kinked paths revealing hidden surprises were a feature of this young king’s garden. In the royal idiom of the age, Louis and his artists used sculpture, water, and orientation to liken the nature of his rule to the daily passage of the life-giving sun.

The general aim was to impress, and Louis XIV succeeded. By 1668 the modest country house was incongruously married to the most talked-about grounds in France. Called a theater king by contemporaries, Louis was aided in this purpose by his innate showman’s flair.

He spread word of his works at Versailles by means of a series of nocturnal fêtes in the grounds, the first in 1664, a second in 1668, and a third in 1674. He invited the nobility, bourgeois Parisians, provincial notables, and ambassadors and other distinguished foreigners, like the duke of Monmouth, a bastard of Charles II of England.

He relied on a team of specialists—from actors, playwrights, musicians, artists, and set builders to dressmakers, flower arrangers, and pyrotechnists—all under the general direction of a gifted impresario. Carlo Vigarani hailed from the country of origin of this kind of court spectacular, imported to France along with Medici queens from sixteenth-century Italy.

The young king sought to entertain his entourage and to charm his mistresses. But—and this is true of Louis XIV and Versailles in general—he always had politics in view. He used the fêtes to raise his profile both in France and abroad by showing off his comely person (he took part in fancy dress), his good taste, and his resources. His vehicle for this rather modern attitude to self-promotion was a publicity machine that made liberal use of the engraver’s skill.

Its director in all but name was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the key organizer of project Versailles behind the scenes. Thanks to his industry, loyalty, and talents, this older man had been promoted by the young Louis XIV from clerk to the most powerful positions in the government. He ended up combining the finance ministry, which provided the funds, with oversight of the Buildings, Arts, Tapestries, and Manufactories of France: in effect, an arts minister.

Colbert hired the best artists to engrave the highlights of the royal fêtes—the theatricals, fireworks, balls, and banquets. At a leisurely pace, in a world that moved more slowly than today’s, he had these engravings made up into collections bound in calf or morocco. In the 1670s he gave these away by the hundreds to the ambassadors, who were encouraged in turn to show them around in their home capitals. As word spread, overseas sightseers were drawn to Versailles, like the English architect Christopher Wren, an early visitor in 1665. Louis had succeeded in using the arts to get himself talked about.

By 1668, when he had just turned thirty, Louis had won his first war, wresting Lille from his wife’s family, the Spanish Habsburgs. Flushed with success, he decided to turn his attention from the gardens of Versailles to the house. This was too small to be much more than a backdrop to outdoor activities. But the ephemeral theaters and ballrooms repeatedly erected for the garden fêtes were wasteful, and these festivities always ran the risk of bad weather. Louis now wanted to build a permanent theater and ballroom at Versailles. Not for the last time in the history of the extravagant palace, expensive new buildings could be claimed as an economy.

At first Louis planned to preserve the original château at the center of his enlargements. But in June 1669, with work already under way, he decided on a far more ambitious upgrade of Versailles into a center of government. He now envisaged the ministers working with him at Versailles, just as they already followed him from Paris to Saint-Germain and to Fontainebleau, the other big royal palace in the vicinity of the capital.

Inspired by this vision, Louis announced his intention to demolish his father’s château. He wanted to build huge wings to the north and south to house a ballroom, theater, and lodgings for the courtiers of the household: those with a right to board and lodging under the royal roof. Attracting these great nobles into his permanent entourage was already a key concern for the young Louis. As early as 1663, he was nagging Colbert about their accommodations. Stories of bad-tempered grandees dining in holes—a reference to the inns of Versailles—and sleeping in their coaches during the fêtes of 1664 and 1668 were not the best way of tempting French nobles out to Versailles.

A tussle now ensued between Colbert and his master. Each had his own ideas for how France’s king should be housed. The powerful arts minister would have preferred to see the king finish his improvements to the Louvre, the Parisian palace that all Frenchmen thought of as the traditional seat of the monarchy. The two men eventually compromised. For the time being the king dropped his talk of demolition and of wings. But he had his way in building something grand and majestic at Versailles.

The architect Louis Le Vau drew up new plans for what became known as the Envelope. His new extension literally enveloped the old château on three sides; the gaps between the new and old buildings created inner courtyards for use by servants. The new façades were built of bright, creamy stone and decorated with Ionic columns in the Italian manner. The second, or attic, story was topped by a balustrade masking a flat roof.

This upper story would go some way to satisfy the king’s wish to house his courtiers. Traces remain of the original décor of the attic rooms. They had painted ceilings—a prestigious feature in this period—and sculptured cornices. This richness shows that Louis intended them as lodgings for persons of unusual eminence, probably his cousins, the princes of the blood.

On the Paris side, too, there was a transformation. The detached service wings dating from the 1660s were converted into more lodgings for courtiers and joined up with the side wings of the Louis XIII château. The effect, more chance than design, was to create two elongated wings that progressively narrow as they recede toward the old château. This is still a distinctive aspect of the palace today. At the same time, a huge new forecourt was created. This was flanked by four pavilions, one for each of the four ministers of state, their families, and their bureaux.

In contrast to Le Vau’s Italianate façades overlooking the garden, on the Paris side Louis XIV’s aesthetic choices were constrained by the older work in the Louis XIII style. Louis and Colbert were troubled by this jarring divorce of styles and materials between the garden and Paris sides. At first they tried to offset it by giving the rebuilt wings on the Paris side flat roofs to harmonize with those of the Envelope. But the need for more accommodations prevailed. Only a year or so later these roofs were drastically raised to provide two superposed attics filled with lodgings.

With massive wings to east or west shelved for the time being, Louis still needed more lodgings for courtiers. At Saint-Germain or Fontainebleau most of the court lodged, not in the palace, but in the town. A senior court official, the grand marshal of lodgings, had the job of requisitioning the billets and chalking up names on townsfolk’s doors.

At Versailles the courtiers were now to build their own accommodations. In 1671 Louis XIV announced that he was giving away plots of land on the Paris side and that houses built on them would be exempt from seizure for debt—an enticement for France’s great nobles, many of them cash-strapped and in debt. A rush of grandees took advantage.

Louis required the new houses to be built in a uniform style. They also had to defer in both height (no more than two stories) and building materials (the same cream stone, redbrick effect, and blue slates) to the Paris façades of the royal residence on the low hill above them. An English visitor in 1677, John Locke, likened the effect to that of an English manor house and its surrounding cottages.

The new houses lined two of the three tree-lined avenues that fanned out from the trapezoidal plaza in front of the château. Le Nôtre had planned this impressive approach in the 1660s by broadening two avenues that already existed under Louis XIII and, for the sake of symmetry, adding a third to the south, the future avenue de Sceaux, in fact a decorative cul-de-sac. On paper, the total effect resembles a goose’s webbed foot.

Behind the northernmost avenue (today’s avenue de Saint-Cloud), François d’Orbay, the architect who took over after Le Vau’s death in 1670, laid out a new town on a rectilinear grid organized around two reserved spaces: one, further from the château, for a market, the other for a residential place along the lines of similar squares seen in Paris by this date. To safeguard the spiritual needs of the enlarged château community, Louis himself laid the foundation stone for a convent of Franciscan friars.

Inside the Envelope, along the north and south sides, Louis created new first-floor state apartments for himself and his queen, Maria Theresa of Spain. Originally, each comprised a symmetrical series of seven lavishly decorated rooms linked by doors lined up with each other in the manner of the time to create a long and imposing vista when all were open simultaneously.

The king’s suite of rooms followed the standard pattern of a royal apartment in France at this time, beginning with a vestibule, then a guardroom, an antechamber where the throne was set up, a state bedchamber, a large cabinet (study), and two smaller, more private rooms. Respectively a study and a bedchamber, these led out to a central terrace shared with the queen and overlooking Le Nôtre’s garden.

For the first time, these rooms allowed the sovereigns to receive in state at Versailles. In 1674 work began on a monumental marble staircase to serve the king’s new apartment. With its magnificent murals and painted ceilings, it was one of the most admired features of Versailles until Louis XV demolished it to provide more accommodations for his large family. Its later name, the Ambassadors’ Staircase, underlines Louis XIV’s constant preoccupation with impressing rival European powers.

*   *   *

Throughout the 1670s Louis XIV was still only an occasional resident. He came in the summer months, when the garden looked and smelled its best. The chief royal seat remained Saint-Germain. On average, Louis stayed there at least ten months a year in the 1670s, when not at war. For most of this time Versailles was a building site. In the Envelope, work on the king’s bath apartment and the new staircase dragged on for most of the decade. So it did in the gardens, where the transformations had been almost continuous since 1661. Fascinated by architecture, Louis was a hands-on client, the true director of works, annotating plans, inspecting maquettes, meeting with his architects on Thursdays, and conducting a detailed correspondence from the front with Colbert.

Louis paid constant visits of inspection. In 1672 an organ of court news and gossip, the Mercure galant, informed its readers that not a month goes by without the King going [to Versailles], only to find that it looks completely different when he returns, the great changes arising from the beautiful things being endlessly added. Between the lines the pressure placed on the contractors can be sensed.⁵

In 1678 a more mature Louis, aged forty, was in the course of concluding a successful war against the Dutch. He now felt ready, politically and financially, to take his plans for Versailles to their logical conclusion. Ideas that Louis had taken up and then dropped in 1669, including the massive wings, were no longer to be deferred. Le Vau being dead, the work was entrusted to Jules Hardouin Mansart, the king’s chief architect.

No master plan survives. But an official medal minted in 1680, inscribed with the Latin words REGIA VERSALIUM (Palace of Versailles), shows all the important additions of this largest of all building campaigns at Versailles. By 1677 Louis, Colbert, and Mansart must have been agreed on the scale, if not the detail, of the new works, which were staggered to spread the cost. The plan was to turn Versailles into the main royal residence, the aim that Louis must have had in mind since at least 1669.

In the first step, begun in spring 1678, Mansart filled in Le Vau’s garden terrace in the Envelope to create a grand gallery on the first floor: today’s Hall of Mirrors, with its flanking Salons of War and Peace. The next year he began a huge new wing to the south, two monumental stable blocks opposite the château on the Paris side, and a major remodeling of the forecourts.

On the Paris side, he joined together Le Vau’s ministerial pavilions to form two large wings for the ministers set in a vast Ministers’ Court. Beneath its sloping cobbles were underground barracks for the companies of royal troops who guarded it. A second set of gates gave access to an inner courtyard. This Royal Court (Cour Royale) was the entrance to the palace proper and was guarded at night by the king’s personal bodyguard.

The slope of the hill meant that a short flight of steps was needed to connect this second courtyard with a third, the Marble Court (Cour de Marbre). This innermost courtyard was bounded on three sides by the Paris façades of Louis XIII’s château. By now these had been altered almost out of recognition: windows had been enlarged, balconies and sculptured figures added, and in the center, a false third story had been added to create a pedimental frontal, crowned with an ornamental clock.

With a length of 176 yards (161 meters), Mansart’s new south wing was over half as long again as the garden façade of the Envelope. Wing is something of a misnomer: the building is a rectangle originally divided into three internal courtyards by two cross wings. It was built to house members of the royal family in the rooms overlooking the gardens, and for this reason was often called the Princes’ Wing (Aile des Princes). The inner courts, the attics, and the town side were destined for courtiers, kitchens, and workshops. Much of the life of the royal palace was to be found here and in the wing soon to be built to the north.

The two stable buildings begun by Mansart in this same year face the Paris side of the palace from across the place d’Armes. Identical from the outside, the Grand Stables (Grande Écurie) to the north housed the king’s saddle horses, the Small Stables (Petite Écurie) to the south his carriages. Their monumentality was highly unusual for the time and is a good example of the magnificence for which Louis XIV strove at Versailles. Stone façades and the elaborate central portals topped by sculptured horses spoke the architectural language of a noble or princely residence, not mere service buildings. The large forecourts had no particular function but to add to this aura of stateliness. The real work of an army of ostlers, grooms, coachmen, saddlers, blacksmiths, and horse doctors was conducted out of sight, in a sprawl of low buildings and courtyards behind the imposing façades.

In 1682 Mansart opened up two new building sites. One was the Kennel (Chenil), which housed the hounds, horses, and personnel of the king’s hunt—a major court service. Its two-story buildings occupied a sprawling site behind the Grand Stables. The other, the Grand Commons (Grand Commun), occupied the site of the old parish church, which now went the