In the annals of European monarchy, no other ruler outshines Louis XIV, whose reign lasted a staggering seventy-two years, until his death in 1715. Small wonder that millions of tourists from all over the world visit the Palace of Versailles each year to gaze upon Louis’s most monumental work.
Yet Versailles is more than just the château and its beautiful gardens; it is also a town in its own right, which grew alongside the fabulous château. Today, it is a well-heeled suburb of Paris, popular among Anglo expatriates. And for its residents, it is another of Louis XIV’s creations that remains the most beloved treasure of Versailles: the Place du Marché Notre-Dame, which hosts one of the largest and best food markets in the region. Three days a week, the square fills with stalls offering every imaginable product: rare fruits and vegetables, artisanal cheeses, local wines, olives, candies, and spices. Small food trucks sell crêpes and piping hot escargot swimming in garlic butter. The covered market surrounding the square is open every day (except Monday, bien sur) and holds a luscious array of meats, fresh fish, and oysters.
But for a true glimpse of the intersection of French gastronomy and royalty in the seventeenth century, visitors are well advised to seek out the Potager du Roi, the king’s vegetable garden, located just outside the château gates. A triumph of early modern science and ingenuity, it serves as an enduring testament to the Sun King’s imperious demands for everyday transcendence, and the innovations he spurred among his most loyal courtiers.
Louis XIV became king in 1643, at the age of four, after his father (that pious persecutor of Huguenots, Louis XIII) died of tuberculosis. His mother, Anne of Austria, served as regent, assisted by her legendary chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. After Mazarin’s death in 1661, Louis ruled in his own right, gradually solidifying his total control of the nobility and the state. He initiated far-reaching economic and military reforms that transformed France into an ever more centralized, wealthy, and modern state. “L’état c’est moi!” Louis once famously declared. “I am the State!” Louis adopted the sun as his royal emblem, blatantly invoking its divine and omniscient qualities as he fashioned himself into an absolute monarch of unprecedented power.
While the decadent and romantic escapades of Louis’s court have been the subject of much pulpy pop culture over the years, the Sun King’s true passion was diplomacy and war. At that time, what Louis termed the métier de roi, the kingly craft, was consumed above all else with foreign affairs, and especially with defending and expanding one’s territorial domain. To the extent that a king troubled himself with domestic affairs, it was largely in the service of strengthening the state so as to make it more powerful on the European stage. Louis brought a more aggressive stance to French foreign policy, pursuing numerous wars of conquest. He had been gifted a large and effective army, the perfect tool for expanding France into a more impressive and defensible territory—for example, by seizing Alsace and moving the French border to the Rhine. Louis was particularly fond of fighting the Dutch, then a preeminent power, and extended French territory to the north and east in a series of campaigns.
France’s military strength and aggressive foreign policy provoked the English and the Dutch to ally themselves with France’s traditional adversary, the Austrian Hapsburgs. This led to the War of the Grand Alliance, or Nine Years’ War, which was fought not only along French land borders but in the American colonies, Ireland, West Africa, and India (making it one of the earliest “world wars”). The tail end of Louis’s reign was taken up by the War of the Spanish Succession, in which Europe’s major powers fought for control of the Spanish throne and its vast global empire after the death of the last Spanish Hapsburg king. After a long and brutal war, the Spanish crown passed from the Hapsburgs to the House of Bourbon, as a grandson of Louis XIV became the king of Spain. But overall, the war was not a great success for France, as it was forced to relinquish a number of colonies and territories. England, on the other hand, won a raft of new colonies and commercial arrangements, and the war is commonly seen as marking the beginning of England’s ascendancy over France and Spain on the global stage.
All these wars were costly, and French debt soared in the final decades of Louis’s reign. The French people tired of their Sun King, with his endless wars and heavy taxes. This public discontent with the monarchy was not mollified by Louis’s successors, and it would culminate later that century in the French Revolution.
Yet Louis cared little about earthly annoyances like debt and discontent, and he spent many years and millions of livres transforming his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles into the splendid palace we know today. His motivations were not purely decadent: he also used the luxurious château to seduce and pacify the historically mutinous French nobility. Rather than scheming rebellion, the court at Versailles became obsessed with fashion and luxury, gossip and trends, and competing for the king’s favor.
In Versailles, the Sun King maintained a strict routine, timed to the minute, as a way of maximizing efficiency and enjoyment. The rules and rituals surrounding food were among the most important, and the kitchens at Versailles employed five hundred cooks and servants to fulfill the king’s culinary expectations. The king was often seated alone at his table, either au grand couvert, in a large hall in view of the entire court, or au petit couvert, in his own rooms with high-placed courtiers lurking about. Unlike the traditional banquet, with its elaborate seating arrangements reflecting gradations of privilege and power, the couvert emphasized the absolutism of Louis’s reign, in which even his closest family members dared not approach him.1
Louis was known to have a ferocious appetite; his sister-in-law, Princess Elizabeth Charlotte (known as the Princess Palatine), noted that she “often saw the king eat four full plates of various soups, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a big plate of salad, two big slices of ham, mouton in gravy and garlic, a plate of pastries, and also fruits and boiled eggs.”2 Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was discovered upon the king’s death and autopsy that his stomach was three times larger than that of a normal adult. Yet despite chronic digestion and dental issues, the king persevered with his feasts, determined to maintain a public façade of good health even when suffering mightily. In the words of the nineteenth-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “if the man in reality was so often ill, the King always appeared well.”3
Dr. Guy-Crescent Fagon, the royal physician, was rather vexed by the king’s gluttony, and in particular his love of vegetables, which were thought to worsen his digestive issues. Of particular concern was the king’s love of green peas, on which he apparently gorged whenever they were in season. Peas first became fashionable at Versailles in 1660, when a courtier returning from Italy presented a basket of peas to the king in January, far ahead of season. Initially a novelty, a serious green pea craze ensued. The court became so enamored of peas that they appeared on the menu every evening, in multiple dishes. Madame de Maintenon, the mistress and later second wife of the king, wrote,
The chapter of peas still lasts: the impatience to eat some, the pleasure of having eaten some, and the joy of eating them again are the three points which our princes have been talking about for the last four days. Some ladies, after having supper with the king and eaten well, find peas at home to eat before going to bed, at the risk of having an indigestion. It is a fashion, it is a furor.4
The Sun King had a great affection generally for les primeurs, the “new vegetables” grown just ahead or at the very beginning of their usual season. (They tend to have a fresher taste; carottes primeur, for example, available in May and June, are sweeter and crunchier.) So he eventually ordered his gardener, Jean-Baptiste La Quintinie, to defy nature and produce his favorite fruits and vegetables out of season. La Quintinie was a renowned gardener, but even he must have been daunted by the task set before him, especially when he saw what was set aside for the new vegetable garden: a swampy patch of land on the edge of the château grounds. Yet he had the benefit of limitless funds and manpower, and between 1678 and 1683, the land was drained and a system of terraces and walls built up, creating multiple levels at which plants could be grown. By manipulating these levels and their exposure to the sun, La Quintinie could create various microclimates within the twenty-five-acre garden. He also built greenhouses and experimented with new pruning methods. His dedication and ingenuity eventually paid off, and he was able to produce for the king asparagus in January, strawberries in March, peas in April, and so on. He planted dozens of varieties—fifty types of pears and sixteen kinds of lettuce, for example—so fresh produce could be served to the king year-round. A new figuerie housed seven hundred trees to provide the king with his beloved figs, and the demand for asparagus was so high that it was eventually given a larger plot outside the garden (the clos des asperges, or asparagus enclosure). La Quintinie himself was enamored of a winter pear, the Bon Chrétien (Good Christian), which could satisfy the court’s fruit cravings until the spring blooms. Louis sent these pears as gifts to European notables.
Louis XIV was delighted with his primeurs and with his new garden. He enjoyed walking in the Potager du Roi and admiring his miraculous vegetables and fruits, and he often showed it off to foreign dignitaries. He ennobled La Quintinie for his efforts and rued his death in 1688 as a “great loss.” After bending the aristocracy to his will and reshaping the map of the world with his armies, Louis must have been pleased that he could also force nature to bear its fruit earlier for him.
Somehow the king’s vegetable garden survived the French Revolution and two world wars, and it is now used by the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage to train future landscapers. It still produces fruits and vegetables, which can be bought in the garden shop. La Quintinie’s achievement may not seem so miraculous to our modern sensibilities, with globalization bringing us virtually any type of food year-round, but his garden reminds us that for most of human existence, the diets of even the most powerful and divine kings were subject to nature’s rules. For all the immense power that the Sun King accumulated, he could not in fact call forth his favorite vegetables with his own brilliance. It was science that came to the rescue, and not for the last time.