Athenais (11 page)
Louis had found as his consort a woman he felt was worthy to support his self-mythologizing. Athena might, after all, make an exception for Apollo. Athénaïs de Montespan was the perfect feminine counterpoint to Louis’s conception of himself, which he planned to display in the greatest palace Europe had ever seen. Moreover, she was as hungry for power and splendor as Louis himself. The genius loci of Louis’s house seemed somehow to reside in the changing natures of his lovers, and the divertissement was a farewell to the pastoral conceit of Versailles as the King’s pleasure house. It was now to become the literal manifestation of the glory of Louis XIV. The transformation began with Athénaïs.
“Of all the violent passions, the least
unbecoming in women is love.”
C
ardinal Mazarin left Louis XIV three gifts: his kingdom, his taste and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Without Colbert, no less than Le Brun, Le Vau, Le Notre and Mansart, Europe’s greatest baroque palace could not have been built. While Le Brun and Le Vau designed the house, Mansart constructed it and Le Notre created the gardens, Colbert was the money man. Not that Colbert, the merchant’s son from Rheims who became Mazarin’s secretary, then minister of finance and superintendent of buildings to Louis, ever liked Versailles very much. Like many people, at first he failed to understand Louis’s passion for the place, and repeatedly tried to divert his master’s attention to the Louvre, which he considered the proper residence for the King. Versailles was too flat, too damp, too unhealthy; there was no proper town or even a water supply. Why did the King insist on retaining the unfashionable little house built by his father as the centerpiece of his palace? The foundations were unsteady, and a new hill would have to be made to accommodate Louis’s plans. Moreover, the construction costs — one third of all taxes for thirty years — were so astronomical that Louis could not even bear to look at the accounts. These were Colbert’s headache, and much of the ingenuity he deployed in improving the French economy was motivated by the necessity to alleviate it, but he grumbled and fretted, and his prudent soul was never reconciled to the terrible expense of his master’s dream.
Colbert was so cold and impassive that he was nicknamed “the North.” His passion was administration — not a prepossessing enthusiasm, but one for which France had reason to be grateful. When Colbert took over, the treasury was meager and agriculture and trade had been severely damaged by the civil wars during Louis’s minority. Nevertheless, Louis was determined to continue the project begun in his father’s reign by Cardinal Richelieu and developed by Mazarin, to create a strong and united nation with a comprehensive cultural identity. Colbert was an unimaginative man, but he understood his master’s ambition for France, and set about providing him with the means to achieve it. In just ten years, he doubled the national revenues, starting with the reform of the tax-collecting authorities to put the treasury in surplus without raising taxes. This money he ploughed back into French manufacture and export, using the court as a showpiece to advertise the best French workmanship. Colbert poked his nose into everything. In addition to sharing the administration of the Academy for Painting and Sculpture with Le Brun, he established and directed the Academy of Architecture, oversaw the building of France’s first navy, controlled import tariffs and customs barriers, improved the French West India trading company and encouraged French expansion into Canada. Louis wrote to his son the Dauphin: “Never forget that it is by work that a King rules,” but the financial regeneration of France was the product of Colbert’s work rather than Louis’s. It seems fortunate, though, that the imaginative part of the proceedings was left to the King.
Louis XIV’s famous declaration, “Versailles, c’est moi,” encapsulates the spirit of the baroque, and Versailles itself became the model, or ideal, for grand architecture throughout Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The idea of a baroque work, known as the “concettismo,” is “the transformation of a thought through the work of different disciplines,”
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that is, the separate elements of the object are demonstrated by the cumulative, interrelated impact of its constituent elements. At Versailles, architecture, sculpture, painting, decoration and landscaping all worked together to create a symbiotic impact which was greater than that of any element considered separately. Thus the unified appearance of château, gardens, town and roads created a spectacle which was best appreciated if all were examined together. The baroque is the expression of the classical idea of life lived as a spectacle, in which men conduct themselves as “actors” before God and every public gesture becomes ceremonial. It is notable that many seventeenth-century books on religious or public affairs have titles like
Theatrum ceremoniale historico-politicum
or
Theatrum ecclesiasticum.
Louis’s genius was to adapt this conception of life as theater for his own political ends. The architecture of Versailles, and the public life of its owner, became, as never before, the theatrical expression of, and the metaphor for, absolute power. Louis and Versailles came to exist in a symbiotic relationship, the one personifying and defining the majesty of the other.
After the divertissement given for Athénaïs in 1668, Louis had his workmen brought in (a total of 30,000 men were needed to complete the château) to create an “envelope” of stone around the original building which would form the core of a new house. The principal artists at Versailles, Le Brun, Le Vau and Le Notre, had worked together at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the residence of Louis’s former finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet. In 1661, Fouquet gave a famous fête at Vaux, the splendor of which enraged the King as it was largely funded by money Fouquet had supposedly embezzled from public coffers. Fouquet was condemned to imprisonment, and Louis availed himself of the treasures of Vaux as well as of its creators. Le Vau designed the château at Versailles in collaboration with Le Brun, who was also the King’s painter-in-chief and responsible for the interior of the château. When Le Vau died in 1670, his designs were realized and expanded by Mansart.
From 1674 onwards, the court took up a partial residence at Versailles, but it was not until 1682 that the building was ready for a permanent move. The relocation of the court has often been attributed to Louis’s dislike of Paris, a city tainted by childhood memories of the development of the wars of the Fronde, but this argument is as unjust as it is often repeated. The last winter Louis spent in Paris was that of 1670, twenty years after the Fronde, and too much emphasis is placed on the idea that he somehow found the town traumatizing. Louis did prefer Versailles, but not because he hated the Louvre. Rather, Versailles provided an appropriate backdrop for his sovereignty in a way that his town palaces, which had developed rather haphazardly from the fortified castles of a more warlike age, never could. His move was not an attempt to punish Paris, on which he lavished a great deal of money throughout his reign.
The construction of the central apartments, on a direct east–west axis, allowed the King’s day to reflect the movements of the sun’s cycle, and every room in the château was oriented towards this symbol of power. In Le Notre’s plans for the park, the water ran from north to south, creating the suggestion that the two contrary elements were harmonized by Louis’s presence. The “space” of Versailles, its staircases and diagonal perspectives, opened with movement, so that the rhythms of the King’s day corresponded with the rhythmic successions of the rooms. The visitor is guided, as by an orator through a speech, through the “ideas” of the building. Versailles embodies a social hierarchy which has the King at its summit; the favor a courtier enjoyed could be calculated architecturally by how far he was allowed to progress through the rooms and courtyards towards the person of the King. The Cour Royale, the Cour des Ministres and finally the Cour de Marbre, in the heart of the building, were all subject to strict gradations of precedent. Louis was passionate about the aesthetics of his château. When Mansart protested that the chimneys would smoke if their position was not altered, the King replied that he didn’t care about the smoke as long as it did not spoil the view. Drafts didn’t concern him provided his doors were splendidly symmetrical. If there was no town, then a town would grow where the King was. If there was no water, then the King would force it to flow. And as Louis controlled the structure of his house, so he would control its inhabitants. The etiquette of Versailles mirrored the fact that in its every aspect, the château was a testament to the King’s God-given majesty. More practically, the lesson Louis had learned from the Fronde wars — that an independent nobility was a potential source of insurrection — meant that if he intended to keep the nobility permanently under his eyes, he needed a palace big enough to hold them. Quite literally, Louis’s house had to contain his aristocracy, and thus, artistically and politically, Versailles represents Louis’s personal achievements, the stage for the performance he made of his life.
The apartments assigned to Athénaïs de Montespan after their completion in 1676 are perhaps the greatest indication of her importance to Louis at the time. Her suite comprised twenty rooms adjacent to the King’s on the second floor of the château, while the Queen had to make do with eleven. It was in Athénaïs’s rooms that she and Louis would closet themselves in the window where Athénaïs made the King laugh until he ached with her remarks about those who passed beneath. The courtiers came to dislike this habit so much that they referred to walking under her windows as “going before the guns.” Even the Queen was not safe. Once, during a promenade, her carriage forded a stream and filled with water, and Athénaïs declared that if she had been there, she would have called out, “La Reine boit,” punning on the similarity of the verbs “to drink” and “to limp.” Louis could not help laughing, but he would sternly remind Athénaïs that Marie-Thérèse was still her mistress. In fact, though Athénaïs’s jokes were often cruel, she herself was not really malicious, or
méchante.
She would pour vitriol on bores and flatterers, but once she had made Louis laugh, she forgot her unkindness, as she never really meant to offend anyone, and much as the courtiers hated being the butt of her jokes, they never lost a taste for them.
Athénaïs was sometimes accused of callousness, but her ruthless lack of sentimentality might more accurately be seen as a reflection of an age which was much less compassionate, far more cruel. When Athénaïs’s coach ran over a man and killed him, her companions reproached her because she did not burst into tears as they had done, but she accused them of hypocrisy, arguing that they were weeping at their own distress at the terrible sight and not for the victim. After all, people were run over all the time without causing grief among the court ladies. Mme. de Sévigné is equally realistic about the brutalities of the world she inhabited. Writing to her daughter with news of a battle in 1676, she reports cheerfully: “Condé was taken by storm the night of Saturday to Sunday. At first this news makes your heart beat faster; you think we must have paid dearly for this victory. Not at all, my dear, it only cost a few soldiers, and not one with a name.” Emotion was saved for family or friends; the misfortunes of others were part of God’s will and therefore a waste of feeling. Indeed, delight in cruelty was a disturbing pleasure for people of all classes, and the scaffold at the Place de Grève was as popular an outing as the opera or a good sermon. The master of the future Parisian doctor Noel Falcon-net wrote to the boy’s father that, as a reward for studying hard, he was treating his pupil to a viewing of a man being broken on the wheel. This was the more barbaric face of the occasionally caustic wit Athénaïs had learned to display in the salons of Paris, a symptom of a world where amusement and pain coexisted in far closer proximity than they do today.
Athénaïs shared Louis’s passion for Versailles and had an equal taste for splendor, but like Louis she was not above the practical. The King took great pride in his kitchen garden, with its lettuces, cabbages, peaches and his favorite strawberries, and had no reservations about giving the Doge of Venice or the Siamese ambassador a tour of his vegetable patch. He even wrote and printed his own guidebook to the gardens of Versailles. Athénaïs delighted him with her design for a fountain, built on what is now the Bassin d’Apollon, which was based on a gilded weeping willow with over one hundred jets of water gushing from its branches. The water tree impressed everyone with its ingenuity, as did the exquisite porcelain Trianon which Louis had constructed for Athénaïs in 1670 on the site of a demolished village. This was a series of miniature pavilions made of blue and white Delft tiles enclosed by flower gardens of anemones, Spanish jasmine, tuberoses and orange trees which produced the intoxicating perfumes Louis and Athénaïs loved. It was a toy house, a house to make love in, and it says a good deal about Mme. de Maintenon’s character that she later claimed it was too cold and had it pulled down.
Another lesson Louis had absorbed from Mazarin’s predecessor, Richelieu, was that the “mythologization” of the monarchy was a powerful instrument for cultural unity and control. The arts could be used to exalt the King and to manipulate the opinion of the educated classes into a consciousness of national glory.
During Louis’s adolescence, the dominant influence on culture in Paris was Italian, and the King was anxious to develop an indigenous style of French painting, music and dance which would be unique to his own court. Richelieu had, for example, turned the court ballets into political allegories, with the identification of the monarch with the sun as a prominent motif. As the decoration of Versailles had established, it was an ideal metaphor for the artistic representation of royal power. In 1621, Louis XIII had danced in the ballet
Le Soleil,
taking on the image of the sun with its overtones of divinity. The classical origins of the sun cult were numerous, but one of Louis’s favorite incarnations, as we have seen, was that of Apollo, the sun god, and his encouragement of French culture was in some sense a pacific “Apollonian” counterpoint to the other arts his reign celebrated, those of Mars. The sun god is the center of the universe, and the begetter of the arts which glorify his power. Every work of art created in his reign, Louis believed, formed a fragment of his personal glory. Yet while Apollo is a leitmotif in Louis XIV’s personal iconography, in Molière’s comedy
Amphitryon,
the King took on the role of Jupiter.
