Seven Ages of Paris (28 page)

Here lies one twenty years a maid,

Fifteen a whore, and seven a procuress

was the epitaph the pamphleteers gave her when she died, aged forty-three and of natural causes, in 1764. Thanks to her interference in high policy, her extravagance and her wanton influence on the King, Pompadour died unmourned, despised by the court as a bourgeois but hated by the bourgeois of Paris as being in league with the tax collectors. Nevertheless, through her encouragement of the arts and architecture, France’s cultural heritage owes more to her than it likes to admit. At Versailles the Petit Trianon, and in Paris the Ecole Militaire and the Place de la Concorde, all owe something to
Mlle.
Poisson, as does Sèvres porcelain. Her place was taken by another of low birth, a pretty prostitute called Jeanne Bécu, later Comtesse du Barry. She was, so Louis confided to that great expert on the art of philandering, the Duc de Richelieu, “The only woman in France who can make me forget that I am in my sixties.”

There was never to be a
Mme.
de Maintenon who could bring Louis XV in his maturer years to a sense of gravitas. Although, with the highly developed sexual urges of the Bourbon clan, his amorous exploits were no more excessive than those of Henri IV or Louis XIV, his ineffectiveness as a ruler ensured that they were considered scandalous even by the century of de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos. With tragedy, post-Racine, dying as an art, the essential frivolity of the life and times of Louis XV is reflected in the dramas of Marivaux, perhaps especially when compared with those of Molière; while such serious talents as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and the encyclopédistes—illustrious as they were—hardly lent support to a threatened dynasty. Painted by Pompadour’s protégé Boucher (“His lovers are shepherds, but incapable of watching a flock,” complained the critics), life at Versailles grew ever more feckless, pointless and removed from the real world. Unfortunately, the court there was composed largely of absentee landlords seeking refuge from the mounting disfavour of their peasants, and allowing their estates to fall into rack and ruin. Unlike their English counterparts, they never travelled or made the “grand tour,” so their horizons became ever more narrow. More than a diversion, at Versailles sex became the principal occupation; it was acceptable, when princes of the blood like the Chartres dined out, for them to ask for the use of their hostess’s bed during the meal. In contrast to Empress Maria Theresa’s respected and austere court in Vienna, Louis’s earned its reputation as the most corrupt in Europe,
Mme.
du Barry symbolizing the completeness of its corruption.

In Paris the tenor of life at court was mirrored and embodied in the person of the wicked but brave and brilliant Armand, Duc de Richelieu, Marshal of France and grand-nephew of the great Cardinal. Adept at climbing into and out of bedroom windows, he won fame by audaciously scaling the supposedly impregnable heights of Fort Saint-Philip at Mahon, on the isle of Minorca, thereby achieving the surrender of the British garrison. It was one of the few French successes in the Seven Years War (1756–63), and a victory famed both for the execution of the unfortunate British commander, Admiral Byng (“pour encourager les autres”) and for the invention, by Richelieu’s enterprising cook, of Mahonaise sauce. Described at the time as being “husband to all wives except his own,” Richelieu married three times under three reigns and sired a child (illegitimate) in his eighties. Strolling round the Place Royale, the Duc was given to reminiscing happily that he had slept with the lady of every single household. Through all his escapades, however, he was generally able to count on the support of the King, who described him as “an old family acquaintance; they found him once under my mother’s bed!” Aged ninety-two, still en pleine vigueur, he chose wisely to die one year before the Revolution.

For France, victories on the battlefield exonerate scandals; but Louis XV was a loser. Paying little heed to the last words of his predecessor, he likewise impoverished the country by his wars (though he hated battles), wars even more foolish and unsuccessful than those of Louis XIV. At first, blundering far into the eastern marches of Europe, Louis supported that new upstart, Frederick II of Prussia, then turned against him. In the first war (of the Austrian Succession), the French army found itself having to fight a terrible mid-winter retreat from Prague; in the second, it was roundly defeated by an embattled Frederick at Rossbach. In both conflicts Prussia emerged with net gains, pointers to the crushing defeats that German arms would inflict on France in the next two centuries. Worse still, in the course of the bitter Seven Years War, which was almost a first world war, France lost her empire in Canada (though, at the time, Voltaire scathingly wrote off this vast domain as “quelques arpents de neige”—a few acres of snow), the Mississippi territory and India, while Britain gained hers. As French historians accept, the Peace of Paris signed in 1763 was one of the saddest in French history. About the only territorial acquisition of the reign was Corsica, where an important actor in the history of France was waiting to be born.

From being “le bien-aimé” Louis progressively became France’s most unpopular monarch. By the 1750s he had been forced to construct a “Route de la Révolte” whereby he could travel from his Palais de Fontainebleau to Versailles without traversing turbulent Paris. In 1757, a half-mad servingman, Robert François Damiens, tried to assassinate him with a penknife. Only the King appeared to be astonished. “Why try to kill me?” he asked. “I have done no one any harm.” Few historians would agree. Damiens was put to death no less cruelly than Ravaillac, the successful assassin of the admirable Henri IV a century and a half previously. Tried by sixty judges and tortured judicially for several hours before his execution (despite the King’s request that he should not be harmed), Damiens—like Ravaillac—was pulled limb from limb by four horses; but first his flesh was torn open by giant, red-hot pincers and molten lead poured into the wounds.

In May 1774, regretted by no one and horribly disfigured, Louis was carried off by smallpox. His burial was carried out in secrecy at Saint-Denis, for fear of the cortège being attacked by angry Parisians. With remarkable similarity to the end of Louis XIV, both the Dauphin and his wife had predeceased the King. So it was Louis’s grandson who inherited, as the twenty-year-old Louis XVI—as popular as his predecessor had been unpopular. At least superficially, once again the barometer looked set fair.

NEW BOUNDARIES

The Paris of Louis XV and XVI was still a noisy, smelly city, the largest in Europe, and with her narrow streets still medieval in plan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, habitually prejudiced towards the rustic, found it a city of “small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars, carters, sewing women, women hawking tisanes and old hats.” The writer Restif de la Bretonne agreed, providing a glimpse of what Paris was like on a wet night: water gushing from the housetops in torrents, the Rue Montmartre a river of filth.

Little or nothing was added to Parisian architecture during the Regency, or during the early years of Louis XV, when continuing wars left little to spend. The Palais Bourbon, however, was erected in 1722–8 for a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and
Mme.
de Montespan, and there was intense building activity during the years 1758–88. Ten thousand new houses were erected and a great deal of demolition carried out—as witness the superb records painted by Hubert Robert, the chronicler supreme of ruins. The old wooden houses encumbering bridges like the Pont Notre-Dame were pulled down. In 1786, a royal decree ordered that all the houses on the endangered Seine bridges should be removed— but the Revolution intervened before it could be complied with. A minimum width for new streets was fixed at 9.75 metres. A new wall, known as the “Farmers-General,” twenty-five kilometres in length, enlarged the boundaries of the city to coincide with today’s outer line of boulevards. It was completed just in time for the Revolution—for which its construction was in part responsible.

During the first half of the century Parisian architects and interior decorators flirted with the light-hearted frivolity of Italian and German rococo, of which Fontaine’s and d’Ivry’s ornate north and eastern frontages of the Palais Royal, and the resplendently ornate Salon de la Princesse by Germain Boffrand in the Marais’s Hôtel de Soubise are superb examples. But on the whole Parisian architecture settled down into an elegant classicism, developed under Louis XIV and admired and copied throughout Europe. Behind this French classicism lay a body of architectural theory, fostered by the Académie Royale d’Architecture. Here Jacques-François Blondel (no relation, apparently, of his great namesake of Louis XIV’s time) produced his prolific drawings. These show the typical town house which was to become the prototype of chic, bourgeois Paris when the Regent brought life back to the city on the death of Louis XIV. Private houses, often already divided into apartments, would rise from five floors to six, seven or even nine by the time of the Revolution.

Among the few new churches built was Soufflot’s basilica to Sainte Geneviève, up above the Sorbonne, which—after the Revolution—was to become the vast, cold and empty dome of the Panthéon, resting place of the great and the good of France, including Victor Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire, Zola and Jean Moulin. As already noted,
Mme.
de Pompadour (who made her brother, de Marigny, Controller of Buildings) influenced the construction of the Ecole Militaire. Designed to accommodate 500 gentilhommes preparing for a military career and conveniently adjacent to Louis XIV’s Invalides, the imposing Ecole occupied much of the hitherto empty Plain of Grenelle, and in front of it would be created an enormous open space, the Champ-de-Mars, where 25,000 men could manoeuvre (a feature of which Napoleon would make considerable use). But by far the most lasting architectural achievement of the century, one which also bore the stamp of Pompadour’s influence, was the massive Place Louis XV. In 1748 the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession but did little else for France, was marked by the city elders of Paris with a statue in honour of Louis XV. The King generously offered a large open site belonging to the royal estates just west of the Tuileries Gardens.

From this concept, a competition, won by the distinguished architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel (who also designed the Ecole Militaire) and boosted by
Mme.
de Pompadour, grew into an ambitious scheme of a colossal piazza surrounding the royal effigy. Almost as soon as it was erected, the statue of Louis “le bien-aimé” as a Roman emperor on horseback had placards attached to it, damning the King’s vices and his indifference to the plight of the poor; and it was to become the site of the guillotine that would shortly remove the head of his grandson. Begun in 1757, inaugurated in 1763 and completed in 1772, it was first known as Place Louis XV, then from 1792 as the Place de la Révolution, and from 1795 as the Place de la Concorde. The new piazza instantly altered the whole structure of Paris more definitively than anything else in its history. Soon to become the heart of the expanding city, it denoted the final end of the ascendancy of the Marais, the Louvre and the Palais Royal. Under Gabriel’s scheme, a new axis was created running up the Rue Royale and the bridge, eventually named the Pont de la Concorde (begun in 1788, as the last major work before the deluge), linking it to the Left Bank. On the far side of the piazza, Gabriel built two imposing twin palaces, one of which was to house the Ministry of the Navy and the other the Hôtel Crillon. The inauguration of the Place, however, was hardly auspicious for the future of Parisian circulation: the transporter bringing the weighty statue of the King got stuck outside the Elysée Palace (built by the Comte d’Evreux in 1718 and subsequently purchased by
Mme.
de Pompadour), giving Paris wags cause to jest, “They will never get him past the Hôtel Pompadour.” Following the ceremony, the new Place was seized with a monumental traffic jam, because there was then no bridge between the Pont Royal and the Pont de Sèvres. Nevertheless, Gabriel’s great achievement soon led to the creation of new residential districts around the Rue Saint-Honoré and further developed the once isolated Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank. Paris was marching decisively westward, but money was running out; at Versailles, Louis was forced to reduce his stable to 1,000 horses; in Paris Soufflot died in 1780, reputedly of a broken heart because his vast church up on Mont Sainte-Geneviève could not be completed.

At least in one respect, however, in the last days of the ancien régime, eyes were distracted from what was going on in Paris terrestrially to the air, where, on the very brink of revolution, was to be pioneered one of the modern world’s greatest inventions: human flight. On 5 June 1783 the Montgolfier brothers sent up their first hot-air balloon; two months later a physicist, Jacques Charles, released from the Champ-de-Mars a more sophisticated device filled with hydrogen. He was watched by a tremendous crowd. Among them was Benjamin Franklin, recently arrived in Paris as American ambassador (following the Declaration of Independence in 1776), full of scientific knowledge and fresh revolutionary zeal, and who was to remark to those doubting the value of balloons, “Of what use is the new-born baby?” Though Louis XVI had first suggested that two criminals under sentence of death be allowed to make the world’s first manned flight, in fact it was to be made, on 21 November in the same year, by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes in a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, flying for twenty-five minutes at an altitude of 100 metres across an astounded city. (The intrepid de Rozier was killed two years later while trying to cross the English Channel—a feat which had already earned Jean-Pierre Blanchard £50 and a life pension from Louis XVI.) Less than a hundred years later the heroic Balloons of Paris, successors of the montgolfières (hot air) and the charlières (gas), were to capture the imagination of Parisians, and beyond, by establishing a tenuous lifeline to the outside world, during the siege by Moltke’s Prussians. At the same time, on the ground attention was attracted by more spurious scientific practitioners such as the German Mesmer, offering 20,000 louis to make the universal cures of Mesmerism available to the world at large; and Count Cagliostro, a complete fraud who claimed possession of an Elixir of Life—and was finally exiled from Paris in 1786.