‘Avec un almanach et une montre, on pouvait à trois cent lieues de lui dire avec justesse ce qu’il faisait.’
‘With an almanac and a watch, one could, even at a distance of 300 leagues, say exactly what he was doing.’
Said of Louis XIV by Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), in his memoirs
AT THE END of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV’s court consisted of about 10,000 people, almost all of them constantly clamouring for royal attention. The Italian writer Primi Visconti, who spent eight years at Louis XIV’s court, wrote that the spectacle of the King emerging from his palace for a tour of the grounds reminded him of ‘the queen bee when she goes out into the fields with her swarm’.
Some of these drones would be asking for a serious favour – the 1996 French film Ridicule, for example, tells the credible story of a young nobleman, with the wonderfully aristocratic name Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy, who has to jump through a succession of protocol hoops to beg Louis XIV for a grant so that he can drain the marshes on his land and save his peasant tenants from malaria.
More often, though, the petitioners would be jostling in the corridors of Versailles in the hope of obtaining an honour such as the right to hold the King’s candlestick while he went to bed – a job that they would be willing to pay for.
Performing the most menial tasks for the King and his courtiers were about 7,000 servants, all of them permanently guarded (or kept under control) by some 4,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cavalry. On an average day when Louis XIV was in residence, there might be a crowd of 15,000 people flowing around the palace and the grounds – all of them living according to the King’s timetable.
When the Duc de Saint-Simon wrote of Louis XIV that ‘with an almanac and a watch, one could, even at a distance of 300 kilometres, say exactly what he was doing’ he did not disapprove. He found this predictability and stability reassuring. At least you knew where you were with Louis XIV – literally. Just as the sun determines what time of day it is, the Sun King decided what all his courtiers and the members of the royal family – all his most credible rivals for power – were doing at any given time.
From dawn till dusk and into the night, life at Versailles was centred on Louis XIV’s movements and desires. The rigorous palace schedule meant that everyone’s attention was focused on what was happening in ten minutes’ time, an hour later, that evening, or the next day. Courtiers had to change clothes, move from room to room, wait around, be ready to appear before the monarch. They had to learn the rules of behaviour for each different ceremony, and spend vast amounts of money on exactly the right costumes for each one. No ambitious prince or nobleman had time or money left for raising a revolutionary army. In any case, their plotting skills were exercised trying to work out how to beat a rival to a key post at court, or even how to get admitted to a specific event. Weeks might be wasted starting a malicious rumour or plotting to trick someone into a faux pas. At Versailles, etiquette was the opium of the aristocracy.
If you were invited to attend court at Versailles, it was impossible to refuse, even if it meant moving out of your château or spacious Paris mansion and into a cramped apartment at the palace. If you weren’t at Versailles, you were nobody. If you didn’t know the rules of etiquette, you were an uncultured slob. Everywhere outside Versailles was a dead zone. As the nineteenth-century writer Stendhal put it, ‘Louis XIV’s masterpiece was to create the boredom of exile.’
A look at the Sun King’s typical daily routine suggests that attendance at court wasn’t exactly exciting, either.
At seven o’clock, his valet de chambre got up from a camp bed in Louis XIV’s room (the King usually slept alone, behind the curtains of a four-poster), and returned at seven fifteen with servants to open the shutters. If it was cold enough (which it often was, with the palace’s large windows and high ceilings), attendants called feutiers (from the French feu, for fire) would light a fire. At seven thirty precisely, the valet de chambre went to the royal bedside and announced, ‘Sire, voilà l’heure.’
The premiers gentilshommes de la chambre (first gentlemen of the bedchamber) would then enter and open the royal bed curtains. The premiers gentilshommes were a team of four, each man being on duty for one year in a four-year cycle. This annual changeover didn’t happen just because opening the bed curtains was too exhausting. It was a highly sought after position amongst French noblemen. The premier gentilhomme on duty was in charge of the budget for the King’s bedroom, so he could siphon off money from the purchase of candles, curtains, sheets, etc. He also had the power to invite people into the royal bedroom or – equally important – exclude them. Influence was the most valuable currency at Louis XIV’s Versailles and the premier gentilhomme possessed enough of it to stuff a mattress.
Once the bed curtains were successfully drawn, the premier médecin (first doctor) entered the room. He would give Louis a quick check-up, and maybe pass on a piece of Versailles gossip (especially if he had been bribed to do so by some intriguer). At the same time, musicians – usually violinists and oboe players – would pipe up one of the King’s favourite tunes beneath his bedroom window.
At 8.15 a.m., it was time for the entrée familière – not a meal but the entrance by selected members of the royal family – and the grande entrée of Louis XIV’s closest servants – the grand chambellan (Godefroy-Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne), his longest-serving and most intimate advisor, keeper of his seal, second in rank when receiving ambassadors, and – a key role – the man who would hand the King his shirt in the morning (as long as no high-ranking royal was present).
With the grand chambellan came the grand maître, head of Louis XIV’s household, and the maître de la garde-robe (master of the wardrobe). The grand chambellan would bring a small font so that Louis could bless himself, before a 15-minute religious service was held for all those in the room.
By now, the King had been awake for an hour, but he was still not out of bed. At eight thirty his hairdresser (valet du cabinet des perruques) would enter, to shave Louis (every other day) and choose his headgear for the early part of the morning – his perruque du lever, or ‘getting-up wig’. Louis would now rise, put on a dressing gown and slippers, and go to sit by the fireplace to be coiffed.
After a few minutes, the seconde entrée would be announced, and a new crowd of people would crush in. They included an ‘ordinary’ doctor and surgeon, secretaries, readers, the silverware keeper (contrôleur de l’argenterie), more wardrobe valets, and other carefully selected gentilshommes.
By this time, Louis might well be perched on his commode, or chaise d’affaires, but no one would bat an eyelid, or a nostril. The monarch was a public personage, as visible as the sun itself, and his bowel movements would always be observed by an uncritical audience of highly fortunate witnesses. The privilege of watching Louis defecate was reserved for people who had been granted the necessary certificate, called a brevet d’affaires, which cost around 200,000 livres, the equivalent during Louis XIV’s reign of the price of about 1,000 houses in an average French town – payable to the King, of course. The man with the honour of carrying the commode in and out of the bedroom and emptying it, the porteur de chaise d’affaires, had paid Louis 20,000 livres for the job. The salary was only 600 livres per year, but it was hereditary, so over the generations it was an investment. In short, Louis XIV was living proof that where there’s muck there’s brass.
Once the royal stools had been recorded and approved by the doctors, and the commode taken away, the huissier (bailiff) at the door could begin to announce the lucky ‘people of quality’ who had been selected to attend the grand lever, or ‘grand getting-up’ – including women. This entry ceremony was performed in strict order of protocol, so that no mere marquis could elbow in front of a duchesse. By 9 a.m. the room often contained about 50 people, and was so full that a lesser noble could hardly get through the door, and almost certainly could not see Louis XIV. But at least they were present, and their name had been called out across the crowd of wigs.
Next, the people who could actually see the King were allowed to watch him having his breakfast, usually one or two cups of bouillon (broth) or herbal tea – which had been tasted beforehand to check for poisons, and individually announced on arrival in the room as though they were guests: ‘Le bouillon du Roi!’
Invigorated by this light refreshment, Louis would take off his own dressing gown and nightshirt, and remove the lucky charms he wore in bed – which were mainly religious relics. According to his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, one of these was ‘from the real cross, and apparently authenticated by the best [experts]’.
To cover up the royal nudity, the person of highest rank would give the King his shirt. Resorting to some rare self-sufficiency, Louis would tie his own tie before selecting two handkerchiefs from three offered to him, perhaps adding an element of suspense for his spectators.
He then prayed again, kneeling by his bed. Despite rumours of dissolute goings-on at court, Louis XIV himself always tried to impose religious order at Versailles, and would even check up on who was observing Lent. If he heard reports of any courtier eating meat during the fasting season, the unfortunate aristocrat might be deselected from the grand lever crowd – a humiliating demotion.
After his personal moment of prayer, Louis XIV would lead a procession though the galerie des Glaces towards his chapel, attended by his cortège of close servants and courtiers, for a ten o’clock mass. This was when most courtiers got their first daily glimpse of the King, and throngs of France’s chicest aristos in their finery would line the route, hoping to say a word in the royal ear or catch his eye. Women would often hold a candle to look devout – but also to provide soft lighting for their faces.
Daily mass was obligatory for all Louis XIV’s closest entourage. After all, he was monarch by divine right, so everyone had to pay homage to the source of his power. As the satirist Jean de la Bruyère put it, describing the crowds in the chapel: ‘The people worship the King and the King worships God.’
Louis XIV was unquestionably devout, but he made sure that his daily religious routine was never boring by constantly commissioning new music for the services from the royal composer Lully or rivals for his post. Morning mass at Versailles was where the country’s best new music was to be heard.
Only after mass would Louis finally go to his office, the cabinet de travail, having taken more or less three hours to get up. Despite this apparent inefficiency, the whole government of France happened in that office, mainly in morning sessions. As Louis XIV said, ‘L’État, c’est moi.’ (‘I am the state.’)
Given that he celebrated mass every day, Louis seems to have thought it unnecessary to observe the Sabbath, and worked on Sundays, when he usually held his Council of State. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, he presided over the Council of Finances, and on Wednesdays a second Council of State. Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays were flexible, and would be given over to urgent matters of state, or to meetings with his architects and gardeners. Building work continued during most of his lifetime, and the renovation of Versailles was given the same importance as politics.
Nevertheless, Louis took his country’s political affairs seriously – the proof of this was that during his councils, ministers were actually allowed to sit down in his presence. Elsewhere in the palace everyone had to remain standing while Louis XIV was in view – even his own brother could only sit if expressly instructed to do so by the King.
At 1 p.m. Louis walked back to his bedroom, his route again lined by courtiers hoping to be noticed. Getting a prime spot between the cabinet and the bedroom was a huge honour because if you had a request – a relative to be promoted, a marsh to be drained, an invitation to be obtained – now was the time to put your case. Everyone knew that if first impressions worked, the lucky courtier might receive a private audience, and if their pitch was good enough, the King might grant them the funds and the royal seal of approval for their project.
For this to work, you had to look good – Louis might notice a tall or particularly well dressed man and stop to ask one of his attendants who this person was. But looks weren’t enough. The object of the King’s attention then had a few seconds during which to impress, preferably with a piece of quotable flattery. The diarist and courtier Saint-Simon said that shameless obsequiousness was the only way to approach Louis XIV: ‘The crudest [pieces of flattery] were well received, and the most degrading were enjoyed even more.’
Louis XIV liked to feed people a line to see how quick-witted they were. He once famously asked the painter Charles Le Brun, ‘Do you not think I have aged?’ Le Brun came back with, ‘Sire, all I see are a few more campaigns on Your Majesty’s forehead.’ Not exactly flattering, but highly effective because Louis loved to be thought of as a successful general. It was surely no coincidence that Le Brun became director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and one of the men hired for the interior decoration of Versailles.
Similarly, the playwright Jean Racine was asked to go to Holland to watch the King’s army at work, presumably to get inspiration for one of his grandiose plays in which rulers battle for supremacy. Rashly, Racine didn’t go, and on his return to Versailles, Louis confronted him: ‘Didn’t you want to go and watch a siege?’, to which Racine quipped that he had ordered a new set of campaign outfits from his tailor, but ‘when he delivered them, the towns that Your Majesty was besieging had been taken’. A piece of repartee that saved Racine – and his career – from royal disfavour.
Sometimes these attempts at flattery would go wrong, because even Louis XIV had his limits. The Duc d’Uzès became a laughing stock at court for repeating the same barely credible flattering remark at every occasion. The King once asked Uzès when his wife’s baby was due, and the duke replied absurdly: ‘Oh, Sire, whenever Your Majesty wishes.’ While watching a scientific experiment, Louis was pleased with the chemist’s servile ‘Sire, these two gases will now have the honour of decomposing before Your Majesty,’ but less impressed when Uzès added: ‘If Your Majesty will permit it.’ Worst of all, though, when the Queen asked Uzès what time it was, he told her: ‘The time that Your Majesty wishes.’ It sounds as though she set him up just to create some gossip.
Louis XIV’s lunch, called dîner,fn1 was eaten in his bedroom, alone – if you don’t count the horde of spectators. Again, a select crowd of courtiers would be allowed in to stand and watch the King eating at his small square table, where he would tuck in to soup (often taking three or four bowls), ham, mutton, game, hard-boiled eggs, salad, fruit and pâtisseries.
The dishes sound simple enough, but the chefs were as keen to impress as everyone else at Versailles. The King’s cooks invented delicacies like filets de cerf aux perdreaux truffés (fillets of venison with truffle-stuffed partridges), and would sometimes flavour his food with violets. The gardeners also had to raise their performance and provide perfect seasonal produce – at the height of Louis XIV’s reign, his gardens grew seven varieties of melon and six of strawberries. Of course, when Louis favoured a certain fruit or vegetable, everyone in Versailles had to follow suit, and the town’s shopkeepers would take full advantage – during a craze for peas in the 1660s, prices went up to 130 livres per pound, almost a year’s salary for an average worker.
The food at Versailles was subject to etiquette every bit as rigid as the rules guiding the palace’s human residents. Each dish was brought from the kitchen accompanied by a dozen or so attendants – and any courtier seeing the convoy would have to bow to the King’s meal. Different dishes and drinks would have their own processions because they came from separate departments in the King’s kitchens, which were housed in a vast building that Louis XIV had constructed on the site of the church of the old Versailles village. The kitchens preserved a holy aspect, because the building contained a chapel dedicated to St Roch, who was believed to protect against epidemics and bad food – the patron saint of salmonella and unrisen soufflés. Six priests served in this chapel, blessing the dishes and those who prepared them.
The kitchen workers and waiters numbered about 500. For example, it took three people just to pass Louis XIV a glass of wine. The gentilhomme with the honour of serving the King at table would call out ‘à boire pour le Roi!’ (‘a drink for the King’). The chef d’échansonnerie-bouche (head wine server) would then give the gentilhomme a golden tray carrying a glass and two flasks – one of wine, the other of water to dilute it. The two men, followed by the aide de gobelet échansonnerie-bouche (assistant goblet and wine server) would bow before the King’s table, and then pour a little mixture of wine and water into cups for tasting. If none of the three tasters collapsed foaming at the mouth, the gentilhomme would then give the King the two flasks, and Louis would mix his own drink in his glass.fn2
The whole rigmarole with the flasks and glasses had to be repeated every time the King wanted a refill, because the drinks were kept on a chest of drawers set against the wall.
After his dîner, the King got changed (again, watched by a few courtiers), and then went about his afternoon activities. These he decided upon almost at the last minute, only giving his orders in the morning, and thereby obliging the courtiers who were to be honoured by his presence to rush off and put on their walking, riding or hunting outfits – while also keeping people on tenterhooks to see who would be invited.
In younger life, Louis XIV would go shooting in the park at least twice a week and hunt deer on horseback in the nearby forest at least once. He was by all accounts an excellent marks-man – the Duc de Saint-Simon wrote that ‘there was no better shot than he’ (although in French, the word tireur was also a crude double entendre). Louis XIV could bag 250 birds in a single day. This was not surprising, though, as 2,000 pheasants and 5,000 partridges might be released from the royal pheasant house to ensure that the King would not be frustrated.
Louis XIV would often give the dead birds to ladies present, who would wear the bloody corpses on their belts as trophies, and return to the palace still showing these gruesome signs of royal favour.
The King’s afternoon riding expeditions provided slightly different opportunities to stain his courtiers’ clothing. Legend has it that Louis XIV was blessed with an abnormally large (or patient) bladder, and could ride for hours without stopping. Naturally, while he rode, everyone else in his party had to ride. There were no comfort breaks unless Louis himself took one, and because he rarely did so, any courtier whose bladder was bursting had a painful choice – either cork it or wet themselves in the saddle. A quick stop behind a tree – however discreet – would be noticed and the offender banished from future hunting parties.
On clement afternoons, Louis also loved to promenade around his gardens, which, as we have already seen, would come to life before his eyes. Fountains would spring up as he walked, and hats would come off – he was the only person permitted to cover his head when he was present. Music would also start up, because music, along with flattery, was one of Louis XIV’s true loves, and just like flattery, he wanted to hear it everywhere he went. Louis himself played the lute, harpsichord and guitar (brilliantly, of course, according to his courtiers).
On his walks, Louis was either accompanied by strolling musicians or would come across small orchestras posted at strategic points around the grounds. When performing in windy weather, the court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully would have to increase the number of musicians in his ensemble so that they could make themselves heard.
Naturally, every orchestra, marching band and choir at Versailles had to play the King’s favourite songs, adding still more layers to the repetitive tedium of the courtiers’ lives. Elisabeth-Charlotte, the German wife of Louis XIV’s gay brother Philippe d’Orléans, once described a typical concert at court as ‘a tune from an old opera that we have heard a hundred times before’. And she was an avowed admirer of Louis XIV.
The King would return to the palace at about 5 p.m. and change clothes again, donning his most flamboyant costume and largest wig of the day, before visiting his queen or official mistress for a little tête-à-tête.
Three times a week, between seven and ten in the evening, Louis held his ‘appartement’. This was the courtiers’ favourite time of day, because the King hosted entertainments accompanied by a generous buffet of ice creams and pâtisseries at which everyone would help themselves. It was all very relaxed, with Louis mingling, talking about that day’s hunting, listening to music, dancing, watching card games and playing billiards.
Even so, with Louis present, relaxation was a relative concept. Betting was allowed at court, although forbidden in Paris, and it was a dangerous pursuit at Versailles, because players were willing to raise the stakes to ruinous levels just to attract the King’s attention. When they hit a losing streak, their fate would be sealed if Louis joined the game while they were trying to win their money back, because it was not polite to beat the King.
Playing billiards against Louis XIV provided another excellent chance to flaunt one’s talent for obsequiousness. It was said, for example, that a politician called Michel Chamillart was made Secretary of State for War and Minister of Finance purely thanks to his skill at losing to Louis at billiards. Chamillart was notoriously bad at both jobs and was dubbed by a wit as ‘a hero at billiards, a zero at the ministry’.
The worst thing about these ‘informal’ evenings, though, was that in hot weather, the huge crowd would create such a hammam that ice creams would melt instantly and bewigged, overdressed courtiers would suffer heat exhaustion.
In fact, Louis himself often couldn’t stand the heat, and would frequently leave these evening entertainments to his son (also called Louis, though destined never to reign, because he died of smallpox in 1711 before he could inherit the throne). The King, meanwhile, might be with his mistress enjoying his own overheated soirée.
The evening entertainments over, Louis XIV would retire to his antechamber from 10 to 11p.m. to eat his souper, a formal meal for which he would be seated in an armchair and watched by courtiers, including a row of especially favoured people who were allowed to stand behind him. Again, musicians might well be playing in the background.
Louis would sometimes use a meal like this to cause ructions at court. On 5 January 1685, for example, the diarist the Marquis de Sourches noted that: ‘The King gave a souper for the ladies. But they were only a small number, to the great displeasure of those who were not invited.’ Louis XIV was a master of divide and rule.
After supper, it was back to the bedroom with the same elite group who had attended his lever. The ceremony was the same as in the morning, only performed backwards, and with extra prayers. The only new element in the evening was the ceremony of the candlestick. The chaplain would hand it to the premier valet de chambre, who would carry it over to the King’s armchair. Louis would then select one of his courtiers to take off one glove and hold the candlestick while he got undressed.
The King climbed into his bed, the curtains were drawn, the premier valet de chambre would lie down on his camp bed, and everyone else would leave the room knowing that at seven o’clock the next morning, it would all begin again. If they were very lucky, tomorrow they would be invited to watch the King eat, maybe even from behind his chair; they might get the chance to utter some self-abasing flattery, lose at billiards, and hear the same tune for the thousandth time; and if they were amongst the most favoured in the realm, they might even get to watch the Sun King perform a bowel movement.
The elite in the King’s bedroom weren’t the only courtiers at Versailles to be subjected to waste products. When Louis XIV was in residence, the palace was so crowded that bodily functions became an embarrassing problem. According to an inventory of royal furniture, between 1664 and 1705 there were about 350 chaises de commodité (commodes) kept in garde-robes à chaise (literally, ‘chair wardrobes’) all over the building – but this was not enough to cope with the crowds, and not always convenient when courtiers were waiting at a key spot for the King to pass by. Hence the many stories of chic French aristocrats disappearing into bushes in the gardens, peeing in staircases or behind curtains, or getting servants to hold chamber pots and vases so that they could relieve themselves whenever they needed to. It is said that some men would go into bedrooms and use shaving and washing bowls – an unpleasant surprise for the occupant who later returned to their room to freshen up.
Even the clergy got in on the act – it was said that the aged Bishop of Noyon (who was also an aristocrat) was once caught short while alone on the upper level of the chapel at Versailles, and urinated over a balustrade. The guard on duty below heard the sudden cascade and rushed over to see a man of the cloth with his cloth hitched up. The guard quickly reported the matter to Louis XIV’s valet. Louis, though, had a soft spot for the old bishop, who was often present for his evening prayers, and did nothing to punish this desecration.
The palace must have reeked, especially on hot days, so that standing in smelly corridors, next to urine-soaked curtains, while bursting to use a chaise, in the vague hope of catching the King’s eye, must have been a source of constant humiliation for the crème de la crème of civilized French society. Most of all, though, one has to pity the servants whose job it was to lift the collecting bowls out of all the chaises de commodité and empty their contents into 30-odd cesspits dotted about the grounds.
On top of all this, the prospect of being in Louis XIV’s presence became less and less enticing as his reign went on.
It is often said that Louis XIV never bathed because his doctors believed that washing was dangerous. There was a widely held theory at the time that hot water could enter the body via the pores and poison it. One of Louis XIV’s physicians, Théophraste Renaudot, said that ‘bathing exterminates the body and fills the head with vapours’.fn3 Then again, water quality was not always perfect, so there might have been something in this theory, especially in cities like Paris where until the nineteenth century most household water came direct from the River Seine, which was also the main sewer.
However, the stories about Louis XIV’s body odour are often exaggerated. As we saw when discussing his fountains, some of the water piped into Versailles came from springs, so the quality could be relatively good. Louis himself loved swimming in rivers when he was a young man, and took frequent baths when he was older. In the 1670s he built himself a ‘bathing apartment’ with a tub that would be replenished by a small army of servants carrying jugs of hot water from a nearby boiler room.
Accounts of how often Louis XIV bathed tend to vary according to the strength of the writer’s belief in an absolute monarchy, but it is likely that he would have wanted to wash off the smell, sweat and blood after hunting – meaning that he would have bathed several times per week in younger life.
Not all Louis XIV’s courtiers followed his example. Many aristocrats believed in the dangers of washing, and would content themselves with a quick morning swab of the face and hands with a cloth moistened with water or vinegar – only the visible parts of the body had to look clean. To reduce body odours, they had creams and strong perfumes (musk and patchouli were favourites), and the better-off aristocrats who had rooms at the palace could change their shirts and undergarments several times a day. Even so, with the mix of body odours and perfumes, the crowded corridors of Versailles would definitely have set the nostrils twitching.
Despite the many portraits depicting Louis XIV as a demi-god, in later life his physical presence was far from pleasant. Like many people of the time, his dental hygiene left much to be desired, so that from the age of 38, in the late 1670s, his teeth began giving him serious problems. In 1678, one of his doctors, Antoine d’Aquin, noted that the King’s ‘right cheek and gum were swollen, and the abscess, having suppurated … was lanced and pus was withdrawn’.
By 1685, d’Aquin was reporting that a botched operation to have teeth removed from Louis XIV’s upper left jaw ‘sometimes caused a flow of bad-smelling purulent matter’. The doctor described ‘a hole in this jaw which, every time he drank or gargled, let the water enter his nose, from which it flowed like a fountain’. One has to pity the lucky courtiers chosen to observe the royal meals.
The hole was eventually cauterized after an agonizing session with red-hot irons and no anaesthetic, but thereafter, Louis was apparently a victim of ‘a strong, almost cadaverous odour when he blew his nose’.
By the time he was 47, Louis XIV had lost all his upper teeth but one, while all his lower teeth were partially rotten. This was just after his second marriage, to Madame de Maintenon. Never can ‘you may now kiss the bride’ have sounded so threatening. Not that the ceremony would have included those words – it was held in secret and was by all accounts a sombre mass.
In short, Louis XIV became a sort of Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. The royal portraits stayed eternally glamorousfn4 while the real man lost his teeth and emitted cadaverous odours – and his courtiers were obliged to pretend it wasn’t happening.
The question is, why did this daily regime of tyranny and pretence not provoke a rebellion amongst the courtiers?
Were none of these proud aristocrats – some of whom traced their families back to Charlemagne or William the Conqueror, or who were members of other European royal families – sick of the stench and the self-degradation? And why was there no Versailles revolution against the crushing boredom?
Surely it would only have taken direct action by a few influential figures, supported by Louis XIV’s ambitious younger brother, Philippe d’Orléans, to have put an end to the whole absurd ‘emperor’s new clothes’ regime. If a few hats had been defiantly kept on heads in the gardens of Versailles, a few aristocratic backsides planted on seats while the King was dining, or groans of disgust heard when he sat on his commode, then the spell would have been broken. The rebellious nobles could have convinced the Parisian mob that things were going to change, malcontents everywhere would have refused to pay their abusive local tax collectors, and Louis XIV’s sun would have set.
But it didn’t happen.
There seem to have been several reasons why Versailles never became unbearable for Louis XIV’s courtiers – at least, not until the very end of his reign, when he was ill and increasingly under the sway of his religious wife.
For a start, boredom breeds gossip, and the aristocrats at Versailles spent their days and nights starting, passing on and elaborating salacious rumours about each other. The young wife of an aged duke was pregnant? Bets would be taken on who was the real father, especially after the baby was born and illicit resemblances could be alleged.
The King’s various coucheries also provided plenty of entertainment, though he was so open in his infidelities that remarks about his mistress would mainly be jealous backbiting rather than moral accusations.
Not even the Queen, Marie-Thérèse, escaped the Versailles rumour mill – when she gave birth to a daughter in 1664, witnesses at the delivery remarked that the newborn girl was dark-skinned. One of the ladies-in-waiting, Madame de Motteville, described the baby as ‘une mauresse’, ‘a black North African’. To scotch rumours, the doctors blamed the infant’s dark complexion on the long labour and even on the Queen’s fondness for chocolate (she had started the fashion for drinking it in Paris), but there was so much gossip that 40 days later, some courtiers refused to believe the report that the baby had died. A few years afterwards, it was suggested that a young black servant girl at Versailles was the daughter, who had been hidden away. There were also stories that the girl was the fruit of an encounter between Louis XIV and a Caribbean maid.
Yet the rumours at court weren’t all sexual tittle-tattle. With Louis governing France from one room at Versailles, courtiers felt flattered to be at the heart of national affairs. Today, French politicians seem to love nothing better than being filmed or photographed in hushed conversation with each other, underlining their status as members of an in-the-know in-crowd. At Louis XIV’s court it was no different.
Courtiers could see and hear the King giving out orders, watch foreign ambassadors arrive and judge how they had been received, or witness ministers and generals being appointed and dismissed. In his diaries, the Marquis de Sourches constantly noted rumours that today would be thought of as security leaks. On 11 March 1690, for example, de Sourches talked about the ‘rumeur’ that ‘twelve thousand of the Holy Roman Emperor’s best troops on the Rhine had left for Hungary’ (this retreat by France’s enemy in the Nine Years War was good news), though he added that ‘perhaps the number was not so great and, ostensibly, the truth was that he had only marched away five or six thousand’. Clearly everyone was openly swapping hearsay about troop movements.
This story is accompanied by a long list of newly appointed army officers (all of them aristocrats), complete with their family background, because being selected for one of the King’s elite regiments was confirmation of the family’s noble status.
Sourches wrote similar entries for decades, especially during Louis XIV’s frequent wars, suggesting that the corridors of Versailles constantly echoed to the sound of official proclamations and only semi-hushed revelations. Insider knowledge like that is the basis of modern politicians’ whole careers, and must have fascinated the thousands of aristocrats in seventeenth-century Versailles.
Another reason why the nobility tolerated the Sun King’s blinding self-aggrandizement was baser: money. There were fortunes to be made and lost at Versailles, and not just from gambling.
The idea of selling state jobs wasn’t new. It was created by Henri IV in 1604, but Louis XIV turned it into a growth industry that earned him a fortune. When he created the post of percepteur des taxes d’enlèvement d’ordures à Paris (collector of taxes to pay for rubbish collection), for example, it was sold for a vast sum – 75,000 livres. The new recruit was guaranteed to cream off his percentage of the tax, and had the power to hold whole Parisian neighbourhoods to ransom if they didn’t pay up. Louis, meanwhile, received not only the 75,000 livres and his share of the taxes, but also an annual payment from the tax collector so that he could keep his job. It was win-win-win.
As bathing in hot water became more fashionable (or less risky) towards the end of Louis XIV’s reign, he decided to raise money by making it necessary to buy a licence to set up a high-class bathhouse – a sort of seventeenth-century urban spa – where the well-off residents of most major towns in France could pay a small fortune to wash, get a shave, have their wig powdered and deloused, and even undergo minor operations.
These licences sold so well that in 1689 Louis issued an edict creating 200 more. The 200 existing spa owners, known technically as the barbiers-perruquiers-baigneurs-étuvistes (barbers-wigmakers-bathers-steamroom operators) were horrified at the idea of so much competition – and certain that the market would not support so many of these spas – so they clubbed together and paid the King a ‘voluntary contribution’ of 100,000 livres to have the edict withdrawn. This was the equivalent of 1,000 years’ salary for a common soldier or coachman, so the earnings at stake must have been immense.
Just like a modern free-market economy, the aristocrats knew that some of the profits from Louis XIV’s lucrative jobs and licences would trickle down to them. The problem was that to stand a chance of cashing in, they had to bow and scrape to the King. Invitations to join him at his second home at the nearby château de Marly were as sought-after as tickets to a World Cup final. Courtiers would mutter a two-word plea – ‘Sire, Marly?’ – as he passed them in the gardens or the corridors, and the going rate to get one’s name on the guest list by other means was apparently 6,000 livres, payable to the Princesse d’Harcourt, a cousin by marriage of Louis XIV. The aristocrats paid up, partly so that they would be perceived as influential members of the in-crowd, but also for the opportunity to earn their cash back.
Sometimes Louis even made people’s mere presence at Versailles a blatant moneymaking scheme. In 1681 he organized a national lottery, nominally in aid of the poor, and obliged his courtiers to be generous, though this time he was offering large prizes in return. Participants bought as many tickets as they could afford, wrote their name on them, and put them in collecting boxes, with some gamblers trying to improve their chances by scribbling flattering messages to the King on the outside of their folded ticket. One was apparently inscribed with a clever, obsequious pun: ‘One Louis can make my fortune’ (a Louis was a coin as well as the King’s name).
The take-up was massive, with collection boxes arriving from all around the country – though there were complaints that some provincial boxes had not arrived in time for the draw. In any case, it came as no surprise when a ticket belonging to Louis XIV won the main prize of 100,000 livres. Sportingly, or because he thought that such obvious cheating would scupper future lotteries, he refused to accept his winnings, and put the money back in the pot. But, coincidentally or not, other large prizes were won by Louis XIV’s son, brother, wife and several other prominent courtiers.
In short, it was very worthwhile for aristocrats to stay on at Versailles, within range of all this money. But not everyone at court had the cash to buy a job, an audience with the King, or even enough hats to keep up with fashion. So, predictably, some courtiers resorted to theft. There were unimaginably rich pickings at the palace, and everyone knew that the jewellers in town never asked where sellers had obtained the diamonds, brooches or odd pieces of gold and silverware that they were peddling.
One evening, a skilful blade cut a large diamond button from the dress of Marie-Adelaïde de Savoie, the mother of the future King Louis XV, taking a neat square of material with it. She didn’t notice anything until it was too late, and when she reported her loss, news was put about that the perpetrator must have been a common gatecrasher, no doubt to preserve the court’s reputation.
At a ball on 11 December 1697, the Chevalier de Sully caught a young nobleman trying to steal a jewel from his outfit. The King was informed, but nothing was done in order to protect the thief’s family’s name. The young man was simply exiled from court, which was considered punishment enough. Even so, the young criminal knew that with a little well-placed flattery, bribery or (if really necessary) bravado on the battlefield, the exile could be rescinded.
Money flowed down through Versailles society in other forms, too. Any dishes served to the King that he didn’t finish were resold in town by the serdeaux – as their name suggests, they were originally the King’s water servers, but later became more general servants, often from noble families, whose job was to clear away the tables after a meal or party. Along one side of the place d’Armes in Versailles, just outside the palace entrance, market stalls would sell royal dishes, often untouched, to townspeople or down-on-their-luck courtiers who were looking for a cheap meal. Not surprisingly, serdeau was another job title that had to be bought.
Thanks to Louis XIV, the whole town of Versailles became an El Dorado, with canny residents able to make fortunes from the palace run-off. Chief amongst these were the hotel and inn owners providing board, lodging and prostitutes for the permanently incoming tide of builders, craftsmen, merchants, con artists and hangers-on. By 1700 the huddle of streets around the palace contained more than 100 hotels and inns.
Surprisingly, the fortune hunters who were most at risk were those who worked in the rag trade – any kind of tailor, seamstress, shoemaker, milliner, wigmaker or haberdasher.
They might have been expected to prosper the most, because fashions at court were so absurd that no garment could be bought ready-made. At the start of Louis XIV’s reign, for example, men’s garters and shoes were swathed in so many ribbons that courtiers were in real danger of somersaulting down staircases – Louis himself popularized the use of the walking stick to counter this. Naturally, vast stocks of ribboned garters had to be hand-sewn, and the walking sticks had to be personalized with jewels or gold handles as a mark of rank. Louis also decreed from time to time that certain courtiers would be allowed to wear a certain colour, so that new uniforms had to be ordered at top speed.
Women at the palace were encumbered with heavy dresses consisting of three skirts – la modeste, la friponne (or ‘mischievous’, because a lover might lift it) and la secrète. At court, they had to wear a train, the length of which depended on their rank – these could reach 12 feet (the French didn’t start measuring in metres until the Revolution) for a duchess, up to 44 feet for the Queen.
Under obligation to wear these customized costumes, both male and female courtiers spent half their lives getting measured and fitted, and begging the best cloth cutters and needle-workers to give priority to their new outfit. But this didn’t help the workers themselves, and the most frequent bankrupts in the town of Versailles were tailors.
This was because, despite the huge demand for clothes and accessories of all sorts, the nobles rarely paid in full for the finery they ordered. A shopkeeper who sold a pair of shoes, a cane or gloves might be able to demand cash, but large, complicated creations would be supplied on credit, and bills would often be ignored. And even if the courtiers were sued for payment, ultimately they were protected, thanks to Louis XIV’s decree making their houses inviolable property. If a Versailles aristocrat pleaded cash-poverty, no creditor could force him or her to sell their valuable mansion, so that a nobleman or-woman with huge debts could stay at court, living on credit, and angling for the glance or word from the King that might make him or her rich for life – or for generations.
Meanwhile, the tailors they bankrupted would have to pawn the tools of their trade, which would be bought by another fortune hunter.
In short, Louis XIV created a self-perpetuating market economy based on the notion of his own glory. It was totally corrupt but highly efficient. The proudest aristocrats in France would obey his every whim in the hope of earning prestige and its associated cash. This probably explains why, after the troubles at the start of his reign, Louis never entertained any doubts about the justification for his absolutist regime.
In a way, though, his self-confidence was a mistake, because by rewarding aristocrats for self-abasing obedience, Louis XIV seems to have sown the seeds for the demise of the monarchy.
After all, if you were an aristocrat who had been forced to humiliate yourself, and then pay a fortune, to land a lucrative job, you would be more than keen to hang on to it. If that job involved wielding power as, say, a tax collector or a judge, and making a rich living out of corruption, this keenness would become an obsession. And if you had also bought the right to pass your job on to future generations of your family, staying in your position of power would become your entire dynastic raison d’être.
So Louis XIV might have thought he was enslaving his aristocracy, but he was in fact giving it a very good reason to bite the royal hand that fed it. Thanks to Louis XIV, the aristocracy could feed itself, and had less reason to show allegiance to the monarch. What’s more, taxing the less fortunate had now become the aristocrat’s whole way of life.
This was the situation that would cripple Louis XVI’s attempts to reform French society before 1789, and that would end up sending him and many aristocrats to the guillotine.
Louis XIV was so sure of his unshakeable authority that he once even felt comfortable enough to joke about a riot. When his first grandson was born in 1682, the people of Versailles came to the palace to celebrate, but things quickly got out of hand. Building work was still going on, and the mob began to tear down wooden scaffolding and set light to it, throwing tarpaulins and old clothes on to the celebratory bonfire to get it really roaring.
Anxious courtiers advised Louis XIV to send soldiers to disperse the mob and put out the flames, but the King quipped: ‘Let them carry on, as long as they don’t burn us.’
It would be another century before his joke would turn sour.