Merivel A Man of His Time (7 page)

I tried to put all pessimistic thought out of my mind when at last I sensed that we were approaching the Palace. The first sign that drew my attention to this was a great noise of hammering and pounding. I opened the window of the coach and this noise grew very loud, and I smelled that the air was clotted with dust and this clotting mingled with a marshy Stench. Then we came upon the source of these things: a widening plain on which a great quantity of Stonecutters were toiling upon blocks of granite and white marble, and Carpenters hewing wood, and all the heavy material of their labours being loaded into carts, drawn by horses and mules.

This plain extended far to the east and west horizons, and was altogether filled up with this arduous labour. There must have been five hundred men and a hundred horses spread over the earth, which appeared very damp, so that the wheels of the carts were sometimes sunk into it, and the straining of the animals to move the carts pitiful to behold. God be praised that I have never seen a Battlefield, but this is how the scene suggested itself to me, as though blood had mingled with the soil, to make it heavy. And everywhere there were things broken and cast away: ladders and wheels and shafts, and horses themselves, appearing to lie still and dead in the mud.

I gaped stupidly at this panorama. It seemed to me that, in truth, what lay before me were the workings of the mind of King Louis. Though Versailles stood already garlanded with universal glory, he evidently desired it to be greater yet. He had not finished with Nature but, like the Emperors of Rome, was still tearing at it, to conjure from it wonders never before imagined.

I remembered the thirty-six thousand souls who had already given their labour to the enterprise, and asked myself how great that number might be now and how great it would become, and how many had perished. And I thought how fortunate I was to be living my life of relative ease in England and not breaking my sinews as a stonecutter, here on a black and malodorous plain, as winter came on.

I turned my head away. I examined my Letter once again. Beyond the plain was a steep incline, up which my carriage toiled, and then, lo, it was there before me, the Great and Marvellous Palace.

I admit that it caught at my breath. In an instant, the sufferings of the stonecutters vanished away. Everything vanished away. For here was a disposition of buildings unlike any that I’d ever beheld. I am at pains to describe it with simple words. The best I can set down is to say that the whole seemed, almost, to
flow
in its wondrous horizontal order, and its colours of pink brick and cream stone to rise up in one harmonious chord, as though it had been conjured there, not by any architect but by a composer of Music. Even the sun colluded with this Song of Magnificence and Beauty by breaking through the grey clouds and etching the buildings with soft winter light, so that the slate roofs gleamed like pewter and the glass of a thousand windows was touched with a diamond brightness, like the high notes from a flute.

I could have wished it to be deserted, so that I might hear its music played for me alone, or even to be some Picture of itself at which I might pause and gaze in rapt silence. But as we came on, I found my coach surrounded by a throng of people, mostly of the poorer kind, who dared not try to enter at the outer gate and contented themselves by hawking their wares or by performing little feats, such as walking on stilts or turning somersaults, to get a few
sous
from the Courtiers, as they passed by.

My coachman drove through this little crowd impatiently, as though they might have been a troupe of geese, sending one man flying off his stilts into the dust, and we entered into the first of the two vast courtyards, built upon ramparts, called the Place des Armes, which lends to the Palace additional space and grandeur.

Once entered here, it is as though you have come into a
city
, for everything folds in around you. All you can absorb is the march upon march of ornamented façades, seeming to stretch almost to infinity. The world beyond these façades ceases, on the moment, to exist. Lined up in two great ranks, guarding the
portail
, beyond which lie the King’s
Appartements
, are the uniformed Swiss Guards, their ranks moving slowly and in unimpeachable step to the soft beating of twenty or thirty drums.

The coach drove on to the
portail
, where our way was barred by Sentries carrying halberds, who had been chosen, no doubt, for their furious dark eyes and their largeness of form. I descended from the coach, a little stiff and bent-over, and dusty and smelling of straw, and took out my Letter. This document – already somewhat creased and dirtied by the journey it had endured (and with a small crack in the sealing wax now horribly visible to me) – was examined by the Sentries with disinclination, as though it might have been the corpse of a mouse, and handed back to me. I was informed peremptorily that my coach could not proceed beyond this point.

‘Messieurs,’ said I, in the best French I could muster after all my hours upon the road. ‘
Regardez-bien
. This is the Great Seal of His Majesty King Charles II of England. This Letter contains his express wish that I be granted an immediate audience with His Majesty King Louis, to whom I am come to offer my services …’

‘The King,’ replied the tallest of the sentries, ‘does not grant
“Immediate
Audiences”. Please make your way to the
Grand Commun
, over there, where the Correct Formalities for Foreign Supplicants will be explained to you by one of the
Surintendents
.’

The
Grand Commun
was revealed to be the very substantial three-storeyed building to the right of the courtyard, with a great quantity of windows and a press of people coming and going through two doorways. I had no choice but to obey the Sentry, clambering back into the coach, so that I could be driven to one of the doors with my Valises, and here I was set down at last.

I paid the Coachman and thanked him. As he turned the horses and made to drive away, I put up my hand and waved to him sadly, as though I might have been a Pauper’s child deposited on the steps of an orphanage. And when he had quite gone, I felt all around me the great World of Versailles pressing upon me, as though to sweep me up and lead me on into its thousand wonders, but then pushing past me and buffeting me and showing me a very vast Indifference, and I really did not know, in that sudden instant, what to do or where to turn. I only wished myself younger and more lithe, and with a heart beating more strongly than mine for the great Adventure upon which I had embarked.

Abandoning my heavy Valises to temporary chance of theft, I entered the
Grand Commun
, turned left down a passageway and was relieved to find myself, upon opening the first door that I came to, in an enormous kitchen, where fifteen or twenty chefs were preparing some imminent feast. The air was steamy from two great cauldrons of soup upon a blackened range, fragrant with the smell of boiling leeks and onions, and noisy with the shouting and badinage of the chefs as they worked.

Not having eaten for many hours, I stared about me with longing, noting now a quantity of chickens and rabbits being turned on a roasting spit, and some delectable soft pastries set out to cool upon a marble slab.

Doffing my hat, I saluted the chefs and said in my inelegant French: ‘Good day to you, Messieurs. I am come out from England, an emissary of my King.’

One or two of the cooks raised their heads and stared at me. The others merely carried on with their work. Nobody spoke.

‘Please forgive the intrusion upon your labours,’ I continued. ‘But I confess I am a little lost. And somewhat hungry.’

At this, one of the chefs threw a muslin cloth over the pastries, towards which he could see my eyes (if not yet my hand) straying; then he wiped his brow with a corner of his apron and said to me: ‘Please go away, Monsieur. We have no time to talk to strangers.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I understand. But if one of you might direct me … I was advised to ask for the
Surintendents du Grand Commun
…’

Taking hold of my arm with his damp, meaty hand, this chef manoeuvred me towards the door through which I had arrived and pointed to a staircase at the far end of the passageway. ‘
Surintendents
up above,’ he said. ‘Not in the kitchens.’

For the next hour I walked the corridors of the
Grand Commun
, where the stone of the ground floor was replaced, on the First
étage
, by polished wood and great tapestries hung between the windows and marble busts, and statues were everywhere to be seen in a state of such magnificent whiteness, it was as though they had been brought this very day from the studio of the sculptor.

But it was difficult to look closely at anything, because every great space was choked with people: men and women wearing what I took to be the latest fashions from Paris and vitiating the air with their strong perfumes and their wig powder, and those strange chemicals the women use to paint black moles on their faces.

I walked among them with a smile on my lips, just as though I were an old habitué of the building, when in truth I had no idea where I was going, or whom, precisely, I was seeking, nor in what direction my orphaned Valises any longer resided.

I noted, after a while, that some of the Courtiers looked at me strangely and one man, wearing a coat of coral-coloured satin, flicked at my shoulder lightly with his thumb and forefinger, and laughed, before scampering away. And then the others in his company turned and regarded me, and joined in the laughter. I looked down at myself, to see whether mud or straw still clung to my coat, but it appeared clean enough, so I walked on, unknowing. And this is a thing I do detest, that others laugh at me for no reason that I can understand. I am happy to be the butt of a jest, as I
frequently
was at Whitehall, but to enjoy myself I must know what the jest is about.

Hunger persecuted me. I was almost ready to go down again to the kitchen and beg a bowl of soup from the chefs, when I was at last shown into the company of one of the
Surintendents
of the building by a kindly crone, walking in a slow and stately step, under a peculiar coiffure of black lace.

I felt, by this time, exhausted and teetering on the edge of some kind of madness. I clutched at this
Surintendent
with a desperate grip. For it seemed to me that the exquisite Order of the façades at Versailles was matched, once one entered the buildings, by a corresponding Chaos. I could make no sense of anything, so I held tightly to this man, like a desperado about to carry him off, guessing that only someone calling himself a
Surintendent
might possess the means to lighten for me my heavy burden of confusion.

‘Monsieur!’ I cried, reaching yet again for my Letter, and holding it out to him, ‘I am counting upon you to help me.’

‘Who are you?’ said the man, extricating himself deftly from my hold upon his arm.

I told him my name as calmly as I could, styling myself
Chevalier
Robert Merivel in the case that ‘Sir’ had no meaning for him, and drew his attention to the Great Seal on the Letter, which, to my vast consternation, he immediately broke.

‘
Ah, non!
’ I cried out. ‘
Non, Monsieur!
That Letter is intended for the King alone!’

The
Surintendent
paid no heed whatever to my distress, but only brought the Letter close to his face in order to read it. The Letter is brief, but his reading of it seemed to take him many long minutes. The he looked up and regarded me with a disbelieving air. ‘A Doctor?’ he said. ‘You are a Doctor?’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and it has been my good fortune to be of service to my most Beloved Majesty, King Charles. Thus, he recommends me for some service here …’

‘You do not appear like a Doctor.’

‘Nevertheless, that is what I am. I have held this profession for many years. I trained in Anatomy at Cambridge …’

At that moment a distant bell chimed the hour of five o’clock and
the
Surintendent
hastily thrust my Letter back into my hands, with no apology for having broken its seal, and made as if to depart. But I reached out and again held fast to his arm. ‘Please, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I beg of you, tell me where I am to lodge. My journey has been a long one and I am very tired.’

‘I am sorry,’ said the
Surintendent
, ‘but I must leave you, Sir. I am needed elsewhere. Indeed, I am already late, as I know by the five o’clock bell. As to
logements
, you will have to take your chance on the upper floors. Versailles is very crowded at the moment, as you can see. Your best chance is to offer to pay money to someone willing to share some little corner with you.’

‘What? What do you mean, “some little corner”?’

The man shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It’s the best you will come by,’ he said. ‘Here, even a Marquis must sometimes sleep in a passageway.’

It is night now.

I am lying on a tilting cot in a cold upper room. A screen made of linen gives me a little privacy, but the rest of the room is occupied by a Dutch Clockmaker, to whom I have given three English shillings to share his room and his pisspot. He lies in a narrow bed, snoring like a hog.

I have opened my Valises – found at last where I had left them – so far as to procure a nightshirt and a nightcap, which I have put on, but there is nowhere to hang my clothes or set out my few possessions, but only this Portion of space in a very small room under the leads of the
Grand Commun
.

I fall into a shifting kind of sleep and am awoken almost immediately, or so it seems to me, by the gnawing hunger in my belly, which has passed from a State of Longing to a State of Agony so fierce as to make me cry out. And I think, on the sudden, that this is the kind of hunger Will Gates would suffer, were I to cast him out of Bidnold and I know that – at all or any cost to myself – I must never do this. And I swear that I will not.

My mind returns once more to the kitchens down beneath me. The Clockmaker has informed me that the food prepared there goes all to the
Grands Appartements
, where the King and his entourage
consume
it in great quantities. Nobody, I am told, who inhabits the
Grand Commun
is ever fed, for the reason that the King believes the expense of this to be too great.