We’ll get to my favourite bookshop in Lisbon, Livraria Sà da Costa, in a minute.

First, a word on Portuguese secondhand and antiquarian bookshops in general (called albufarristas in Portuguese) — I’ve never seen so many!  In both Lisbon and Porto, there seemed to be one everywhere I looked.  I’ve previously written about my favourite albufarrista in Porto, Livraria Moreira da Costa.

Livraria Moreira da Costa in Porto.  

I’ve since been informed by a Portuguese friend via Instagram that book publishing was an expensive undertaking in times past, and subject to heavy censorship for much of the 20th century while Portugal groaned under the Salazar dictatorship.  As a result, most people could only afford to buy secondhand books.  If anyone has another explanation, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Louis XVI’s library at Versailles is the only room in the Private Apartments (Petits appartements) that the unfortunate monarch substantially altered after he came to the throne.  Otherwise, he left his grandfather Louis XV’s rooms more or less as he found them.

Consequently, this library is also the only room in the Private Apartments that is decorated in the neo-classical style to which Louis XVI has given his name.  Note the rectilinear paneling in the picture below.

Looking into Louis XVI’s library from the west door.

Louis XV had of course also had a library.  In fact, he had several.  A series of small libraries in the attic-level Petits cabinets was constructed for him in the 1730s, including a map room.  He lost interest in the Petits cabinets after the creation of the Private Apartments and eventually made them over to his daughter-in-law, the Dauphine, in 1766.  After her death, they passed to Mme du Barry, for whom an exquisite little library was arranged.  It can be visited today.

Small though it is, my local secondhand bookshop keeps turning up Versailles Century treasures.  Yesterday it was this original edition of John Miller’s The The Life and Times of William and Mary, which was part of a ‘Life and Times of —–‘ series on British monarchs published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  The series editor was the eminent biographer Antonia Fraser.

‘The Life and Times of William and Mary’ by John Miller.

This book, like the others in the series, is lavishly illustrated with both black and white and colour plates.

I’ve always been intrigued by William and Mary, who are such an anomaly in our history.  They were the only joint sovereigns of the British isles, and among the few anywhere.  That their reign was successful is due largely due to their harmonious marriage, and the fact that one generally deferred to the other, thus avoiding a power struggle.  Mary, like any God-fearing woman of her time, believed it was her place to submit to her husband.  William, for his part, who knew from the start that his wife was a potential heiress to the English, Scottish, and Irish crowns, once said that he would not be his “wife’s gentleman usher.” Even so, I had never really understood how the unprecedented joint sovereignty came about.  The book explains it succinctly.

One faction of Parliament, keen to maintain as much legal continuity as possible in the wake of the ouster of Mary’s father, the deeply unpopular James II, wanted Mary to succeed on her own.  An even more conservative faction wanted her merely to serve as regent and not ascend to the throne until her father’s natural death (overseas).  A more radical faction wanted William to take the throne as sole monarch by right of conquest, for which there was a precedent in the case of William the Conqueror more than 600 years earlier.  In the end, the compromise choice was joint sovereignty, with Mary’s sister Anne to be accepted as heiress presumptive.  Thus the pair were crowned William III (r. 1688-1702) and Mary II (r.1688-1694).

A visit to my local secondhand bookshop today paid off handsomely.  I found 2 ‘new’ Nancy Mitford biographies for my collection.

Attentive readers might remember from an early post that Mitford’s biography of Frederick the Great was the first Versailles Century book that I read as a youngster.

Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford.

That book then led me to her Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, which were my introduction to the world of Versailles.

Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King by Nancy Mitford.

The books in the photo above are my personal copies.  I’ve had them for decades.  I once had a copy of Frederick the Great, too, but some years ago I donated it to the Pride Library at the University of Western Ontario.  Actually, I’ve donated several hundred titles in various media to that fine institution.  You can read about my donations here: http://www.uwo.ca/pridelib/site/Collections/Donor%20Collections1/David%20Gemeinhardt%20Collection.html

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

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