The Sun King Read online

  NANCY MITFORD (1904–1973) was born into the British aristocracy and, by her own account, brought up without an education, except in riding and French. She managed a London bookshop during the Second World War, then moved to Paris, where she began to write her celebrated and successful novels, among them The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, about the foibles of the English upper class. Nancy Mitford was also the author of four biographies: Madame de Pompadour (1954; available as an NYRB Classic), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and Frederick the Great (1970). In 1967 Mitford moved from Paris to Versailles, where she lived until her death from Hodgkin’s disease.

  PHILIP MANSEL is the author of six books dealing with French history, including a life of Louis XVIII (1981), The Court of France, 1789–1830 (1989) and Paris Between Empires (2001). He is currently at work on a life of Louis XIV.

  THE SUN KING

  Louis XIV at Versailles

  NANCY MITFORD

  Introduction by

  PHILIP MANSEL

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SUN KING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. THE HOUSE

  2. THE BUILDERS

  3. THE MORTEMARTS

  4. THE ENVELOPE

  5. THE GOVERNESS

  6. POISON

  7. A CITY OF THE RICH

  8. THE GRAND DAUPHIN

  9. THE QUEEN’S STAIRCASE

  10. THE YOUNG GENERATION

  11. THE NEW RÉGIME

  12. THE FACULTY

  13. SAINT-CYR, THE SCHOOL

  14. SAINT-CYR, THE CONVENT

  15. LORD PORTLAND’S EMBASSY

  16. THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

  17. MOURNING

  18. MARTIAL NOISES OFF

  19. THREE IN ELEVEN MONTHS

  20. THE END

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  On October 16, 1928, Nancy Mitford wrote to her brother Tom: “Have you been to Versailles yet? It is my spiritual home and at this time of year is the most divinely melancholy place in the world.” The passion revealed in these words found its finest expression in the publication in 1966—thirty-eight years later—of The Sun King. An ideal marriage of author, subject, and format, on publication it sold 250,000 copies, was translated into seven languages (including French) and has never been out of print in England.

  Versailles was more than a royal palace. It was also a seat of government; a national job center and social security office, distributing hundreds of appointments and pensions; an information center receiving couriers from throughout Europe; a year-round reception, ball, concert, and fashion parade; a marriage market and finishing school; and a hub of creativity inspiring music, plays, operas, letters, diaries, and memoirs (by, in the reign of Louis XIV, among many others Lully, Rameau, Racine, Molière, Madame de Sévigné, and the Duc de Saint-Simon). In addition to staterooms and hundreds of apartments, it also housed the royal family’s art collections and scientific laboratories; a chapel, where the king attended religious services most days of the year; kitchens serving hundreds of meals; and vendors’ stalls. Its outbuildings contained the ministries of war and foreign affairs, guards’ barracks, stables, riding schools, and hunt kennels. The palace was surrounded on the east by parade grounds for the king’s household troops and court officials’ houses, on the west by a sweep of gardens and parks. Versailles also functioned, as preachers in the chapel often lamented, as a gambling den and a brothel.

  To this multidimensional universe, more varied and stimulating than the Internet today, Mitford brought her novelist’s interest in human nature and physical detail; her gift for narrative and entertainment; and the passion for “that celestial land,” France, which had been one reason for her move from London to Paris in 1946, and which drives her books Madame de Pompadour (1954) and Voltaire in Love (1957) and her novels The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). The other reason was her love for the French politician, and confidant of de Gaulle, Gaston Palewski.

  Reproducing many phrases culled from contemporary letters and memoirs, Mitford begins with the king’s love affair with Louise de La Vallière, which helped spur him to visit Versailles in the 1660s. She then describes the subsequent mistresses going up and down “the Queen’s staircase.” Madame de Maintenon, “the Governess,” whose combination of piety, world-liness, poor judgment, disloyalty towards friends, and mismanagement of the girls’ school that she founded at Saint-Cyr, is analyzed with distaste. One chapter, “The Faculty,” describes the incompetent doctors under whom, then as now, while “the strong survive; the weak, after much suffering and expense both of money and spirit, die.” She does not neglect the royal artists Le Vau and Le Brun and the gardener Le Nôtre, nor the king’s rival ministers Colbert and Louvois. Separate chapters are devoted to “the younger generation” of the king’s bastards, cousins, and nephew. “Three in eleven months” describes the deaths of the king’s son the Dauphin and his grandson and granddaughter-in-law, the Duc and Duchesse de Bourgogne in 1711–12. Throughout the book Mitford shows that the court of Versailles consisted not just of the king and his family and friends but of an entire society of ministers, diplomats, officers, preachers, gardeners, and other professions: a microcosm of France. Below the appearances of deference, they could manipulate as well as serve the king.

  Physical details are telling. While the king, “the viceroy of the Almighty,” faced the altar as he worshipped God in the chapel, the courtiers stared at the king. The king held a stick across a door in Saint-Cyr, only lowered for those who had truly been invited to a performance of Racine’s play Esther in January 1689. The princes of the House of Condé became so physically small and mentally strange that they resembled “little black beetles.” “The melancholy smiles of Mary of Modena” were the only satisfactions Louis XIV derived from his decision to recognize her son “the Old Pretender” as king of England. The opening sentence is famous: “Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de La Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life.”

  Mitford describes Versailles, correctly, as “a shop window, a permanent exhibition of French goods,” which “made an enormous contribution to French supremacy in the arts.” The hereditary system for offices, from ministers to gardeners, was its foundation: “he built the greatest palace on earth but it always remained the home of a young man, grand without being pompous, full of light and air and cheerfulness—a country house.” She describes the Galerie des Glaces as the palace’s “main street” or “market place.” Not all readers, however, will agree that this gallery, which contains more images of the monarch it glorifies than any other, is “one of the beauties of the western world.”

  If she idealizes the palace, it is not true that she idealizes Louis XIV. She describes him as “a man of iron,” unbowed by deaths or defeats. He was secretive, ruthless, indifferent to the sufferings of peasants and galley slaves, capable of inspiring terror and making blunders such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the imposition of the papal bull Unigenitus on the French bishops. “Hardly had he assembled his most interesting and important subjects under his roof than he retired into almost private life with an ageing spouse [Madame de Maintenon] and her circle of excellent nonentities”—although Louis XIV’s private life still resembled other people’s public life.

  The text was checked by two historians, John Lough and Ian Dunlop, but there are exaggerations. Lord Portland, sent as ambassador to Louis XIV by William III in 1698, is unlikely, unless he had a very silent marriage, not to have spoken “a word of Eng
lish.” He preferred French but could understand, and write, English, and his wife, a member of the Villiers family, was English. The place in the order of succession to the throne to which Louis XIV elevated his bastards is exaggerated (they came after, not before, the princes of the blood); and he is absolved, implausibly, from knowledge of the ravaging of the Palatinate. Nevertheless The Sun King has helped inspire many other historians of the court, including the author of this introduction.

  The original edition of The Sun King was also an outstanding early example of the “coffee-table book,” showing, at the appropriate moment in the text, not only photographs of the palace and portraits of its inhabitants but also objects made by Louis XIV’s craftsmen, now dispersed to museums or private collections. Thus it revived, in twentieth-century commercial form, the tradition of the royal illustrated book much practiced by the court it described. The first book to commemorate Versailles had been the volume showing scenes from Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée of 1664, one of the early entertainments organized there by Louis XIV.

  The credit, and the original idea for The Sun King, are due to the pioneer of book packaging George Rainbird and the “indispensable” picture researcher, Joy Law. Mitford wrote: “the book in its present form would never have seen the light of day but for her.” She became a friend to whom, in gratitude, the author left her house in Versailles.

  Versailles, which Mitford had loved so much, also helped to kill her. In 1967, as she had long planned, she moved from Paris to Versailles, to 4 rue d’Artois. In 1969 Gaston Palewski married his mistress of many years, Violette de Talleyrand. She was heiress of a family that had held court offices in Versailles and she owned the magnificent eighteenth-century château of Le Marais, south of Paris. Soon thereafter Mitford developed the rare form of Hodgkin’s disease from which she suffered four years of agony until her death, in her house in Versailles, on 30 June 1973. Her strictures on doctors in The Sun King proved all too prescient.

  Nevertheless The Sun King remains, as her friend Harold Acton, another English historian of Bourbons (The Bourbons of Naples, 1956; The Last Bourbons of Naples, 1961), wrote in his biography of Nancy Mitford, “the most entertaining introduction to its subject in English.” Like much else in English history and culture (for example, the Wallace Collection of French pictures and furniture in London, or the career of her great-uncle Sir Winston Churchill), The Sun King also shows that Francophilia is just as English as Francophobia.

  —PHILIP MANSEL

  THE SUN KING

  Dedicated to Raymond Mortimer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author’s grateful thanks are due to Mr Raymond Mortimer, Comte Jean de Baglion, Mr Ian Dunlop and Professor John Lough for kindly reading and advising upon the text. M. Gerard van der Kemp, Conservateur en Chef at Versailles; M. Jean Féray, Inspecteur Général des Beaux Arts; Mme Chantal Coural of the Conservation at Versailles; Prince Clary; Mr Francis Watson, Director of the Wallace Collection, London; Mr Tom Wragg, Librarian of Chatsworth; Mr John Hadfield; Mme Gaudin; Miss Irene Clephane; Mrs St John Saunders and the Librarian and staff of the London Library have all given valuable assistance. Comtesse Carl Costa de Beauregard harboured the author for months while the work was in progress. Finally Mrs Joy Law has been indispensable; the book in its present form would never have seen the light of day but for her.

  1. THE HOUSE

  Et l’on peut comparer sans crainte d’être injuste

  Le siècle de Louis au beau siècle de Auguste.

  CHARLES PERRAULT

  Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de La Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life. For years before he lived there it was never out of his mind. When he was at the seat of government or away on hunting visits or with his army at the front he had to be sent a daily report on the work in hand on his house down to the tiniest details; and he never stopped adding to and improving the place while there was breath in his body. This ‘undeserving favourite’ as the courtiers called it is part of his legend but in fact the Sun King only lived there during the meridian and the sunset years: in his great morning he held his court, consisting of a few dozen officials, at the Louvre and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was born, with visits to Chambord, Fontainebleau and Vincennes. Like a feudal king, he was always on the move, generally at war, and his court was a bivouac between two campaigns.

  Nobody ever knew when this secret man first conceived the design by which his father’s little hunting lodge was to become the hub of the universe, perhaps as early as 1661 when he began to give parties in the gardens there for his young mistress and a band of friends, whose average age at that time was nineteen. He was twenty-three, had been married for a year and already had a son, but his kingdom had hitherto been governed by Cardinal Mazarin his godfather; and his behaviour was still regulated by his mother, Queen Anne of Austria. He liked to disport himself away from the eye of the older generation and Versailles was a perfect place in which to do so, though the parties there had to take place in the garden; the house was much too small. The weather was always fine in those happy young days, the freshness of evening a welcome change from the heat of noon.

  Louis XIII’s house at Versailles had some twenty rooms and one big dormitory for men. It was perched over a village which clustered round a twelfth-century church, (where the Orangery is today; the Pièce d’Eau des Suisses was the village pond). Some poor little hamlets in the neighbourhood were called Trianon, Saint-Cyr, Clagny. Versailles, on the main road from Normandy to Paris, was more prosperous than they were; farmers and their cattle passed through it and it possessed three inns. The surrounding country was full of game, and Louis XIII who, like most Bourbons, practically lived on horseback, so often found himself at Versailles after a day’s hunting that he built the house to save himself the choice between staying at an inn or riding home to Saint-Germain after dark.

  No doubt Louis XIV’s famous visit to Vaux-le-Vicomte gave him his first idea of what Versailles might become. Like many people of mixed blood he was a strong nationalist; at the newly-built Vaux he first saw the perfection of contemporary French taste, free from that Italian influence which had hitherto been fashionable. Its master, Nicolas Fouquet, gave a house-warming there, 17 August 1661, and invited six thousand people to meet the King. It proved to be his own farewell party; the King, with mingled admiration and fury, examined the establishment in all its sumptuous detail and decided that Fouquet’s ostentation (luxe insolent et audacieux) was unsuitable for a subject and intolerable for a minister of finance. He did not modify this view as the evening wore on and such gifts as diamond tiaras and saddle-horses were distributed to the guests. Louis returned Fouquet’s hospitality by clapping him in gaol and we seldom hear of other people giving parties for the King. Mazarin had just died and Fouquet’s real crime was ambition: he was intriguing to make himself head of the government. Had Louis XIV been the man everybody supposed him to be Fouquet would have ruled both King and country; Louis however had other ideas and to put them into practice he was obliged to get rid of this clever, unscrupulous statesman. He thus gave a second indication of his own implacable ambition, the first having been his marriage with Marie-Thérèse of Spain when the wife he wanted was Mazarin’s niece, Marie Mancini. She said to him as they parted ‘You are the King; you love me and yet you send me away’. He was always to be the master of his mistresses and of himself, as well as of France. Marie-Thérèse eventually brought the crown of Spain to the Bourbons — who shall say that Mazarin’s brains would not have been a greater prize? They were to prove a precious legacy to many another family.

  So Fouquet went to his long martyrdom in the fortress of Pignerol. His sins were not visited on his children. His daughter, the Duchesse de Béthune, was always kindly received at Court; under Louis XV, his grandson the Maréchal de Belle-Isle became a rich and respected soldier while his (Belle-Isle’s) son, Gisors, was a French Sir Philip Sidney. But the King took a certain amount of loot
from Vaux-le-Vicomte and thought himself justified by the fact that its contents had been paid for out of public money, in other words his own. Archives, tapestry, brocade hangings, silver and silver gilt ornaments, statues and over a thousand orange trees found their way to the royal palaces. The orange trees alone represented a considerable sum; a sizeable one even nowadays costs a hundred pounds. The King was passionately fond of them and had them in all his rooms, in silver tubs. (Perhaps if one were exiled from France the single object most reminiscent of that celestial land would be an orange tree in a tub.) Eight of Louis XIV’s own trees still exist in the Orangery at Versailles to this day. He also appropriated the three remarkable men who had created Vaux: Le Nôtre the gardener, Le Vau the architect and Le Brun the artist of all work. He needed them to help him in the realization of a project which was now beginning to occupy his thoughts.

  Louis XIV seems to have known that he would live to be old. His plans, both artistic and political, were for a long term; they ripened slowly and were confined to nobody. Why, having decided to build himself a house, he chose Versailles as a situation remains mysterious. The material difficulties of building on a large scale there were considerable. He insisted on keeping his father’s little lodge, poised on a sandy knoll whose surface was forever shifting, and building his own mansion round it. As the house became more and more vast the hill itself had to be enlarged. The water supply, too, was always a problem. Then why, as he wanted a house of his very own, to be a monument to his reign, did he build on to an existing one, whose style had become unfashionable? His architects all begged him to pull down the old house because it made their work so difficult. His answer was that if the old house disappeared for any reason he would immediately build it up again brick by brick. No doubt Versailles had some special charm for him; his courtiers never could imagine what it was; their complaints and criticism grew more and more vociferous as his purpose, which was to make them all live there with him, became evident. As much as they dared they even protested to his face. ‘There is no view.’ But he loved the view, so typical of the Ile de France: a great cutting through woodlands quietly rolling away to the western horizon and ending in two poplar trees. It had always been the same, and though he was to lighten it with the canal he never would put statuary to replace the poplars. ‘There is no town’ was another complaint. So much the better — wherever the King lives a town will spring up; this one can be properly planned and laid out. ‘It is unhealthy.’ The King feels perfectly well there.