Louis XV knew from the very start that, whatever he did, he was a “roi de perdition.” And this gave him a harsh, cold intolerance that courtiers felt with trepidation, even when he was a child. His primordial sentiment, much more than boredom, was mischief: irritation at finding himself in one of those points where history was tightening its grip and leaving no room for escape. It was as though his existence had run its course before he had lived it. He felt the impossibility of being anything other than dissolute, indolent, and spiteful. And even if he’d been willing to fight it, he imagined he would be cut down, and no one would have been surprised, in the same way that he was said to have cut down the fortunes of some of his subjects, without anyone being surprised.
Madame du Hausset records that it hurt him to laugh: at most he could force a smile. And that smile meant: “we will grant you anything, provided you don’t expect our attention.” With dull pedantry, which destroyed his natural elegance, he repeated the same stories several times, never finding anyone who could make him realize what boredom it produced. He is credited with many fairly banal bons mots that are admired for their wit, whereas certain remarks of devastating lucidity are cited as expressions of his patent lack of decorum. He was obsessed about idle kings (“rois fainéants”), and Cardinal Fleury, who coerced him to inaction, while exhorting him to maintain some semblance of activity, was once imprudent enough to speak to him about it. “One day I reached the point of telling the king that there had been certain kings of France who had been deposed because they did nothing. It seemed to affect him deeply. He made no reply at the time, but two days later he said: ‘I have reflected on what you told me about certain of my predecessors who were deposed—but tell me, when those sovereigns were deposed, did they get good pensions?’”
“… in the small apartments of Versailles, he appeared like a big and gloomy and sad child, with something in his spirit that was cold, malicious, sarcastic…”
The Parc aux Cerfs, whose name alone invited resentful subjects to dream of continual, cloistered lechery, was “a fairly poor house with a tiny garden, closed off in the cul-de-sac of rue des Tournelles and rue Saint-Médéric; it consisted of four bedrooms and several small sitting rooms, and could accommodate two or three women at most, indeed it seemed designed to accommodate just one.” The house bore that name because it was built, during the time of Louis XIII, in a district on the edge of Versailles where there was a park of wild animals. It was inhabited not by thousands of round-breasted gopis pining for Krishna but by one or two girls at a time, waiting for the visits of an unknown lord, who sometimes passed himself off as a Polish gentleman and forgot to remove his blue sash. And every so often, for a month or so, the house was even empty. In that place, absolutist whim ended up establishing the foundation for a very bourgeois institution: the kept woman. And even Madame de Pompadour, who oversaw such pleasures, later administering births and pensions, went as far as coining a maxim that regulated the countless future ménages of lesser rank: “It is his heart that I want.” As for the rest, she was relieved to forgo it. She would no longer have to eat chocolate with triple vanilla and truffles for breakfast, to rouse her “very cool temperament,” seeing that “men, as you well know, attach such importance to certain things.”
Louis XIV declares: “L’État, c’est moi”—“I am the State.” A courtier tells Louis XV: “Tout cela est à vous—All of that is yours.” These are the devilish words of Villeroy, whom Hugo singles out in La Pitié suprême to explain his grim compulsion to omnipotence. Then, having tired of lines such as “Sanche! Alonze! Clovis! Sennachérib! Cambyse!,” Hugo sets about describing the chronic situation of Louis XV as none of the king’s contemporaries had managed: “Une stupide joie avec un vaste ennui—A stupid pleasure with a vast boredom.” Only Louis XV’s enemy, his opposite, had words free of resentment. When the king died and not even his coffin could properly seal his fetid remains, transported in haste, spurning of all ceremony, at night, with an air of merriment, to Reims, only Frederick the Great was able to write to Voltaire what was sadly evident: that wretched man was un honnête homme whose only fault was to be king. Cardinal de Bernis, with forlorn courtesy, had written something similar in a letter which is a threnody for the Seven Years’ War: “I love the King, and I grieve for him with all my heart; an honnête homme capable of friendship and desiring only good, he allows evil to be done and to tarnish the splendor of a reign that could have been glorious and peaceful.”
“The end of every dynasty is marked by a king ignoring government to devote himself to dissipation. Nature announces his fall with inauspicious signs (comets, two suns, earthquakes, floods, diseases, etc.). In China, as we know, it is through the people that Heaven reveals its will to withdraw its mandate (ming) from the reigning king (revolution, songs of spirited young men). The dissipation of the king, however, is not just a simple expression of immoral conduct. It expresses the will to secure for his own profit all property, all power. … … …
“The ‘rois de perdition,’ in their arrogance, sought to reach Heaven building nine-storey towers, but also digging deep cellars. Their conduct can be construed as an exceptional exaggeration of a normal spirit of celebration (if we think of the winter drinking sessions of the peasants). The wrong is not in the action itself, but in its ‘disproportion.’ It consists in doing too much and too often what can and must be done on certain occasions.”
We’ll never know much for sure about his dissipation, in the same way that we won’t know much for sure about his childish games. But one account describes how, at the age of seven, they amused him by filling a vast room with sparrows and suddenly releasing hawks that ripped them to pieces with their sharp beaks. Another account describes how “the king had a white fawn that he fed and nurtured, which ate from his hand and was very fond of the king; he had it taken to La Muette and said he wanted to kill it. He had it sent a distance away and he shot and wounded it. The fawn dragged itself toward him and nuzzled him; once again he had it sent a distance away and he shot it a second time and killed it. His act seemed very cruel. There are other similar stories about him, involving certain birds that he has at Passy.”
In politics, Louis XV had only one abiding objective: that of conspiring against his government. He is the first king who chooses to place himself in the role of provocateur. The Secret of the King was a parallel policy that often caught him out in his own secrets. The Duc de Broglie, who made the first attempt to reconstruct this vain and acrobatic story of multiple deceptions, records one exemplary moment—when, in 1773, Louis XV, while plotting behind the scenes with Sweden, “had full satisfaction: needing to conduct an affair that was half-diplomatic and half-military, he succeeded in hiding one part from the minister of war, the other part from the foreign minister, and finally the whole of it from the person to whom he generally entrusted his secret policies. Three secrets carried on together, unconnected one from the other, were the crowning achievement of his system and a work of genius of its kind.” Then, when Louis XV succeeded even in deceiving his secret confidants, revealing part of the secret to his ministers, who had always played the role of the dupe, a sort of paralyzing peace hovered over him. All external purpose had faded before the evidence of the king’s trick, which forced him to play all and everything against himself, and thus to betray the betrayers whom he had chosen. The strands of the plot, once brought together, neutralized one another—and left in the middle of it was the lone, powerless sovereign: whether or not he resorted to hypochondriac inaction or to feverishly covering his tracks, he was thwarted at every turn, and was now damned.
Of all Louis XV’s bastard children, the son of Mademoiselle de Romans was honored with an evocative name. From Versailles, one December day, the king sent one of his very few intimate notes, which has since passed through the hands of many collectors: “I am well aware ma grande that you had some idea in your head when you left, though I couldn’t guess exactly what it was. I do not want our child to be under my name on the certificate of baptism, but nor do I want to be unable to recognize him in a few years’ time, if I so wish. I therefore want it to be put down as Louis Aimé or Louise Aimée, son or daughter of Louis Le Roy or of Louis Bourbon, as you prefer … I also want the godfather and the godmother to be poor people, or servants, excluding anyone else.”
Louis XV called Mademoiselle de Romans “ma grande”—according to the perceptive eye of Sophie Arnould—because “nature, abandoning its rules of good taste, had pleased itself to make a great exaggeration. Mademoiselle de Romans had a comely figure, and everything about her was in perfect proportion, but that perfection was colossal … The king himself, who was a very handsome man, looked like a schoolboy or half a king beside her.” Louis XV went too often to visit her at Passy, and too often he had a carriage and six horses sent to collect her. Choiseul, his minister, began to be concerned about possible political consequences; Madame de Pompadour was alarmed. Only the Maréchale de Mirepoix could find arguments to reassure her: “I certainly won’t say that he loves you more than her, and if with the wave of a magic wand she could be transported here and were at dinner this evening and everyone were aware of her tastes, then you would perhaps have reason to worry. But princes are, above all, men of habit; the King’s friendship for you is the same that he has for your apartment, for what is around you; you have adapted to his ways, to his affairs; with you there is no embarrassment, he has no fear of boring you; how can you imagine he’d have the courage to upset all this in a single day, to settle down in a totally different world, and to make a public spectacle of himself with such a great change of decoration?” But Madame de Pompadour’s fear was tinged with curiosity: once the bastard was born, it was said that Mademoiselle de Romans went to the Bois de Boulogne, dressed in lace, with the infant in a wicker basket, and breast-fed him there, on a secluded path. One day Madame de Pompadour, preceded by her trusty Madame du Hausset, her face concealed by her bonnet and by a handkerchief that she kept over her mouth, pretended to be passing casually along the same path. Mademoiselle de Romans was breast-feeding, her jet-black hair held back with a diamond-encrusted comb. Madame du Hausset approached her and said: “‘What a pretty child.’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I can say so myself, though I’m the mother.’ Madame, who was holding my arm, was trembling, and nor did I feel too confident. Mademoiselle de Romans said: ‘Do you live nearby?’ ‘Yes, Madame,’ I said, ‘I live at Auteuil with this lady, who at this moment has terrible toothache.’ ‘Oh, I am sorry, it’s a pain I’ve suffered much myself.’”
The king soon grew tired. His archers came to take away the child so that he would be brought up far from his mother. There were many letters of complaint and recrimination from the mistress who had fallen into disgrace. But Busby Berkeley’s remark was true at Versailles long before Hollywood: “There is no comeback for a has-been.” There was nothing to do but await her son’s future: when Louis XV died, she let the new king have the boy’s certificate of baptism—and the fourteen-year-old Abbé de Bourbon was received at Court. Many saw in him the slim and graceful figure of Louis XV. While he waited for a position in some prosperous abbey, the bastard was sent to Rome, to Cardinal de Bernis, the last of the four great cardinals who had governed France and now, at his palace on the Corso, entertained passing French nobility. He welcomed the Abbé de Bourbon with kindness, with affection, with “that blend of affability and refinement, of nobility and of simplicity” for which Madame de Genlis declared him to be “the most amiable man I have ever known.” But in Paris they were already forgetting the young abbé of royal stock. There was no more talk of abbeys—and they stopped sending him money. He wandered around Italy. Bernis, his last protector, felt grieved: “He is the Wandering Jew. It pains me to see a man who bears such a name drifting idly around all the inns of Italy; he must either be forbidden to hold such an illustrious name or be more respected in his person. I confess that on this point, and on several others, my thoughts are somewhat old-fashioned, indeed I am myself old-fashioned.” During his aimless wanderings, the Abbé de Bourbon died of chicken pox in Naples.
Sometime later, Madame Louise, a Carmelite nun and half-sister of the Abbé de Bourbon, described how she had met Abbé Turlot, who had been with him when he died: “The other day we talked about the poor Abbé de Bourbon … Such is the world: he’s been dead six months and he’s no longer remembered. I would so like to have a short epitaph written for him, just for it to be known who he was, but I’ll have to discuss it…” Less than a year later, Madame Louise would herself be dead and her plan came to nothing.
Images, for a long time, belonged to a cosmic liturgy that followed the course of the sun in the Zodiac. And for a short time they inhabited the ceremonies that escorted the sun of sovereignty. Having descended from the heavens, they settled in a mezzanine at Versailles. They were often left abandoned there, like a tedious provincial relative who talks about people entirely unknown. From that humiliating confinement they were dislodged as soon as the revolutionary crowd began to stir. Some ended up on the ends of pikes, others worshipped in Egyptian rites. No one understood whether all was tending toward triumph or persecution. It was tending toward both: but there was no longer a templum. Once the zodiacal belt was undone, each image now wandered in ever vaster cities, its tribe forgotten, ready to be attracted, to be plundered everywhere: in living rooms, abbeys, newspaper offices, satanic mills, ruins, American forests, suburbs. A new, uncontrolled, clandestine, contagious life began for them: for years they met at the crossroads of the mind, and at times they recognized a certain familiar air, the impression of a shared past. But they barely had time to stop before a violent gust urged them onward, along other paths, in a perpetual migration.
We smiled at the trimmed hedges,
at the curved Chinese roofs,
at the porcelain ringlets,
at the silk tails–
yet in moments of empty tiredness,
lifting a hand to our head
we felt something missing,
a powdered wig.
(For a long time, it wasn’t clear what belonged to the templum and what didn’t. An incessant mumbling came from the past centuries, from that last and now immense fin de siècle that begins with libertine dryness and the almost criminal recklessness of the Regency or—if we want an earlier cosmic setting—with the “untuned” heavens of Donne and with the disordered “degrees” lamented by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, and perhaps it is now verging on its final end. A breath of modernity that was preparing itself to be scattered. It was hard to contain that mumbling, to find a frame sufficiently well cultivated and conceived, yet not too conspicuous, as a frame must be, but made of substance which would then turn out, when studied closely, to be a pigment of the painting itself. At that point, Talleyrand emerged. Hadn’t Brichot said, in the halls of salon Verdurin, that it was he who had been the first of the fin de siècle? Talleyrand then offered another advantage: of having no ideas, and still fewer opinions, but of having an obscure, murky remnant of that kind of wisdom that merely “hints.”)