In our continuing series ‘in honour of’ the temporary closure of the Carnavalet Museum, we examine 4 chinoiserie panels from the former residence of the Duke of Richelieu in Paris.

Why 4?  They are meant to symbolize the 4 elements: Air, Earth, Fire and Water.

The first 2 of 4 chinoiserie panels: Air and Earth.

Versailles: A Visit to the King’s Private Apartments, Part 2

In the late afternoon of the first day of my visit to Versailles, I went along to the ticket office of the Chateau to buy my ticket for the next day, including a guided tour of the Private Apartments.  There were various tours in several languages, but the young woman behind the counter flatteringly recommended that I take the French language tour at 10:30, on the grounds that it was the most thorough one.  I duly purchased a ticket and wandered off in the rain — the weather was relentlessly wet throughout my visit — to find my dinner.

Semi-restored room in the ticket wing. My inner interior decorator sees some sleek Italian sofas and striking contemporary art in here.

All but skipping with excitement, I turned up the following morning at the designated entrance for the Private Apartments tour.  This entrance is on the north side of the Cour Royale (the Royal Court), the great courtyard that precedes the Cour de Marbre (the Marble Court) at the heart of the palace.  A uniformed man checked my ticket and waved me inside.  A young woman in a smart black pantsuit and a headset then asked me which tour I was there for, and directed me into an adjoining salon.  This turned out to be the holding tank for imminent tours.  It retained its 18th century boiserie, but was furnished with sleek contemporary furniture, which I’m tempted to say was by Philippe Starck, but I’m not sure.  Another pant-suited young lady appeared and gave me a pair of earphones.  I nearly protested that I hadn’t asked for an audio guide, but held my peace.  All became clear when the actual guide appeared, a brisk, middle-aged Frenchwoman.  She instructed us to put in our earbuds and see if we could hear her on the audio system that was connecting us.  A very sensible system, this.  Nothing is more annoying on a guided tour than straining, and failing, to hear what the guide is saying.  We were a group of about 15 or 20.  As far as I could tell, I was the only non-francophone apart from a young woman from Brazil who was studying art history in Paris, which I know because we had a chat after the tour.  In fact, it turned out that she was taking a course on museology and asked me if I would oblige her by taking a short survey about my Versailles experience.  I obliged, of course.

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.