Versailles by Tony Spawforth

Author:Tony Spawforth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781429928786
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

8.

Behind Closed Doors

IN THE seventeenth century, when Versailles was built, privacy mattered much less to the French upper classes than it did a hundred years later. On the first floor of the Envelope, the architect Le Vau did not trouble with corridors. The sole means of circulation were the state rooms themselves—“sumptuous public passages,” as Hézecques called them.1 The queen’s bedchamber on the south side, in which all the queens who lived at Versailles actually slept, traditionally served as a shortcut from the Hall of Mirrors to the queen’s antechambers.2 In the wings, the galleries were little more than covered streets. Royalty, courtiers, and servants all lived on top of one another.

Everyone minded everyone else’s business, helped by thin partition walls and windows overlooking courtyards. At the center of the palace, the Bull’s Eye was a haven of watchful “idlers.” In an age when foreign envoys were little more than spies, royalty was kept under a constant and continuous scrutiny. A pawn in the dynastic politics of France and Austria, the newlywed Marie-Antoinette hid letters from her mother the empress in her bed. One day a senior courtier of anti-Austrian persuasion, the duc de La Vauguyon, was surprised outside her door, his ear to the keyhole.3 Her predecessor, Marie Leczinska, found “several holes” in a door in her private quarters. Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Châteauroux, was suspected: she apparently thought that the queen gossiped on the other side of this door about her and the king.4

In this atmosphere of constant surveillance, royalty and courtiers placed much stock on secure hiding places. The aptly named secrétaire was a popular piece of furniture at Versailles, combining a desk with lockable drawers for papers and other valuables and, in the fall-front variety popular with Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, a concealed safe. In 1769 Louis XV had a mechanical desk delivered that allowed him by one turn of the key to lock the rolltop and all the drawers inside simultaneously. When he pressed another lever, the inkwells slid over to side openings for the servants to refill while the desk remained firmly locked.5

“A king wherever he was and at all times”—for much of his adult reign Louis XIV made little distinction between public and private life. When he was ill, he made a point of appearing daily before the courtiers. Far from being an intimate retreat, his bedchamber was the center of court ceremonial. As the room in which he not only slept and ate but also gave audience, it was a shrunken version of the all-purpose hall of a medieval prince.

The courtiers came to Versailles to interact socially, not to be alone. At the turn of the seventeenth century the companionable habits of an earlier age lived on at Versailles. Two great ladies, the duchesse de Foix and the princess of Fürstenberg, shared not only their lodging but also its one large bed. Saint-Simon reports this in the most matter-of-fact way, adding that the princess was immensely rich.

“Family life” is a cultural construct.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.