Seven Ages of Paris (22 page)

There were darker rumours too. During the latter stages of
Mme.
Voisin’s trial, her daughter had alleged that a woman, acting under her mother’s orders, had performed many conjurations and ceremonies on behalf of
Mme.
de Montespan, such as burning faggots and reading from a paper the lady’s and the King’s names. The incantation read:

Faggot, I burn you; it is not you that I am burning, it is the body, the soul, the spirit, the heart and the understanding of Louis de Bourbon, so that he will be able neither to come nor to go, neither to rest nor to sleep until he has done the will of so and so, naming the name of the said lady, and this forever more.

The priest Guibourg also claimed that it was for Montespan that his Black Masses had been said. Young
Mlle.
Voisin went on to describe one occasion when “a lady was placed naked upon a mattress, with her head hanging down and supported by a pillow on a chair propped upside down, her legs hanging, a napkin on her belly, and on the napkin a cross at the place of the stomach, the chalice on the belly.” The horrible details continued, with allegations of how Voisin’s daughter, officiating at a Black Mass for
Mme.
de Montespan, had taken:

an infant apparently born before term, put him into a basin, cut his throat, spilled the blood into the cup and consecrated the blood with the host, brought the Mass to its finish, and had the entrails of the child taken away; the next day … the mother Voisin carried the blood and the host to be distilled into vials of glass which
Mme.
de Montespan took away with her …

From this evidence, Montespan was clearly implicated, and indeed was the naked “lady” at the Black Mass. She was further accused of attempting the murder by poison of
Mlle.
de Fontanges, and even of attempting to murder the King himself by means of a poisoned petition delivered by her accomplice Voisin. All of these charges carried the death penalty. La Reynie’s investigation then moved still closer, with the interrogation of Montespan’s own sister-in-law,
Mme.
de Vivonne. But Louis could not allow his mistress, a lover to whom he had been publicly attached for thirteen years, and who had been the mother of his legitimated bastards, to be mis dans le bain by the Chambre Ardente, tortured like the Marquise de Brinvilliers and the other riff-raff accused. Rather than face any more scandal, in 1682 he ordered Louis Boucherat, presiding over the Chambre Ardente, to put an end to its enquiries. For Louis in his middle years appearances were everything; never mind the unspeakable activities they covered up.

The last execution in the “Affaire des Poisons,” of a humble valet, took place on the Place de Grève in July 1682. Swiftly Louis had the trial proceedings burned. Yet, despite the suspension of the Chambre Ardente’s investigations, the scandal continued. When Louvois, Colbert’s dour successor, died in July 1691, his son claimed that he had been poisoned. Although the King’s intervention had saved her from the possible horrors of “examination,” the reign of the powerful Machiavellian Athénaïs de Montespan was over. For appearance’s sake, she was allowed to linger on at court in a marginal role for another ten years. Doubtless this was as much to keep her activities under close watch as for any pleasure of her; then she was bundled off to Saint-Joseph, the convent she had herself founded, where she resided for seventeen more years expiating her sins.

The austerely prim and devout ex-governess (to
Mme.
de Montespan’s children, there was the final shaft), Françoise Scarron, otherwise known as
Mme.
de Maintenon, now moved in as the King’s mistress—and stayed there for the rest of his reign. Her replacement of Montespan took place at almost the same time as the move to Versailles, and would profoundly affect the style and the mood there, as well as the overall direction of the King’s life. Meanwhile, and given the degree of embarrassment which an abandoned
Mme.
de Montespan might have caused the King in Paris, and given the suspicions bandied about in the capital, could it be that Louis XIV’s escape to Versailles had an added immediacy directly linked to the scandal, the worst that was to rock Paris in the whole reign? It gave him every good reason to want to wash his hands of the whole affair, and move his entourage out to the wholesome pure air of Versailles.

DEPARTURE FOR VERSAILLES

On 6 May 1682, Louis XIV abandoned Paris for Versailles. It was slightly less than a century after his grandfather had fought so hard to gain mastery of his capital. That was the day Louis made the official announcement that, henceforth, the seat of the French government would be out at his former hunting-lodge, Versailles, twenty kilometres removed from the Louvre. In Nancy Mitford’s words:

[Louis] arrived there with some pomp, accompanied by his family, his ministers and the whole Court. The Court of France for ever in the country! The fashionable world was filled with dismay now that the long-expected blow had fallen. Not all the criticism was frivolous, however. For years Colbert had begged his master to abandon the project, for the obvious administrative reasons …

The house was still far from ready, but the King—like any sensible house-owner—thought he would never get the workmen out unless he moved in himself. Jules Hardouin-Mansart was still at work finishing the Galerie des Glaces.

The rest of the accommodation, to provide lodgings for between 2,000 and 5,000 people, was austere to say the least. In many cases rooms had been chopped up into tiny units with no regard for the imposing façade, giving on to dismal little interior wells. But at least the King himself and his descendants could feel safe there. Although they were virtually unguarded, over the coming century there would be only one half-hearted attempt at assassination.

Aged forty-four in 1682, Louis was at the peak of his powers. In 1661 his queen, Maria Theresa, had presented him with a son and heir, the Grand Dauphin, who showed promise of becoming a sound ruler and who in turn, later in that year of the move to Versailles, produced an heir, the Duc de Bourgogne. As we have seen, the King’s mistresses, the Duchesse de La Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, had provided a clutch of further children, several of whom had been legitimized. Thus the succession to the throne of France, only recently so shaky, now seemed assured. The King’s own health was excellent; the territory of France seemed at last secure from external foes; and the nation seemed, rarely and miraculously, at peace with herself. Much of the work of Henri IV appeared to have reached fruition. His grandson could now, with some justification, call himself Louis le Grand (the title which the municipality of Paris had unctuously bestowed on him in 1678) and the Roi Soleil. He could afford a little personal extravagance in building a new country seat, but what had decided him to pull out of the capital for which Henri of Navarre had fought so ardently?

Like many of his Valois forebears, including François I, Louis preferred country to town. Already by 1665 he had taken to spending one day a week out at his father’s modest hunting-lodge in the woodlands of Versailles. Yet it was not so much la chasse that drew him as peace and tranquillity; he needed space. And this was something rooted in the experiences of his early years, in his love of order in all things, as well as in the nature of Paris. Frankly, he disliked Paris; from 1670 until the end of his reign, he would grace the city with his presence only twenty-five times. But his hostility, and his move to Versailles, did Paris only limited harm. In the course of his long reign, the capital still managed to flourish.

EIGHT

*

A Building Boom

Let no one speak to me of anything small!

BERNINI TO LOUIS XIV, 1665

COLBERT

The Fronde, the trial of Fouquet and the various “Affaires des Poisons” had all been significant milestones on Louis XIV’s road to Versailles, as he made his escape from his reasoned fear of plots against his person, as well as from the gossip that seethed in his turbulent capital. But what of his very considerable accomplishments in the city he was about to abandon? What was built, what was changed and what was destroyed during the first half of Louis’s reign, which ended with his decampment for Versailles in 1682?

By the end of his first ten years of personal rule, Louis XIV had launched what had been a virtually bankrupt country on a course of remarkable prosperity. Both in Paris and at Versailles his ambitious building programme from the 1660s onwards was predicated on three factors: the continuation of peace (or, at least, involvement in wars for the pursuit of la Gloire that could be won with little effort or expense); the brilliant policies of the man who succeeded the disgraced Fouquet, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; and the extraordinary inherited and inherent wealth of the country at large. Colbert was already forty-one when appointed assistant to Fouquet in 1661. His capacity for ruthlessness was displayed in the destruction of his boss; he was a teetotaller, icily cold and humourless, earning the nickname of the “Man of Marble” or “le Nord” (Mme. de Sévigné’s sobriquet). Of him the venerable Mazarin, in whose employ Colbert’s career had started, was alleged to have said to the King shortly before his death, “Sire, I owe you everything, but I believe I can repay some of my debt by giving you Colbert.” In fact it was a debt that he thereby discharged fully, and with interest.

A worthy successor to Sully, and in contrast to Fouquet, Colbert was immaculately honest. Into the administration of French finances he introduced a new precision and order, and was almost unique among Louis’s sycophantic entourage in being able to confront the King over his extravagances and the use, or abuse, of royal power. After Mazarin and Fouquet, Louis would permit no one near him with the power of a prime minister; yet Colbert’s influence over his two decades in office came to reach areas far beyond that of a superintendent of finance, not least in the centralization of the nation, France, upon the capital, Paris. Thanks to his early financial reforms, he rapidly achieved a surplus of receipts over expenditure. Nevertheless, and until the mid–eighteenth century, a large share of state revenue still came via such archaic practices, widely open to graft and sleaze, as the sale of offices and allowing “tax farmers” to take their substantial cut of the revenue gleaned.

Under Colbert’s regime, a kind of industrial revolution swept the country. Shipbuilding developed; the army was modernized and expanded; mines, foundries, mills and refineries thrived, as did the wool trade on the back of such prestige industries as Savonnerie carpets and France’s superlative Gobelin tapestries. France, emulating the serious side of her pleasure-loving king, went earnestly to work; as Louis advised the heir who was never to succeed, “Never forget that it is by work that a king rules.” The building boom in Paris was but one aspect of Colbert’s far-reaching influence. When his restraining hand was removed from the treasury by death in 1683, it reinforced the impact on Paris of Louis’s departure for Versailles.

While Paris expanded dramatically, becoming a city of 400,000, the rural population if anything declined. The seventeenth century was mostly a time of hardship and recession for the French peasantry; the weather was capricious, producing frequent years of terrible harvests, and agriculture had not matched the advances being achieved in England. In a bad year a village could easily lose between 10 and 20 per cent of its population. The price of land was such that the purchase of a holding large enough to support one family might cost a labourer the equivalent of a century’s wages. Moreover, the peasantry found itself exploited, parasitically, by the state, the Church, landlords and bureaucrats alike. There were occasional popular revolts against taxation, and regular bread riots in provincial towns, yet because of the centralized power of Paris under the absolute monarchy they were never permitted to amount to anything—at least not for another hundred years. Paris and the provinces would continue to look at each other with mutual dislike, disdain and distrust.

One of the first projects in Paris to receive the attention of Colbert (in 1664 he had also become superintendent of buildings) was the construction of the Collège des Quatre Nations. For this purpose Mazarin had left in his will two million livres, earmarked to provide a Parisian education for sixty boys from the provinces. To find room for the Collège, the old Tour de Nesle from the time of Philippe le Bel, dominating as it did the Left Bank of the Seine, was demolished in 1663. In its place rose a superb piece of baroque designed by Le Vau, with the most magnificent library in Paris—later to become the home of the Académie Française (see this page). Appropriate to the origins of its benefactor, its curved façade—embracing an elliptical church within—was surmounted by a typically Italianate dome, which made it something rare in a city of square squares.

A far more daunting project, however, was the completion of the Louvre—that hardy perennial which claimed the resources of many rulers both before and after Louis. In 1661 fire had ravaged part of it, and Le Vau had been brought in to undertake restoration, with Le Brun painting his extravagant frescoes depicting the triumph of the chariot of Apollo, in a pointed and grandiose compliment to the Roi Soleil. The main priority was the construction of a grand façade to crown the courtyard to the east, the Cour Carrée of François I, more or less completed by 1659. Louis had his own very clear ideas on architecture, and placed a strong emphasis on the classical. So he invited from Rome Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, whose Piazza of Saint Peter’s had established him as the most famous architect of his day.

Aged sixty-six, Bernini brought with him all the arrogance of an Italian of the High Renaissance. Employing what was his idea of flattery, he told the most powerful king in Europe, “inasmuch as you have not seen the buildings of Italy you have remarkably good taste.” At their first meeting in Saint-Germain, he said to Louis, “I have seen, Sire, palaces of emperors and popes … from Rome to Paris. But for a king of France … we must construct something more magnificent … Let no one speak to me of anything small!” This last was the kind of talk that appealed to Louis, and initially Bernini got on surprisingly well with him. Louis sat for him no fewer than thirteen times to produce the outstanding bust, probably the best likeness of the Roi Soleil ever achieved, which now graces Versailles.