Versailles: A Visit to the King’s Private Apartments, Part 1.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit, given my longstanding interest in the place and the fact that I have a degree in French, that I didn’t visit Versailles, or even Paris, until April of this year. Basically, I was distracted for nearly 20 years by my work and travels in Asia, which you can read more about on my other blog and gallery website, Lotus & Persimmon.

I’m happy to say that Versailles lived up to 30 years of expectation.  My visit did not proceed quite as planned, though.  I had devised a very specific program for myself:

Day 1: Take a midday train from Paris to Versailles; check in to my hotel; scout the town; but my tickets for the Chateau for the next day; wander in the gardens of the Chateau; dine in the town; turn in early.

Day 2: Join a guided tour of the Private Apartments; see the State Rooms; have lunch in the town; see Mesdames’ Apartments; visit the Musee Lambinet in the town; dine in the town again; turn in early.

Day 3: Visit the Trianons in the morning; have lunch in town; take an early afternoon train back to Paris.

Needless to say there was a fly in the ointment, which in this case was the weather.  Late March and early April 2016 were very wet in France (and Portugal, as I subsequently experienced).  I saw very little of the gardens because of the frequent downpours, and by the end of Day 2 I simply abandoned the idea of visiting the Trianons, which was just as well because the Chateau was closed on Day 3 due to a transport strike!  I was lucky even to make it back to Paris.

Versailles from the garden on a rainy day.

Frankly, I’m hoping to coin a phrase.

Epochs don’t necessarily fit into the neat and mathematically precise notion of a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. I’ve often thought, for example, that what we in English-speaking North America think of as “the Fifties” wasn’t just the years 1950-59. That strange amalgam of post-war optimism, conformity, and Cold War paranoia was actually the spirit of the whole era from the end of WWII in the summer of 1945 to the assassination of President Kennedy in the autumn of 1963.

Similarly, the 17th and 18th centuries cannot be neatly demarcated in 1700, I feel. The French sensibly take the view that the reign of Louis XIV, in calendar terms only 72 years from 1643 to 1715, was a notional century in itself, which is why they speak of le siecle de Louis XIV (the century of Louis XIV; by the way, please forgive the lack of French accents in my posts so far — I haven’t yet learned how to do them on a Mac). His reign, so consequential for France, Europe and beyond, thus straddles the 17th and 18th centuries.

Louis XIV

I would like to go a few steps further. I propose that the period from 1682, when Louis XIV moved permanently into his newly constructed palace of Versailles, to 1789, when his great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI was involuntarily removed from it, is a recognizable epoch in European and world history. This is not a new idea, but I also humbly propose to give it a new name: The Versailles Century. But why?

Having grasped that Versailles, as the embodiment of elite French culture, was the key to understanding 18th century Europe, I soon realized that knowledge of the French language was indispensable.  Not only was it the tongue of the most admired court in Europe, it was the lingua franca of the entire European elite from London to St. Petersburg.

French dictionary

My new hero, Frederick the Great, for instance, spoke and wrote French in preference to German.  Even when he spoke German, he is said to have spoken a Frenchified version of it.  Legend has it that he once galloped up to a group of officers who were holding their troops back during battle and barked, “Messieurs!  Warum attaquieren Sie nicht?” (“Gentlemen!  Why are you not attacking?”).  The point is that attaquieren is not a German verb, but one invented for the occasion from the French attaquer.

Frederick in the field

Furthermore, French was the language of the ‘Republic of Letters’, that group of what we would now call public intellectuals who lead the Enlightenment.  Many of the most eminent of them were francophones, like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, of course.  However, even if the non-francophones published in their native languages, like, say, Hume in English, or Vico in Italian, they used French to correspond with their foreign peers.  They also used French when they met in person, which was not often in those days before planes and trains, as did Frederick and Voltaire when the latter took up the former’s invitation to live — temporarily, as it turned out — in Potsdam.  When Diderot went to St. Petersburg to meet his benefactress, Catherine the Great, they conversed in French.  The Empress, however, was disconcerted at their first interview by the fact Diderot would thump her on the knee whenever he agreed with what she said.  At their next meeting, he found that a table had been inserted between their chairs.

Catherine the Great

Having devoured Nancy Mitford’s Frederick the Great, which gave me a burning desire to visit Potsdam, the site of Frederick’s beloved palace of Sans Souci, I became curious about the  other people and places mentioned in the book.  For instance, this man Voltaire.  Who was he?  And Madame de Pompadour?  Cardinal de Fleury?  None of these people were showing up in our weekly viewings of The Remarkable Life of Friedrich von der Trenck.

Sans Souci

It occurred to me that Miss Mitford might have written other books.  Returning to the library, I looked up her other works in the card catalogue.  Sure enough, it listed Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King.

I loved the sparkle and wit of her prose, even as a 10-year-old.  Of course, a good deal of her wit went over my head.  I also loved her personal insights.  I noticed, for instance, that in The Sun King she was able to offer a first-hand comparison of the toilet facilities at Versailles and Buckingham Palace, which then, unlike now, was not open to the general public.

Since the great courtesan was Frederick’s contemporary, I decided to borrow Madame de Pompadour first.  Thus it was that I discovered the teeming, scheming labyrinth of Versailles in the mid-18th century.

I remember exactly when my lifelong preoccupation with the 18th century began.

When I was 10 years old, my parents, who had emigrated from Berlin to our small city in Ontario, took me to our local German-Canadian club on a Wednesday evening to watch the first instalment of what I later learned was a 1972 German television series called The Remarkable Life of Frederick, Baron von der Trenck.*  In those pre-downloading, pre-DVD, even pre-VCR days, we sat on folding chairs in the club’s dance hall to watch the show on a large portable screen, as if it were a home movie.

The 6-part series follows Trenck’s soldierly and romantic adventures through the courts of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria, as he navigates the 2 great conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century, the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War.  I was enthralled from start to finish, and would fidget impatiently through the dull preliminary featurettes that preceded each weekly instalment.  Though I boyishly admired Trenck’s manly exploits, the character who really transfixed me was Frederick II of Prussia, whom my parents, good Berliners, invariably and affectionately referred to as der Alte Fritz (Old Fred).

Frederick the Great