NOTED

As the BBC is fond of calling him lately, "the man said to be the President of France" was—"perhaps"—infamously photographed in a crash helmet, leaving a purported love nest shared with a well-known actress while his chauffeur-driven moto waited at curb. The chauffeur of the Presidential Scooter, Closer magazine reported in an explosive seven-page exposé, also delivered fresh croissants in the mornings.

Hollande, a committed bachelor, has refused to explain himself, citing a longstanding French tradition of not delving too closely into the private lives of its public servants (with good reason), and the implicated actress has now sued Closer for libel, another longstanding French tradition for public figures who find themselves facing the unwelcome glare of unwanted publicity.


Meanwhile, in a dramatic development worthy of a soap-opera plot twist, the current Somewhat First Lady of France, Hollande's companion Valerie Trierweiler, has precipitously secluded herself in a Parisian hospital, suffering from "shock."

Unsurprisingly, President Hollande's abysmal poll numbers have rebounded by several percentage points, since en ce pays-ci respect is axiomatically accorded a virile leader, whatever his politics or abilities. With the latest revelation that he had managed to keep the alleged affair secret for over two years, including a hotly contested presidential campaign, the thinking goes that Hollande may indeed have hitherto unremarked managerial skills. And after all, Hollande presides over a country which actually has a name for the just-after-work hours so propitious for infidelity—l'heure bleue—and which also has a tradition of selecting iconic sex symbols such as Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve as models for Marianne, the official state muse.


During the Ancien Régime, mistresses, most famously Madame de Pompadour, lover of Louis XV, were routinely ennobled and held a high official rank—Maîtresse en titre—and often wielded great sway over affairs of state. Madame de Pompadour not only reigned over patronage of the arts in the Rococo age but also influenced the choice of ministers and the strategy of the Seven Years' War. Her brother, the Marquis de Marigny, was appointed to the coveted post of Superintendent of Royal Buildings and so oversaw all government construction in the realm. A woman of considerable acumen, Pompadour created the infamous Parc aux Cerfs, an exclusive royal bordello in the town of Versailles, to satiate the king's voracious appetites and secure her position once her own charms had waned.


After her death, Madame du Barry, a nubile denizen of the Parc, ascended to la Pompadour's position but never her station. (Below, François Boucher's odalesque of Jeanne Bécu shortly before she became a countess.)



But the quintessential concubine was Madame de Montespan, l'Athenée—well-born, clever, scheming, haughty and ambitious—who had bewitched Louis XIV in his early middle age (quite literally and scandalously with a love philtre procured from a satanist who also brewed very efficient poisons, but that is another story). The king sired four illegitimate children with her, all later ennobled, one of whom was later exiled as an insurrectionist. While in royal favor, "La Montespan" reigned as de facto queen, with a suite of rooms at Versailles that eclipsed those of the actual queen, the homely and devout Infanta, Maria Theresa.


Louis XIV's German sister-in-law, la Princesse Palatine, in her posthumous letters reported that during the Dutch Wars, Louis XIV dutifully spent much of each campaign season at the front, presiding over war councils and generally being deferred to, though “he took quite a long time dressing; he had his moustache curled and sometimes spent half an hour before the mirror arranging it with wax.“ (With victory in sight, the undertaking degenerated into showmanship and farce, as when the king invited his decorator and gardener to tour the siege of Cambrai in 1677, instructing his minister Colbert to pay Le Brun and Le Nôtre each 1500 livres for their pains.)


And it was at Cambrai—a jump-the-shark moment if ever there was one—that the king joined his armies with the queen and two mistresses in tow like a band of gypsy camp followers. German mercenaries heckled Madame de Montespan as they marched in revue, whistling and shouting, “Konigs Hure!" At dinner that evening, the king inquired how she had liked the maneuvers and Montespan replied, “Perfectly lovely, only I find the Germans far too naïve for insisting upon calling everything by its proper name.“

It was also understood that Madame de Maintenon, a late and pivotal mistress of Louis XIV, controlled state affairs by forcing all ministers and petitioners to pass through the gauntlet of her appartements at Versailles if they hoped to gain access to the king. She was known at court as "Madame de Maintenant" (Madame Now), and had doubtless married the king privately, though this was never officially acknowledged.



Like just about everything else during the Ancien Régime, the changing of the guard was also handled with aplomb. In one of those almost-too-good-to-be-true moments of history which are nonetheless true, Madame de Montespan, on her way out, and Madame de Maintenon, on her way in, first met on a staircase in Versailles. Madame de Maintenon was ascending and Madame de Montespan descending. The former remarked, "I see that you are going down, Madame, while I am going up."

Upon her fall, which was both spectacular and precipitous, la Montespan exiled herself to a nunnery and occupied herself with expiatory good works, in keeping with another longstanding tradition of discarded royal mistresses, as hospitals in that century were where the destitute were brought to die.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

This Sunday we put aside the cosmic and instead turn to the tongue-in-chic: commuter rail cars fit for the Sun King.



The SNCF, the French national railroad, on the 16th of May quietly slipped into service the first of five suburban train sets operating between Paris and Versailles, its cars decorated with photographic reproductions of the domain's most evocative decors.



Bright, airy, graphic and clever, the lighthearted interiors are a joint effort of the SNCF and the town and château of Versailles. Once all five trains are in service on the RER C line, your chance of catching one is 1 in 5.


Whether you ride beneath the ceiling of Le Brun's Galerie des glaces or no, the trip to Versailles sure beats sitting in a wooden box held on sprung steel straps straddling a fixed undercarriage rolling with steel-banded wheels over unpaved dirt roads. In short, you ride better than a king.





(All images are © C Recoura, from France Today online. Hat tip to Two Nerdy History Girls and their wonderful Sunday breakfast links.)

During the polemical ferment of France in the 1660s, Louis XIV's minister-factotum Colbert and the Perrault brothers, Charles and Claude, laid the intellectual foundations undergirding France’s political and cultural ascendancy. The Perraults played a central role in the adoption of classicism as the French state's de facto official architecture, and in turn classicism's transplantation from Italy to France had a decisive effect on the evolution of Western architecture, as a newly unhobbled France—with a population of over 20 million (greater than that of the rest of Europe combined) and an administration of rare ambition and matching competence—overtook Italy to finally claim its proper place as the first power of Europe.

Architecture had long been understood as the most tangible manifestation of the power and taste of princes, and so it is no surprise that it became intimately integrated with politics in a court where everything was considered to have political utility and a propagandistic dimension. However, the profession—long-neglected due to decades of civil unrest and the dearth of commissions during Louis XIV's long regency—had fallen into a state of disarray which demanded urgent, remedial attention.



This crisis was quickly redressed; in fact, it lasted less than a decade, and by the mid-1670s the negative impact of several initial architectural missteps (most notably Versailles itself) was effectively erased by the extraordinary efficacy and reach of the propaganda machine installed by Colbert and the cultural élite functioning under his direction, with Charles Perrault (above), also author of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes, acting as his chief architectural assitant. Architecture became so thoroughly enmeshed with the fabrication of the glory of the Sun King, and he in turn with the glory of France, that even today a halo of magnificence serves to protect this closed circle of eternal verities by its blinding influence.

One of the main elements of this hermetic structure is the doctor and architect Claude Perrault’s myth of a French classical tradition stretching back to the late fifteenth century, elaborated in the introduction to his translation of Vitruvius. Perrault's work was on the most basic level an attempt to appropriate Vitruvius—the personification of the Roman roots of the classical tradition—for France, as well as a means to create a classical pre-history to legitimize the adoption of Italian classicism as France's official state architecture.

Scouring France’s architectural history for native classicists and constructing an architectural Pantheon from them became a preoccupation of the Académie, as its members attempted to build a stair—however fragile—between French vernacular architecture and the state-sponsored classicism of the reign of Louis XIV. Tellingly, Perrault (below) whined in his introduction to Vitruvius that generations of Italian architects had conspiratorially hoarded their knowledge of classicism, and as proof he cited the dearth of Italian architectural treatises (frankly one has to laugh at his shamelessness).



All this was simply a desperate attempt to backfill an irreducible historical void, for there is a sharp break in French architecture between the hybrid classical/vernacular as practiced at mid-seventeenth century and the state-sponsored classicism that resulted from Bernini’s voyage to Paris in 1665. Indigenous French architecture, which Colbert took for granted as the most tangible symbol of royal power and authority save for exploits of war, could not be implicated as being unworthy of the role the royal administration had defined for it, and thus history had to be manipulated to bring the past into alignment with the needs of the present.



Classicism, that noble enterprise reborn with the Italian Renaissance, was adopted wholesale by France in the wake of Bernini’s passage. (The great Roman sculptor and architect had remarked while viewing Paris from the heights of Meudon that the city was like a carding comb: a forest of chimney pots unrelieved by any monument worthy of notice, ancient or modern, excepting its great gothic churches.) The cultural bureaucracy under Colbert's direction—which may as well be called the Perrault brothers' cabal—undertook a two-pronged effort to first efface Bernini's influence, primarily by vicious slanders directed by Charles, and secondly to erase any trace that France had ever known a time before classicism at all by Claude's fabrication of a made-to-order classical pre-history, anchored by a false legitimacy based on patently ridiculous claims to France’s inheritance of the legacy of Imperial Rome. It thus comes as no surprise that early in his reign, Louis XIV was more often represented as Caesar Augustus, Rome's great emperor, than he was as Apollo, god of illumination and the arts.



Perrault’s classical canon was simply pure propaganda (even the Spanish Habsburg's Escorial somehow got on the list) and served to obscure the Italian parentage of French classicism and thus held an important political dimension at the onset of an era of aggressive French adventurism in Europe. With the appropriation of Renaissance classicism by the cultural bureaucracy, absolutism supplanted humanism as the ideology underpinning architectural expression, and architecture became inextricably enmeshed with state policy and the manipulation of history to promote Louis XIV’s gloire—that is, the myth of the young, untried king’s power and omniscience, his generative force and semi-divine status.



Claude Perrault's Vitruvian project was instrumental in defining the theoretical boundaries and concerns ruling French classicism, but he also played a crucial role in facilitating its adoption by architects by devising a system for the practical application of classical principles, which he published as The Ordinance of the Five Columnar Orders According to the Methods of the Ancients in 1683. The work was an extraordinarily important manifesto couched as a practical “how-to“ guide to architectural composition, and its widespread adoption and numerous translations had a profound impact upon the course of classical architecture.

The treatise reflects Perrault’s dismissal of humanist principles and his promulgation of Descartian rationalism, with its view of a mechanistic universe. Perrault dismissed the quasi-mystical theoretical trappings which had enveloped the five columnar orders, but in so doing destroyed the fusion between meaning and proportion that imbued Renaissance classicism.

His underlying thesis was crucially incomplete, for Perrault concentrated solely upon codifying a single set of “perfect“ proportions for each of the five columnar orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite) while ignoring the larger, determinant question of the proportions of the building being ordered. Specifically, Perrault attempted to deduce a single formula for the internal relationships between the constituent elements of each of the orders, which he deduced by measuring a range of Ancient precedents and establishing a mathematical mean from them. To put it quite bluntly, Perrault invented cookie-cutter classicism, one size fits all.



In classicism, the building’s proportions were paramount and were ruled by the application of geometrical precepts derived from Greek harmonics and mathematics—namely, the Pythagorean geometrical progression of prime numbers and their relation to musical chords, elucidated in Plato’s Timaeus and encapsulated by the Harmonia mundi, the Music of the spheres (below). The proportions a classically trained architect selected to guide his design were comparable to the tonal key chosen by the composer of a musical work, and they in turn determined the choice and treatment of the columnar order that regulated and imposed hierarchy upon the composition.



The orders themselves, far from being static entities whose proportions could be scientifically deduced and quantified, were rather a kind of Platonic ideal, universal in theory but infinitely adaptable in their particulars. Thus they were a closed but elastic system that remained internally coherent, even though their constituent measures (the length of a column in relation to its diameter, for example) were logically varied in response to an architect’s intent and the proportional “key“ he employed.

Unaware or uninterested that a higher level of ordering principles was inextricably enmeshed in the humanist philosophy he dismissed, Perrault never properly addressed the question of the proportions of buildings. Though the French Académie pondered the question and several members also likened proportion to musical composition, these deliberations offered little more than vague platitudes—a feeble echo of the intellectual coherence and direct applicability of humanist principles.

The translation of classicism into a French idiom and its subsequent dissemination had far-reaching historical impact. The wide dissemination of Perrault’s treatise on the orders—which became a massive bestseller throughout Europe for over a century—was instrumental in pushing these principles into obscurity and depriving classicism of the greater part of its creative potential, an impoverishment compounded by the pedantic regimentation of the Académie. (One would be quite interested to know what these savants must have thought about Michelangelo's elongated yet massive, unfluted and volute-less Ionic/Doric columns—in pairs, no less—at the Laurentian Library in Florence, for example.)





Claude Perrault's conception was fully at odds with his subject, for classicism was an art whose fundamental aim was to transcribe Platonic ideals into stone and to express the poetry of the spheres with captured space. In essence, Perrault reduced a complex and nuanced art to the simplistic application of formula—a process of deracination that led to increasingly formulaic designs and that doubtless hastened classicism’s demise.

So shorn, apparently quite in ignorance, of its living, humanist roots, French classicism quickly devolved to the formulas employed by Jules-Hardouin-Mansart, the first and most successful student of Perrault's precepts. The compositional ease Perrault’s ideas afforded him found their ultimate fruit in the remarkable lack of scholarly interest in Hardouin-Mansart (the first monograph of his work was only published some five years ago), even though he was one of the most prolific architects in history and almost single-handedly defined (and designed) the architecture of the Age of Louis XIV. And this is because Hardouin-Mansart's designs are a simulacrum of classicism, a projection of gloire simplified and aggrandized to serve the needs of a monarch who in his maturity was less the leader of a kingdom than he was the figurehead of a vast state bureaucracy.

(Below, Hardouin-Mansart in action: the right-hand wing is the original Enveloppe of Versailles, at left his massive palace-by-the-yard northern addition; a nearly identical pendant was built to the south)



In turn, Hardouin-Mansart's stylistic hegemony and its limited repertoire would crowd out the experiments of the pioneering generations of French classicists and impose itself upon France, and Europe, for well over a century. Add to this the fundamental difference between the French and Italian conception of building—the Italian sculpts a cubic mass, while the Frenchman aligns rectilinear blocks in an accretive fashion—and the end result is Haussman’s Paris, its endless boulevards lined with uniformly handsome and nearly indistinguishable limestone apartment blocks. (Every Parisian has at least once left the Métro distracted and stood, hopelessly disoriented, wondering if he got off at the right stop.)



In the face of increasingly numbing standardization, architects abandoned the search for meaningful form and were seduced by the glittering attractions of novelty, engendering successive waves of historical pastiche in both the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (below, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton). Toward the end of both periods, committed classicists sought a corrective, reinvigorating classical vocabulary with new forms and a return to clarity and purified volumetrics.



Ultimately Perrault’s legacy is ambiguous. Turning to Italy in the seventeenth century, classicism also suffered decline as humanist culture waned, and Perrault’s principles, riding a swelling wave of French political, military and cultural influence, seem simply to have accelerated the inevitable. Perrault undoubtedly banalized classicism, but in so doing offered the key to its widespread adoption and thus played a critical role in fostering the extraordinary flowering of neoclassicism in eighteenth-century Europe.

With war and building and his own gloire, flowers were one of Louis XIV’s abiding passions, and he indulged in them with characteristic immoderation. Year in and year out, the royal accounts note stupendous payments for flowering bulbs and plants, purchased by the millions from the world over. Colbert bore the brunt of this obsession, receiving notes like the following, sent before a visit to Trianon in the fall of 1673: “I expect to find many flowers, late or forced. My brother said that the garden isn’t as full as usual and that Le Bouteux (the head gardener) was holding things in reserve; I hope this is the reason. Look into it.“

Missives from the Sun King's glorious battlefronts invariably open with his most pressing concerns, orange trees and gardens. “Madame de Montespan has informed me that you have given an order to buy orange trees,“ begins a letter to Colbert from the camp at Gembloux during the spring campaign of 1675. Le Nôtre, who disliked flower gardens, nevertheless designed a flower parterre for Versailles at the royal behest—it was in fact among the first work undertaken there—and Saint-Simon tells of the court fleeing Trianon one fine spring day, overcome by the perfume of tuberose hanging in the still air.

(At top: our watercolor elevation of the main pavilion, and below: an engraving of the garden elevation, with the Château of Versailles seen distant in the upper left corner.)


As the sober neoclassical Enveloppe finally rose about the king’s gilded house of cards at Versailles, a little Orientalist fantasy also rose at Trianon, a village of such inconsequence that to raze it required less than a tenth of the sum subsequently spent for the compound’s entrance grille. The Porcelain Trianon stood a mere sixteen years and has been cloaked in legend since 1687, when renovation work began that eventually led to the compound’s destruction and replacement by the Marble, or Grand Trianon. The small compound was conceived as a royal pleasure ground, a retreat dedicated to indulging the senses: to tasting delicacies, smelling rare flowers, listening to the songs of exotic birds, savoring privacy, and of course to making love.

Its enduring renown is surely warranted: Trianon’s five pavilions, profusely decorated in a fantastic, Chinoiserie style and arranged about two oval forecourts paved with faience tile, stood amid parterres set out with flowering plants grown in clay pots—by the early 1690s over a million pots were in constant use—allowing gardeners to change the beds while the king dined, offering the surprise of a fresh color scheme for his afternoon promenade.


The original name of the Porcelain Trianon was "le pavillon de Flore," indicating that the impetus for the compound sprang from this passion, perhaps even more so than the king’s passion for the Marquise de Montespan, and the king's love of flowers would endure long after Olympe, the ingratiating name given her by La Fontaine, had in her turn taken up exile, piety and expiatory good works. The reasons that impelled the Porcelain Trianon into being are simple to surmise and follow a familiar pattern, driven as always by the king’s desire to recycle beloved elements of the early Versailles, amplifying them until they were distorted beyond recognition.

Construction of the Enveloppe entrained the loss of the king’s favorite spot in the park of Versailles, the Parterre des Fleurs, a flower garden on the south terrace of the Old Château. The Parterre was enclosed by a gilded balustrade lined by cypress and other evergreens, with tole vases holding orange trees, painted to resemble porcelain, set out at intervals against them, the intricate tracery of beds within “filled with a thousand sorts of flowers.“ (Below, our watercolor recreation of one of the painted-tole Chinoiserie vases at Trianon.)


The site for the new compound was fore-ordained: the vast Latin Cross of the Grand Canal was in the midst of being excavated and the Ménagerie, sited at the end of the Canal’s southern cross-arm, begged for a northern pendant. (In the twilight of the reign, Madame de Maintenon once blurted out, for no apparent reason, “Symmetry! I’ll die from symmetry!“) And finally the prospect of the greatly enlarged château, brimming with indolent courtiers, was undoubtedly judged by both participants as a looming impediment to the king's deepening involvement with Madame de Montespan (below).


In stylistic terms, the Trianon de Porcelaine, like the king's earliest campaign of gilded embellishments at Versailles, ultimately reflects the influence of the opulent interiors in which Louis XIV spent his youth. It was a crammed, intimate splendor, defined by the taste of his mother and Mazarin—a style that confounded the regal taste of the Spanish Habsburgs with the Cardinal’s fondness for the Italianate baroque. (Below: the family of Louis XIV by Jean Nocret. Few images exist of the interiors of the king's youth, but this painting gives us a good idea of what they would have been like.)


Likewise, this same touchstone of displaced parental affection, transmuted by the alchemy of the Sun King’s insatiable appetites—in 1670 a note from the king exhorted Colbert to “Press (the gardener) Le Bouteux and don’t let him lose a single moment“—engendered horticultural feats at Trianon repealing the natural law and that even today appear wantonly extravagant: jasmine and orange trees grown directly in the earth, protected in winter by demountable greenhouse structures, and parterres that were daily replanted with potted, greenhouse-forced flowers, even through the winter months.

As it was Europe’s first chinoiserie building, predating its earliest successor by well over a half-century, the Porcelain Trianon has gathered something of the miraculous about it—as if, as the court chronicler Félibien phrased it, the buildings had sprung up overnight after a spring rain. Built in a few months in the spring of 1671, the compound did indeed seem miraculous, though its remarkable, densely ornamented roofs were created by a large team of sculptors and ornamental painters in a second campaign that began two years later. One of the enduring myths concerning the compound is that its roofs were covered in porcelain tiles; however, our research shows that they were actually sculpted lead sheets painted to represent porcelain.

Scholars, faced with the horror vaccui of no clearly discernible precedent for a building manifestly without precedent, have long attempted to identify influences and tendencies that informed its design, the majority of them perfectly justified. However, what is most intriguing about the Porcelain Trianon is not so much that it was the first building of its kind, but that it was so thoroughly naïve. As architecture Trianon is nearly pure ornament, the embodiment and the proof of the idea that the fêtes in Versailles’ park inspired the bosquets and structures later erected there.

The compound’s architecture is pure scenography, a dazzling tour-de-force of baroque excess. Its Orientalist ornament, on close inspection, is purely French, executed with unlimited resources but without the rigor imparted by knowledge or the fire of inspired invention. As the president of the Société des Amis de Versailles remarked upon first viewing our watercolor reconstruction, "Oh la la! Ça c'est du kitsch!" One hears the voice of Madame de Montespan, inventor of the garden bosquet with the literally weeping willow, behind it all. (Below: an engraved view the courtyard side of the compound.)


Mostly this flatness was the fault of ignorance; in 1670, one simply had no idea what Chinese buildings looked like, let alone their materials, detailing and planning. Partly it was due to the terrible time constraints imposed by the relentlessly impatient king and his haughty, spoiled mistress, who saw to it that the pavilions flew up in a moment; and partly it was due to the architect Louis Le Vau’s health: he died in the midst of construction and while alive could not possibly have devoted the time and energy necessary to create anything more than a piece of stage decor, if indeed he was architect at all. (We believe the compound was a collective work and that the First Architect Le Vau, the First Painter Charles Le Brun and the royal gardener André Le Nôtre each had a hand in aspects of the design.)

Bizarrely, though the compound is traditionally attributed to him, Le Vau is mentioned but once in the relevant royal accounts, having supervised the destruction of the village of Trianon in 1663. Otherwise, like all the other royal buildings of the period, the Porcelain Trianon's architect is undocumented, which is an absurd state of affairs for France in the 1670s and indicates that a policy was in place demanding anonymity of royal architects, the better to propagate the freshly formed construct of the omnipotent and omniscient Sun King. The only contemporary attribution is that of the royal chronicler, Félibien, who claimed that Trianon’s architects were actually cupids and sprites; how utterly charming.

The Porcelain Trianon’s exoticism nonetheless had deeper referents, most importantly its intimation of the king’s boundless dominion over even the most distant empires, as well as his ability to suspend the seasons, but assessing Trianon as a serious piece of architecture is ultimately misleading and it should rather be judged on its own terms, as an amusing bauble of a building that pretended to little more. (Below: a table conserved at the Getty Center in Malibu almost certainly created for the compound.)


On this account, it was an unparalleled success, the first true folly of Louis XIV’s reign and the spiritual prototype for all chinoiserie pavilions that followed, just as the estate itself was a precursor of the English-inspired folly parks of the late eighteenth century, in which the world and its cultures were abstracted to furnish a nobleman’s amusement.

Félibien captured the charmed essence of Trianon, the ineffable atmosphere of indulgence that erased all criticism, when he called it “a little palace in an extraordinary style, and the perfect place to pass the time on a summer’s day.“ This is the very definition of a folly, encompassing pleasure, idleness, fantasy and amusement, and judging by these criteria the Trianon was a resounding triumph.

[This is the first of an occasional series of posts considering aspects of the remarkable personality of Louis XIV, France's Sun King]

The king wants to go Saturday to Versailles, but God appears unwilling, because of the impossibility of readying the buildings to receive him, due to the prodigious mortality among the workmen. Cartloads of corpses are carried off nightly, as if from a charity hospital. The grim convoys are hidden so as not to terrify the worksite, and not to besmirch that “meritless favorite“—you know that quip about Versailles.

Madame de Sévigné, 12 October 1678

A disturbing undercurrent of obsession runs through the history of Louis XIV’s patronage of building. Madame de Sévigné’s clever chatter chillingly encapsulates the bemused disregard with which the court surveyed the Sun King’s building campaigns.


Cosseted in gilded salons, courtiers viewed schemes such as the tragic folly of attempting to divert the river Eure to Versailles—which killed thousands of military conscripts, squandered millions of livres upon a stillborn aqueduct to nowhere, and had as its only goal assuring that the fountains at Versailles could play at full force all the day long—as nothing more than an amusing diversion, a great gift of a joke that provided endless fodder for bons mots.

(Above, the failed Aqueduct of Maintenon, which today makes an undeniably picturesque landscape ornament.)

The court—composed of the ancient Nobility of the Sword and once a proud warrior class—had, by the midpoint of Louis XIV's reign, paled to snobbism, frivolity and pointlessness, emasculated by the king’s imperiousness and the glittering diversions he so cleverly dangled before it.

(Below, Louis XIV and the Dauphin before the shortlived Thetys Grotto at Versailles.)


When he wished to exercise it, Louis XIV held enormous power. To be brutally concise, the king—faced with splintered, ineffectual opposition—had almost free rein to act as he wished and was held in check mostly by his own conscience. This is the reason why his mother, Queen Anne of Austria, placed so much emphasis upon inculcating into the child-king the precepts of an honnêtte homme, a "good man," for without an ingrained moral compass the temptations of unchecked power could quickly bring a ruler and his nation to ruin.


This is also the reason why devout, intellectual clerics such as Bousseut and Fénelon (above) loomed so large in late 17th century French society: their topical sermons and the moral guidance they offered were effectively the only public criticism permitted of the monarch, the press being under complete governmental control. If anything was to be aired openly by a Frenchman not also a man of God, it was published, anonymously, in the Netherlands.


“This idol, gloire“

By far the most amazing and damning indictment of the king came from the cleric Fénelon, and his open letter, addressed directly to Louis XIV, is all the more remarkable because he was also preceptor to the Dauphin—the king's eldest son and heir to the throne.

...while the people lack bread, you yourself lack solvency, and you refuse to acknowledge the extremity to which you are reduced. Since you have always been happy, you cannot conceive that you would ever cease to be so. You are afraid to open your eyes, afraid to be forced to relinquish a portion of your gloire. That gloire, which hardens your heart, is more dear to you than justice, than your own peace of mind, than the survival of your people, who daily perish from diseases borne of famine. And finally, it is more dear to you than your own eternal salvation, which is irreconcilable with this idol, gloire.

Fénelon's scorn was unprecedented, and it is amazing both he and his missive survived the king's reading. And he was absolutely right: the letters and memoires of ancien régime France are dotted with a leitmotif of anecdote as successive generations of aristocrats and ministers survey a desolate countryside from their carriages and remark upon starved peasants reduced to eating tree bark and grass.

The obsession with gloire—the king's radiant reputation—held by the king and the government, and in large part condoned by the court and society, was the end that permitted every means. Gloire was a throbbing, omnipresent concern at court; the distress of peasants was a distant, easily forgotten abstraction. And this was because gloire was the absract embodiment of the king and the object to which he ensured that the French state directed its energies. Its overriding importance drove Louis XIV to harness the government and in turn the French nation to supply every means to burnish and extend this charged symbol of greatness.

(Below, a detail of our watercolor of ironwork at Marly with the Sun King's cipher of Apollo in radiant glory.)


Louis XIV believed himself both monarch and first guardian of the monarchy, a concept formulated as "the double body of the king." Simply stated, the two kings were the living king and his eternal, inherited position of kingship. For Louis XIV, his gloire was more than a projection of his own prestige; it was the embodiment of the great history and traditions of the French monarchy, of which he was the personification and instrument.

The king worked ceaselessly to burnish and augment his gloire; it was the intellectual prism through which he considered his every policy move and in many ways it was the sum of his existence. Upon the incorporation of the Petite Académie, later the Académie des Inscriptions, in February 1663, the young king stated, “You may judge, gentlemen, the esteem in which I hold you, for I am entrusting you with the thing most precious in the world—my gloire. I am sure that you will produce marvels; for my part, I will attempt to furnish you with subject matter worthy to be dealt with by men as capable as yourselves.“


By strange paradox, for being so self-absorbed the king did not act from egotism. He was universally considered the most polite person that any of his contemporaries had ever encountered. This is borne out in the private letters and diaries of courtiers, in moments when they could drop their masks and recount the truth. It is a well-known fact that the king lost his temper in public but three times in his 72-year reign, and each occasion was incited by the insupportable boorishness or cowardice of his interlocuter. For his part, the king was usually aware when a line had been crossed; he once commented to Racine, “I would praise you more if you praised me less.“

To the king and the aristocracy, the overtaxed peasantry remained an abstraction, the childlike peuple for whom the monarch was their shepherd and benevolent ruler. Custom and situation fostered this remove; caught in the thrilling vortex of great affairs and inured by the theatrical display of vast wealth at court, the king and his entourage could easily justify the next great expense, since the last had done no appreciable harm, and so it was that an utterly superfluous château such as Clagny—estimated to have cost over three million livres, a sum equivalent to a third of the budget for the French navy—could be blithely commanded into being, then razed and rebuilt, for a mistress who herself was heiress to one of the richest noble families in the kingdom.


If Clagny (above, our watercolor elevation), for which even the king remarked "the expense is excessive," had been transmuted into a fleet, it likely would have turned the tide of the War of the League of Augsburg, forestalling or even reversing France’s decline during the second half of the king's reign, and thus forever altering European history. Granted, such historical shell games could be endlessly replayed, but as Madame de Montespan, the mistress in question, rightly observed when reproached for not showing remorse for having accidentally killed a man while riding in her carriage, it was only because her companions had happened to witness the death that they wept; men were run over constantly but they did not grieve for them.


Louis XIV was essentially a man of common sense and he well knew that we, posterity, ultimately would be more attracted to a good show—to grandiose, gilded monuments—than to "recompenses and good deeds."

Suffering is a constant of the human condition and so the human cost of the Sun King's obsessons has been long forgotten, and creations such as Versailles offer a glittering respite from the world as it is. Versailles endures. It will never lose its power to enchant, to transport us into forgetfulness.

In this autumn of our discontent, when today's Washington Post lead headline reads "United in anger, 'Occupy' protests go global," it seems a fitting moment to discuss the garden architecture of pre-revolutionary France. You may smile—indeed we hope you do—but also do recognize that the two subjects are far from being non sequiturs and in fact the garden buildings erected for the aristocracy during the reign of Louis XVI foreshadow later events as presciently as any scandals or political machinations of the period.

Lest we forget, in 1663 Colbert had advised the young Louis XIV (well before he had done anything of serious note) that nothing would increase a monarch's reputation more than glorious exploits in war and building impressive monuments. War and building were uttered in the same breath and indeed were twin pillars of the Sun King's reign: architecture held the highest strategic importance and building was a tool second only to war in the state's policy arsenal. (Below: Versailles, what Louis XIV built to amuse himself.)


As Louis XIV's legacy played out, his successor, Louis XV, naturally timid and reclusive, built intimate pavilions rather than palaces, the pendulum swinging in the mid 18th century to its opposite apogee. In part this was because his predecessor had bankrupted France with his wars and his monuments—to which Louis XV was obliged to add his own, without ever undertaking the necessary reforms to support them. The perpetual, unstated bankruptcy of the state, thrown to a crisis pitch after the disaster of the Seven Years' War, would mean that bills simply were not paid—not that expenses were seriously curtailed. Royal architects, clerks and draftsmen worked years without pay; gardeners starved and finally deserted; maintenance was deferred and broken windows were replaced by oiled paper. The king would most famously say, "Après moi le déluge," and he could not have been more correct, or more cynical. (Below: the Petit Trianon, what Louis XV built to amuse himself.)


Louis XVI, even more timid and maladroit than his predecessor, built next to nothing. (The Sun King's great legacy and burden had run to ground, perfectly illustrating the old adage of "Clogs to clogs in three generations," but in this instance the fortune built and squandered by the Bourbons was that of Europe's richest and most populous nation.) It was Louis XVI's queen, Marie-Antoinette, who commissioned nearly all royal building during the reign, to the extent that she provoked scandal by creating the position of first architect to the queen. (Below: the Marlborough Tower at the hameau, what Louis XVI's wife built to amuse herself while the king amused himself with clockworks.)


The manifest decadence of her elaborate farmers' hamlet at Trianon, le hameau, whose rustic stucco walls were cracked and aged by artisans, provoked the scorn and ire of her subjects, who rightly saw a queen playing milkmaid with Sevres jugs at Versailles while there were bread riots in Paris as contempt for their plight. Likewise, the hameau was taken as certain proof that consideration of the people's opinion did not even cross their rulers' minds; even hypocrisy would have been preferred to having simply been forgotten—or in the queen's case, to having never entered her consciousness at all. It is safe to say that the hameau, along with the infamous diamond necklace scandal, cost the queen her head exactly 218 years ago today. (Below: a Sevres milk bowl and stand, commissioned by Marie-Antoinette for the dairy at Rambouillet.)


More broadly, though, the last decade before the revolution witnesses the French aristocracy—or more accurately that portion of it attached to the court—building ever more elaborate gardens and shoehorning onto them ever more and ever more exotic follies. The competition was fierce and a desperate rage for exoticism gripped the players. Here we quote from our first book, Pleasure Pavilions and Follies:

These late follies offered a boundless repertoire of imagery: pagodas evoked the Orient, innumerable thatched huts hearkened to Edenic idylls, farm villages presented a supremely false vision of peasant life, temples and rotundas echoed the Ancients. All the world and all its cultures were plundered to provide adornments for a nobleman's garden, leading the prince de Ligne to bemoan in 1781 that "Chinese buildings reek of the boulevards and sideshow fairs," and that "Gothic houses, too, are becoming too common." He proposed instead the hitherto untapped ornamental possibilities of Moldavian huts and allowed that Arab and Turkish styles had not yet been exhausted.

(Below: the mosque at Armainvilliers, built for the princesse de Lamballe, intimate of the queen, by an indulgent father who also happened to be the richest man in France.)


De Ligne, another intimate of the queen and someone for whom the oxymoron "profoundly frivolous" could have been coined, had captured the zeitgeist perfectly; in fact, he incarnated it, bragging that he ordered all his follies and suits on credit.

This decadence also expressed itself financially, as it always does. De Ligne, like the baron de Saint-James, the duc de Choiseul and others, bankrupted himself on his gardens, just as, in the late 1780s, the French state was borrowing against projected tax receipts decades hence. If one stops to ponder, it is simply extraordinary that someone like the duc de Choiseul, who ruled France for over a decade as de facto Prime Minister for Louis XV, could bankrupt himself at all, and that he had done so upon a garden. All these élites throwing all their money into gardens, their progeny be damned—quite the spectacle. And what is a garden in the end but a useless fantasy, a cipher for Eden, for paradise, an escape?

(Below: the Lake Pagoda at the Folie Saint-James, which, as its name indicates, stood on wooden pilings sunk into an artificial lake, and was reached by a fretwork Chinoiserie skiff.)


These bankruptcies showed great determination, since the élite had abandoned both traditional stone construction and the cheaper but inferior method of rubble-fill and stucco as well. They had also abandoned the formal French garden of Le Nôtre for Anglo-Chinese folly gardens and also for Masonic gardens, since they had also abandoned the Church and freemasonry was rampant. They built for novelty and effect, not permanence. They erected literally hundreds of flimsy stick-and-lathe structures, crass bastardizations of the world's native cultures, from pagodas to teepees, most of which would not survive the next decade let alone the next century. Or they squandered immense sums on absurdities such as an enormous boulder destined for a grotto in the baron de Saint-James' garden—a stone that required 40 draft horses to drag from the forest of Fontainebleau to Neuilly. (Louis XVI came upon the Sisyphean scene while hunting and, flabbergasted, inquired about the owner, and thereafter referred to Saint-James—who died a pauper in the Bastille—as "the man with the rock.")


Fake tombs and real hermits were also much in vogue. The princesse de Monaco, mistress of the prince de Condé, commissioned an entire "Valley of the Tombs" for her estate of Betz and also kept a hermit, who was forbidden to speak, to animate her thatch-roofed ermitage. The marquis de Girardin also kept a hermit, whose ermitage was praised in a guide for its Spartan furnishings, and moreover the marquis had the great good fortune that his most famous guest, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, died while visiting Ermenonville, permitting him to inter the great writer in a pseudo-antique sarcophagus on a small island in the lake fronting his château, making Rousseau's corpse the ultimate in morbid garden ornaments-cum-prizes. (Above: Girardin's Spartan-chic ermitage at Ermenonville; below: Rousseau's tomb.)


The list of instances of wretched excess and breathtaking decadence, of abandoned traditions and frivolous dilettantism, of willful blindness and stunning naïveté, of callous inhumanity and ostentatious self-gratification could go on for volumes, and this is only history as told through garden follies. The revolution, when it came, swept over France with unparalleled fury; hideous vengeance was exacted and it required well over a century for the country to settle finally into stable democratic rule. We'll leave it at that.