Travelers' Tales Paris (47 page)

And a visit to Versailles, I had felt, would reveal the tyranny of Louis XIV not only over his courtiers but over the arts as well. The function of art, to Louis, was simple: his glorification. He was being quite candid when he told the members of the French Academy, “I entrust to you the most precious thing on earth—my fame.” (The artists proved faithful trustees—not that they had much choice. Molière may have mocked the rest of society, but he never mocked Louis XIV. One gentleman who ventured to criticize the length of a prologue praising Louis XIV promptly found himself in jail.) For twenty years Louis XIV was the primary patron of the arts, and for twenty years, Le Brun, director of the French Academy, saw to it that the arts were devoted to enhancing the splendor of Louis XIV's palace and glorifying his image. It was Le Brun's identification of Louis XIV with Apollo—an identification evident throughout Versailles—that created for posterity the image of the Sun King that Louis desired.

In August of 1991, Bob and I were concluding a test tour of the places I wanted to include in the book I was writing, to check whether those I had fallen in love with over a period of twenty years were still as I remembered them. Arriving at Versailles on a beautiful summer day, we found the parking lot in front of the palace filled with a herd of large tour buses, and the line to purchase tickets to visit the palace far longer than either of us had the patience to endure. Not wanting to spoil our memory of Versailles, we went back to Paris without visiting the palace. Without Versailles, however, I was afraid the plan of my book would be incomplete. I told myself that August, the month the
French go on vacation, was not the time to visit Versailles or, indeed, any place in France. We would, I decided, go to Versailles before Easter, not only before the French vacation but before the colleges and schools let out for the summer. We returned on a rainy day in early April 1992.

We took the Métro to the Invalides station, where there is a connection with the RER to Versailles/Rive Gauche. (The train to Versailles-Chantier does not go to the palace.) The ride was only 38 minutes. Versailles is easy to get to—perhaps too easy.

It was a Tuesday morning, cold, overcast, and intermittently rainy. But again the lot was filled with buses, huge single-deckers and even larger double-deckers. I counted over thirty-five of them—and then stopped counting. When we arrived at the gilt-and-black wrought iron gate leading to the courtyard, the serpentine line of tourists waiting to visit the palace extended past the gate curving around Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis and across the entire length of the enormous courtyard. In 1985 I had been overwhelmed by the crowds. Oh, well, I thought bitterly, even in the Age of Louis XIV, Versailles had been commercial.

Giving up on seeing the inside of the palace, we retreated to the gardens. The long line of visitors queued up to take a little train to the Trianons was so long that the train would have had to make four or five trips to transport the people already in line. And even as we watched, the line was getting longer.

One of the greatest things about the gardens at Versailles is the fountains. An aqueduct and the Marly Machine were built to bring
water four miles to fill 1,400 fountains. (One reason contemporaries were so opposed to Louis's construction project at Versailles was the lack of an adequate water supply nearby.) The fountains, however, were silent during our visit. I later found out they are so expensive to operate that they are rarely turned on.

Descending into the gardens, we sat down on the edge of Le Brun's Fountain of Apollo. Bob, having noticed that I hadn't spoken for quite some time, tried to whip up some enthusiasm by pointing out the geometric beauty of the terrace, the arch of dark green hedges in a great horseshoe behind it, and the arcs of Grecian urns and Grecian statues framed by the hedges circling the Fountain of the Sun God—and, behind it, the palace of the Sun King. Someone, I thought, had been a 17th-century public relations genius. At the time Louis was king, over a hundred years had passed since Copernicus had shaken the foundations of the medieval world by proving that the earth revolved around the sun. To the subconscious mind of some 17th-century visitors, the garden of Louis's palace must have suggested that the planets revolved not around the sun but around the Sun King.

I turned to my book on gardens and read once again that Le Nôtre had designed the gardens here to be an earthly paradise—the Elysian Fields that the Greeks had imagined. But I had to confront the fact that Versailles was no paradise to me. Originally built to destroy the independence of the nobility, in the 20th century it may work just as well to destroy tourist's desire ever to tour again. It creates a curious dilemma: Versailles is so sumptuous and magnificent that you ask yourself, “How can I not visit it?” But after I had visited it, I began to consider buying a summer house, my desire to tour having totally dissipated. My advice is to buy
Versailles: Complete Guide of the Tour of the Château and Gardens
in Paris and read it in the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Rambouillet, Dampierre, or Sceaux. I recommend that you skip Versailles.

In 1992 it was no longer possible to sit in, or even enter, the wonderful Colonnade, the circle of 32 arches supported by columns of blue and pink marble from Languedoc, which, after my earlier trips, I would have suggested as a particularly lovely
place to sit while reading a book. The whole Colonnade was now fenced off. When I saw a VIP being given a private tour, I became truly annoyed. I was angry at Bob, too. I could have arranged for a special tour of Versailles and many of the other places I was visiting, but Bob had asked me when I started doing the research for this book, “How can you write honestly about places where you are given special treatment and the average traveler isn't?” So I had come to Versailles as an ordinary tourist and the experience had become truly unpleasant. When I glared at Bob, he had no idea why. Exercising my divine right to leave, I headed for Les Trois Marches, a charming, romantic restaurant in the town, where in 1985 we had enjoyed a meal whose asparagus wrapped in pastry I still remembered melting in my mouth—but the restaurant had moved, probably to larger quarters to accommodate more tourists.

When, hungry and tired, I settled back in my comfortable seat on the train for the ride back to Paris, I heard sighs of other people settling into theirs. Don't get me wrong: these were not sighs of contentment but of relief—of escape from a truly enervating and depressing experience. The train was packed with tourists, and the gloomy atmosphere of disappointment reminded me of a sub-way ride I had taken many years before from Giants Stadium in New York after the loss of a championship football game.

Since I always like to travel with someone from the century I am visiting, I had stuck Voltaire's
The Age of Louis XIV
in my oversized purse along with my camera. On our trip back to Paris I sat silently reading it for a second time. I was amused to see how, within a few hours, my reading of this paean to Louis XIV had changed. On the trip to Versailles, hoping to experience the brilliance and splendor of the Sun King's court by visiting the setting of endless rounds of feasts, ballets, masked balls, and hunts that all of Europe wanted to emulate, I had approvingly underlined: “
It seems clear that one of Louis XIV's main preoccupations was to inspire, in every field, that spirit of emulation without which all enterprise languishes
.” On the way back, being in a nasty mood, I found a bit of malicious pleasure in recalling that Voltaire's book had not been
well received. It was published twenty years after the Sun King's death, and the king at the time, Louis XV, considered Voltaire's praise of Louis XIV's reign to be a criticism of his own. In addition, a line I had read right over on the way to Versailles now stuck in my mind: “
If he had spent...a fifth of what it cost to force nature at Versailles on embellishing his capital, Paris today would be, throughout its whole extent, as beautiful as is the area around the Tuileries and the Pont-Royal, and would have become the most magnificent city in the Universe
.”

As we emerged from the Métro station, the good thing, I thought, about our trip to Versailles was that it was still early in the afternoon and we had plenty of time that day to spend in Paris.

The palace allowed Louis XIV freely to indulge his passion for hunting and other courtly pleasures, such as entertaining mistresses and staging concerts and ballet. The palace was also an exercise in power architecture, whereby Louis emphasized his social and political superiority. Basic amenities counted for less than conspicuous display: accommodation for courtiers was often cramped, and toilet facilities were few. Versailles became the center of power and court patronage, where sycophantic nobles vied with one another for the king's favors. The court also became a fashion center, imposing its own lavish styles on an aristocracy that was dependent on royal largesse.

—John Ardagh,
Cultural Atlas of France

JULIAN GREEN

A
SCORCHING HOT SUMMER
'
S DAY IS THE RIGHT TIME TO PUSH
open the slightly rickety door that shuts off a treasure trove of coolness. I enter and stand motionless. In here the great shout of Paris is reduced to a murmur, overpowered by the greater silence of this little church. The stocky pillars glow pink in the afternoon light that falls from narrow windows of clear glass set between panes of blue. The pillars support the Romanesque barrel vault, beneath which thought takes wing like a bird beneath a woodland canopy. They are so strong, so still, as if waiting for the Last Judgement, lost in a kind of contemplation that cuts them off from our century. Like kings engrossed in dreams of greatness, they scorn the sad modern anxiety of which I have my share and make me, unawares, a gift of some of the peace they hold within them. Crowns of foliage are set on their heads, and they bear them towards the altar like baskets of offerings in a procession that has been going on for 800 years; a winged siren here, a Christian knight there are like symbols of the solemn thoughts they harbour beneath the rounded sky of the vaults.