The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (10 page)

It was a good move. By thirty-five, he was lieutenant general in the light cavalry and gaining glory on the field and in the
salons, where his witty contemporary portraits in meter and verse were much admired. The expression
rabutinade,
still current today, was coined to commemorate his clever wordplay. But Bussy was not the kind of man to press his advantages
by cultivating the powerful; he was constitutionally unable to compel his instincts and his ambitions to cooperate with one
another. He just couldn't keep his mouth shut or his pen civil. "All chivalry is extinct at court," he tactfully wrote about
the dubious mores of the day, "but that is rather the fault of the ladies than of the knights." Of the powerful duchesse de
Longueville, he simply said, "She was dirty and smelled bad." In a letter Bussy wrote to his first cousin Mme de Sévigné -
and letters in those days had a way of finding a public readership - he described the ugliness of Condé in some detail. Conde,
in turn, "would not suffer [Bussy] to walk the streets of Paris while he was there." It was to Bussy that Turenne had said,
"His Majesty does not like you."

But all this would have amounted to little more than a stunted military career if Bussy had not continually pushed the envelope
of good taste and restraint. In 1658, when Mme de Sevigne's husband had an affair with the famous courtisan Ninon de Lenclos,
Bussy urged her to retaliate by committing adultery with himself, her own cousin; her refusal propelled him to write a caustic
portrait in which he described her physical defects and accused her of inconstancy and frigidity. The next year, he became
embroiled in the Roissy scandal, in which a notorious group of libertines, including a number of known homosexuals, spent
a debauched and well-publicized weekend during Holy Week composing and reading filthy poetry about the king and his court.
Mazarin exiled Bussy for fifteen months.

It was at this time that, to distract himself, he began composing the stories that would eventually become the
Histoires amoureuses
des Gaules, a
licentious and libelous look at the loose morals of the Fronde in which the king appears as Theodose, Conde as Tyr-idate,
and Mazarin as the Great Druid. The book was offered as a private gift to his lover, the marquise de Montglas, and passed
about discreetly, apparently even amusing His Majesty. But Bussy made the mistake of lending it to the notoriously indiscreet
marquise de la Baume, who was languishing in the convent where her husband had imprisoned her for her shamelessness. The marquise
only had the book in her possession for forty-eight hours, but somehow managed to have it copied in its entirety. The copy
eventually found its way to Holland, where it was published in 1665. In April of that year, three months after he had been
inducted into the Académie française - two after the opening of Molière's
Don Juan
- Bussy was arrested by direct order of the king and imprisoned in the Bastille. Mme de Montglas promptly abandoned him and
Mme de Sevigne refused to visit (although he drew on her essential good nature to repair their relationship later on). His
health broken, he was released thirteen months later and exiled indefinitely to his estates in Burgundy.

Banishment was a relatively common form of punishment in those days. It might be difficult for us to discern the punitive
factor in being compelled to live in splendor on a country estate, spared the enormous expense and stress of life at court,
waited upon by an army of servants, and surrounded by the comforts and calm of home, were we not already aware of the unparalleled
advantages of life as the guest of the king. Montaigne had lived happily and productively in self-exile, but few had his acquirements.
Banishment was simply social death, the end of all ambition and glory, at least for most people. But Bussy was not most people.
He soon resigned himself to the fact that this was not to be a short-term exile and embarked on a project that would prove
to be unique in the annals of hospitality.

In the mid-seventeenth century, the only regular mail delivery in France was the thrice-weekly post between Paris and Dijon,
some thirty miles from Bussy-le-Grand. Bussy took full advantage of it, launching an epic letter-writing campaign that would
result in one of the most glorious correspondences of the century, including many vainly ingratiating pleas to the king and
at least 155 letters to Mme de Sevigne. Other correspondents included the famous
precieuses
Mme de Scudery and Mme Bos-suet. He begged them all for news, gossip, and literary exchanges, and they obliged; over the eighteen
years of his exile, despite his distance, Bussy became known as a reliable and discerning cultural arbiter, an "oracle" according
to one admirer. Charpentier, dean of the Academie, wrote, "We often speak of you, citing the authority of your thoughts and
words." He championed the poets Benserade and La Fontaine, and new members of the Académie often sent him their work for his
lucid commentaries. In exile - far from the center of power, far from the glories of the court, far from the rigid constraints
of the ruling ideology - Bussy seemed to find himself for the first time and attained a level of respect and admiration that
had eluded him through decades of public life. Beginning in 1668, he would edit, condense, and reshape the information contained
in his correspondence into his
Memoirs,
which he hoped to present to the king as a glorification of his epoch. He was genuinely disappointed when Louis chose Racine
and Bossuet as his official biographers.

From almost the moment he landed back at home, Bussy had set about a grand remodeling of his chateau, Bussy-Rabutin, which
is still considered among the finest in Burgundy. Every time he opened a correspondence with a new interlocutor, he begged
them for a portrait of themselves, "for I wish to have you in my chambers as well as in my heart." He soon had an enormous
collection (not necessarily of the highest quality), which he arranged in distinct galleries, each with its own portrait of
himself hung prominently at the center. In the
Salle des devises
he hung paintings of the most glorious chateaux of France, interspersed with allegorical emblems pointedly highlighting the
guiding vanities of his self-regard ("Noble in his noble origins"; "His ardor makes me bold"; "I bend but do not break"; "I
stoop to rise"). In the
Salle des hommes de guerre
he hung sixty-five portraits of the great military leaders of France from the Hundred Years War to the Fronde. In the
Tour doree
he hung portraits, each accompanied by witty and often sardonic commentary, of the most beautiful women of the court, including
that of his former lover the marquise de Montglas: "The most beautiful mistress of the realm, she would have been the most
lovable if she had not been the most faithless." The
Salon des belles-amies
featured the royal mistresses of the Valois and Bourbon dynasties, while another gallery held portraits of the kings of France,
statesmen, and men of letters - including, of course, his own. His bedroom held portraits of twenty-two family members, including
that of Mme de Sevigne and her daughter, Mme de Grignan.

In this way, Bussy re-created and surrounded himself with every facet of the society and its illustrious members he had left
behind. He made himself, in a sense, host to all society. Given the effort he put into it (these galleries can still be seen
today, more or less unchanged), it must have been a powerful comfort to him. It was also a lure, as many - including a number
of courtiers who would not have been seen dead with Bussy on one of his rare clandestine visits to Paris - journeyed long
and uncomfortable distances to see for themselves this by now famous simulacrum of their own world deep in the heart of the
provinces. And there can be no doubt that his galleries gave him far more pleasure than the company of the dull and unlettered
local gentry - the dreaded
bonne noblesse.

"A man of good sense can build himself a Paris anywhere," he wrote. His was a Paris of the mind, the only kind where a misfit
like Bussy was ever likely to be tolerated and entertained. Although no one has ever suggested that Bussy had any screws loose,
it is not a great stretch to imagine him wandering his empty hallways, much as he had once strolled through the galleries
of Versailles, making refined conversation and formulating nasty asides with all of his admiring peers, who, for once, were
in little danger of reporting his indiscretions.

Bussy was eventually recalled by the king in 1682, but his return to court was far from triumphant. At Saint-Germain, Louis
allowed him to embrace his knees, but the long-sought pension was not forthcoming. Bussy waited five months, increasingly
aware of being a dinosaur, then returned to Burgundy for good, where he edited his correspondence and, almost unbelievably,
found God. He died in 1693 and his correspondence, published four years later, proved enormously popular. It went through
fourteen editions in forty years and included the first-ever publication of letters by Mme de Sevigne. Among a number of works
that appeared posthumously was an essay dating all the way back to 1649, titled
Discourse on Putting Adversity to Good Use.

There is a relatively simple moral in the triangle of conflicting world views held by Louis XIV, the duchess of Mantua, and
Roger de Bussy. The rules of social life are pegged to a sliding scale of necessary compromises, and every decision we make
is, to some extent, informed by our willingness to conform to the expectations others have of us. We can allow ourselves to
be tractable or obdurate, as we see fit and depending on circumstances. Our decision to act one way or the other will ultimately
be based on the relative benefits of the outcome. This holds equally true for guests and for hosts.

But what happens when we must deal with people to whom these rules are meaningless, who are incapable of flexibility or compromise,
such as the three main protagonists of this chapter? Because hospitality is all about control, when things go sour it tends
to bring out the worst in everyone, perfectionists and rebels alike, turning hosts into tyrants and eccentrics into dissidents.
We all know at least one person - an overly formal host or an antisocial guest - who will not or cannot alter his or her behavior
to accommodate the comfort level of others. Do we engage such misfits in a battle of wills, seeking to bend them against their
natures and insisting that they conform to our standards when they are under our roof, or do we allow our guests to be themselves,
even when their selves are prickly, aggressive, or unsociable? If you are an intolerant host who imposes rules of behavior,
the danger of creating dissidents in your midst - people who are constitutionally or temperamentally compelled to forgo your
hospitality - is quite real. If, on the other hand, you allow your guests free rein to act out their idiosyncrasies, you risk
undermining the control that, as we have seen, is so crucial to good hospitality.

It is a fine wire to walk. It is also just as pertinent to someone hosting a modest dinner party on a Saturday night as it
is to any autocrat in a powdered wig. If, like Louis XIV, we play tyrant as host, we can afford to be as inflexible as we
wish. Most of us would be glad to be shot of the duchess of Mantua but, unlike Louis, very sorry to lose the company of Roger
de Bussy. Since we are more likely to be forced into the role of host as tyrant, however, we may find ourselves compelled
to compromise. We may have to admit a few stuffy duchesses if we wish to retain our Bussys. In weighing the degree of control
that we will be willing to exert over our guests, we will inevitably have to ask ourselves this question: Is one Bussy worth
a house full of duchesses who won't sit down?

CHAPTER V

THE COCKENTRICE

And as for the Dwkys coort, as of lords 8c ladys 8c gentylwomen knyts,
sqwyers 8c gentylmen I hert never of non lyek to it save King Artourys
cort.

John Paston, letter from Bruges, 1468

My wife and I both work at jobs that are demanding and intellectually stimulating, but comparatively low-paying. Anywhere
else in the country we might be considered very well off, but there is nowhere else in the country that we could practice
our professions. In New York City, we get by. When it comes to matters of hospitality, we do all our own work: the shopping,
the cooking, the serving, the cleanup. For large parties, we may occasionally hire a couple of students from Columbia University
to tend bar and scrub glasses, but that is the fullest extent of our extravagance.

I tell myself that I like it that way, and I think it's the truth. I would, of course, be perfectly happy if I never had to
wash another fork again, but doing the dishes is a price I happily pay to maintain full and absolute control. Nothing could
induce me to entrust my guests to a mercenary. A caterer may be and probably is the better cook; he will surely go to more
trouble than I do to present his fare elegantly; he almost certainly has a more refined appreciation of wine and how to select
it; he may smile more than I do over the course of an evening, and will speak more pleasingly and offer more subtle flattery
to my guests. But he is not the host - he is not me - and he can never hope to give the guests what they really want or to
secure for the host the less tangible rewards of hospitality. Most important, being greedy of praise, I couldn't possibly
tolerate having to share it.

The catered dinner party is theater in a language I do not speak. It violates almost every rule of hospitality. I find no
magic, no transcendence, no vision of Utopia, no intimacy there. This is not because there is something intrinsically inferior
about a catered dinner, but because such an affair requires host and guest alike to surrender an essential element of their
humanity. Hospitality is a song of himself that the host sings to his guests. It is also communication, a reciprocal conversation
of the deepest intimacy. You could argue that having an event catered gives the host more freedom and focus for that conversation.
I say it is all of a piece; anyone can relax when someone else is doing all the work. It is the ability to see to everything
personally and still show your guests how pleasant and honorable it is to serve them that communicates your concern for them.
How can you have this conversation when you are speaking through a spokesperson, your caterer? For whom does the caterer speak?
Is he advertising your generosity or his own talents? When Colin Cowie caters a wedding, who is the star? At a catered event,
the host may be singing a beautiful song, but his face is veiled and you suspect that he is lip-synching.

This is what weddings are all about: the creation of a language that avoids affective human intercourse and seeks to project
an abstracted idea about the host - power, status, wealth, influence, patronage - rather than the reality of the host himself.
The proof of this, in my experience, is that the only people who ever truly enjoy a wedding are those intimately connected
to the newlyweds' families, who can override the disembodiment of the emotional experience. The rest of us have to submit
to it and content ourselves with poached salmon and oldies dance tunes.

What choice does the host have, you might ask, if he wishes to invite two hundred people to his daughter's wedding? He can't
very well cook for them, can he? To which I can only respond: Why does he need to invite two hundred people when everyone
he loves in this world can fit in one medium-size room? For whom is the wedding supposed to be if not for them? I know this
is an unfair question based on unrealistic assumptions, but it still bears asking. After all, weddings have been catered for
thousands of years, consistently with the same end in mind. I understand perfectly well that your typical wedding has never
been an intimate family affair on a par with, say, Thanksgiving or a
bris,
but that is precisely my point - a wedding is always about something else. If a father of the bride finds it necessary to
invite his clients or business associates, he must be honest with himself and acknowledge that he is exploiting the happiest
day of his child's life to project an exaggerated and sanitized message of his own social standing.

That is why the hospitality of a powerful person - a politician, say, or a wealthy patron, as we have seen in earlier chapters
- is always fraught with anxiety and confusion for the guest. Like yours and mine, his hospitality is a powerful form of self-expression;
unlike yours and mine, his is deliberately couched in the idiom of remove. You know that he has chosen this language to conceal
at least as much as he reveals about himself; what you cannot hope to know, because he does not want you to know, is precisely
what it is he is concealing. This perversion of all that is potentially fine and ennobling in the conversation of souls is
at the very heart of his power over you - the host as Grand Inquisitor. No one understands this duplicity of the potentate
better than his caterer.

Olivier de La Marche was born to serve. His family, of the minor nobility of Bresse, had been in the service of the dukes
of Burgundy since the thirteenth century. His grandfather had served with distinction in the household of Philip the Bold,
the first Valois duke of Burgundy. His aunt had served as lady-in-waiting to Duchess Marguerite, Philip's wife. His uncle
had served as equerry and cupbearer to Philip's son, John the Fearless. His father had served as warden of the forest of Burgundy
and as counselor and chamberlain to John's son, Philip the Good, the third Valois duke. In 1439, Olivier's patron presented
him to the ducal court, where the fourteen-year-old boy was taken into service as a page.

It is safe to say that the La Marche family owed everything to the house of Burgundy, and that they knew it. They reciprocated
with a blind loyalty that bordered on cultish devotion. Such fidelity was supposed to be the norm in feudal society, but in
the case of the La Marches it was all the more deferential by virtue of their acute awareness of the honor and glory of living
in the golden age of Burgundy. Anyone who was ever involved in the households of the four Valois dukes could not help but
recognize that it was the grandest court in Europe, not excluding the royal establishments in Paris, London, and Madrid or
the imperial court in Vienna. To actually live among and serve the dukes of Burgundy was to experience the very acme of the
knightly tradition and medieval pageantry. The wealth, the color, the pomp, and the glory would have dazzled a mind far more
independent, creative, and skeptical than young Olivier's; as it was, the young man threw himself into unquestioning, slavish
service with tireless zeal and gratitude.

The Valois family had been dukes since 1363, when King John II of France had given the dukedom to his son, Philip the Bold.
The power struggle that began then between the two Valois branches, Burgundy and Orleans, grew nastier and fiercer with every
succeeding generation, fueled by the Hundred Years War. Burgundy slowly began to swallow up its neighbors: Artois, Flanders,
Franche-Comte, the Netherlands, the Ardennes, Hainaut, Brabant, and Luxembourg all became Burgundian territories. In 1407,
John the Fearless ordered the assassination of Louis, due d'Orleans, the king's brother. The Orleans retaliated in kind against
John twelve years later; his son Philip the Good recognized Henry VI of England as his suzerain and pursued the war against
France. A peace treaty was signed in 1435 that made further territorial concessions to Burgundy. By 1450, the house of Burgundy
had courts in Dijon, Brussels, and Bruges and controlled territories encompassing most of the modern Netherlands, Belgium,
Luxembourg, and northern and eastern France. The Burgundian state stretched nearly to Lyon and its western border came within
fifty miles of Paris.

It was around this time that Olivier de La Marche, recently promoted to pantler-squire, left the service of Philip the Good
to become secretary to the duke's son, Charles, count of Charolais. It must have seemed like a good move at the time. It was
true that Olivier had prospered under Philip, a fine man, proud, beloved, and lusty, whom Olivier would later describe as
more like "a chivalrous gentleman, performing bold and valiant deeds," than a great prince. If he were perhaps given to unbridled
fits of rage, he was also praised for his "quality of moderation" and ability to forgive and forget. If he was associated
with certain unpleasant moments, such as the sale of Joan of Arc to the English for ten thousand gold crowns, he was also
the founder of the Low Countries and a true Frenchman who regretted his entire life not having fought for his country at Agincourt.
Philip was a credit to his family, Burgundy, and chivalry.

But he had been duke for some thirty years, while young Charles, still in his teens, represented the future. Olivier was ambitious
not just for himself but also for the house in which he served, and Charles already seemed destined to carry the momentum
of Burgundy's century to its natural culmination: the establishment of an independent kingdom. As a boy, he had stayed up
late into the night reading the old stories of Lancelot and Gawain, Hannibal and Caesar, delighting most especially in the
exploits of Alexander the Great, who, like him, was a son of a Philip. Charles was the first of his line to speak fluent Flemish
and English. He was the very embodiment of knighthood, a fine jouster, fighter, hunter, and sportsman. "He was hot, active,
and impetuous: as a child he was very eager to have his own way," says La Marche. Most unusually for the time, he had been
breast-fed by his mother, Isabella of Portugal, whose suspicious nature he seems to have inherited. Was he perhaps aloof,
austere, friendless, of hasty temper, impetuous, vindictive? Did he lack serenity and collegiality? Did his swarthy complexion,
icy blue eyes, prim mouth, and protruding jaw reveal a certain latent barbarism? Never mind - he was a great lord and Olivier
was his man to the end. "It may be said hereafter," he would later write, "that I praise him highly in my writings because
he was my master. To that, I respond that I am telling the truth and that I knew him to be thus. Any vices that he may have
had were never apparent to me." Philip may have been the Good, but Charles was the Bold.

Philip lived on, while Charles and Olivier chaffed. There was a job to do, and the moment of truth seemed tantalizingly close
at hand, but the aging Philip fell just short of the energy and ruthlessness needed to see it through. Several Burgundian
kingdoms had thrived since the fall of Rome; the destruction of the first is the subject of the
Nibelungenlied;
the kingdom of Lothar­ingia had extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. It could do so again, and soon. The family
was strong enough; the court already richer and more splendid than any royal court; the glories of Burgundian arms, architecture,
arts, and letters were the envy of Europe; and almost all of the necessary territories were in place. All that was needed
was the acquisition of Alsace, Lorraine, and Provence, and Charles could be king, even if Philip would not. Lotharingia could
rise again, but it would have to be on the ruins of France. As Charles himself put it, he loved France so much that he would
have liked her to have six kings instead of one. Philippe de Commynes, who knew Charles intimately, limned his ambition more
grimly: "Even the half of Europe would not have satisfied him."

In 1465, the great princes of France - Burgundy, Brittany, Normandy, Bourbon, and Berry - waged the War of the Public Good
against King Louis XI, and the moment seemed at hand. One decisive military campaign would topple the king and dismember France
for good. Charles led the princes at the battle of Montlhery, with Olivier de La Marche at his side. When Charles broke one
wing of the royal army and sent it into panicked flight, all seemed lost for the king. But instead of consolidating his strength,
Charles ignored all the advice of his commanders in order to pursue the fleeing Frenchmen. By the time he returned to the
battlefield, only to find the rest of Louis's army intact, his men were exhausted from the chase. The battle was fought to
an inconclusive standstill, but Paris and the king survived. Lotharingia would have to wait. Olivier must have experienced
certain nagging doubts about his suzerain's fitness to command, but the knighthood he received on the battlefield would have
made them easy to suppress.

The year 1467 finally brought the long-awaited death of Philip the Good and the accession of Charles the Bold as fourth Valois
duke of Burgundy. His personal inheritance, according to La Marche, was "four hundred thousand crowns of gold cash, seventy-two
thousand marks of silver plate, without counting rich tapestries, rings, gold dishes garnished with precious stones, a large
and well-equipped library, and rich furniture." He wasted not one moment, dispatching Olivier de La Marche on a secret mission
to England forthwith. La Marche soon returned with Edward IV's promise of his sister, Margaret of York, in marriage to the
new duke. The news of the betrothal rang out like a thunderclap across western Europe.

Charles was a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, the first Plantagenet duke of Lancaster. Thus, for him to marry Margaret
- a Yorkist, an enemy of France, and sister of the king who had deposed the Lancastrian Henry VI - could only mean one thing:
a reversal of Burgundian foreign policy. This marriage was, in essence, Charles's notification to Louis XI of his intention
to resume the Hundred Years War. To France, facing the triple threat of an Anglo-Burgundian-Germanic alliance, the wedding
bells would have sounded an awful lot like a death knell. And Olivier de La Marche was in charge of organizing the festivities.

To call the wedding of Charles the Bold to Margaret of York "the marriage of the century," as many historians have done, is
almost an understatement. This marriage had the potential to alter the entire makeup of Western Europe. And since Western
Europe was only decades away from launching the greatest era of exploration, colonization, and international trade the world
has ever known, it is not too much of a stretch to say that this wedding held all world history in the balance. Try to imagine
the history of North America without France or the history of Africa and Southeast Asia without the Netherlands. Now try to
imagine that you are Olivier de La Marche, responsible for conveying the message of Charles's ambitions via the medium of
one single event, one momentous, obliterating, omniphagous act of hospitality. Every wedding sends a message. How would you
advise the caterer if yours was that you were intent on conquering the world? What would Colin Cowie do?