We pursue our continuing series of visits to the Carnavalet Museum this week.  Today’s destination: a drawing room formerly in the hôtel particulier of the Dukes of Uzès.*  Its most noteworthy feature is a set of splendid boiseries, or carved panels.

View of a drawing room salvaged from the hôtel d’Uzès.

The boiseries of this drawing room were designed and executed in 1767 under the supervision of the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who was also responsible for the decoration of the Café Militaire, as explained in a previous post.

The great golden gate of Versailles: On this fateful day 227 years ago, Louis XVI and his family were escorted through it by the mob on their way to Paris, never to return.  Thus ended what I call THE VERSAILLES CENTURY (1682-1789).

The golden gate seen from inside the Cour d’honneur, which is how the King and his family would have seen it on 6 October, 1789, except that it had been broken off its hinges shortly before.  You can just make out the great stables through the grille.

The mob had burst through the gate shortly before midnight on 5 October, howling for the Queen’s blood.  Marie-Antoinette barely managed to escape from her bedroom through a secret passage to the King’s room. The advance of the mob had been delayed just long enough while they massacred the Swiss guards on duty outside the Queen’s room.

It’s a sad day for museum lovers and Versailles Century enthusiasts.  As of today, 3 October, 2016, the Carnavalet Museum in Paris is closed for a massive 3-year program of renovations.  If all goes well, it should re-open in the autumn of 2019.

A facade in the main courtyard of the Carnavalet Museum.

In this edition of VC Museum Visits, we tour the Museum-School of Portuguese Decorative Arts in Lisbon.

Located in the shadow of an ancient Moorish wall in the hillside district of Alfama, this exquisite museum is run by the Ricardo Espirito de Santo Silva Foundation.*  It’s housed in the former palace of the Viscounts of Azurara, which the late Senhor Espirito do Santo Silva (1900-1955), a banker and lavish patron of the arts, purchased in 1947 specifically for the purpose of creating a museum.  A lifelong admirer of Alfama, Lisbon’s most historic district, he was also keen to preserve the skills and traditions of the artisans who lived in the area, hence the inclusion of a school in the foundation.

I knew I was going to love it as soon as I saw what was in the vestibule.

A Cinderella-like 18C carriage in the vestibule.

Today we visit Madame Victoire’s apartment at Versailles.

Louis XV had 8 daughters, of whom 7 survived to adulthood, and of whom 2 lived long enough to see the Revolution.  Mme Victoire, born in 1733, was the younger of those two.  Like all but one of her sisters, she was sent away from Versailles to the abbey of Fontevrault for her education.  As a Daughter of France, i.e. the daughter of a reigning king, she was called Madame rather than Mademoiselle even though she never married.  This portrait of her was painted when she returned to live at Versailles at the end of her schooling in 1748.

Mme Victoire by Nattier.  Credit: Wikipedia

Curiously, only one of the sisters married.  This was the eldest, Mme Louise Elisabeth, known simply as Madame, later as Madame Infante when she was married at 13 to the Infante Philip of Spain, a younger son of Philip V.  He later inherited his mother’s sovereign duchy of Parma,* thus making him and Mme Louise Elisabeth the founders of the house of Bourbon-Parma,** whose descendants now include all the Catholic royalties of Europe.

By the time their nephew Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, only 3 of the sisters were left at Versailles: Mme Adelaide, Mme Victoire, and Mme Sophie, who died in 1782.  Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire remained in the apartments that we see today until the royal family were forced to leave the Chateau in October of 1789.  The sisters withdrew to their estate at Bellevue, from which they fled in 1791 to seek refuge in Italy.  Mme Victoire died of breast cancer in Trieste in 1799, leaving Mme Adelaide the sole survivor of the sisterhood until her own death the following year.

In her final years at Versailles, Mme Victoire luxuriated in a suite of 6 principal rooms: an antechamber, a salon, a large drawing room, a bedchamber, a small drawing room, and a library.  Few people at Versailles had such spacious lodgings.  Even duchesses had to make do with a garret if they were not in favour, and anyone who could afford it kept a house in the town of Versailles as an escape from their cramped quarters in the Chateau.

I’m no longer a regular Architectural Digest reader, but I couldn’t resist the October issue.

The cover of the October, 2016, issue of Architectural Digest.

Why?  The cover story is the Chateau du Fresne near Tours, built in 1770.  The current owner is the Brussels gallery owner Flore de Brantes, who visits her ancestral home regularly with her husband and sons.

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.

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?