TLS on Versailles

Water closets for the few

by JOHN ROGISTER

a review of

Tony Spawforth VERSAILLES A biography of a palace 304pp. St Martin's Press. $29.95. 978 0 312 35785 6
William Ritchey Newton DERRIÈRE LA FAÇADE Vivre au château de Versailles au XVIIIe siècle 268pp. Paris: Perrin. ¤19. 978 2 262 02930 2
Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 478pp. History Press. Paperback, ¿18.99. 978 1 84588 638 7


In Tony Spawforth's useful biography of the palace over its 300 years of existence, we are given an account of the progress of the building of Versailles with an awareness that all was not right from the start. Louis XIV, and above all, his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI, realized that the brick façade on the town side was not in keeping with the classical garden façade in stone. There were plans to remodel the town side along classical lines, but lack of funds meant the project had to be abandoned, although one wing was built, adding a further disparate element to the front of the palace. It was fortunate that Versailles was built when it was because it would have been unaffordable even half a century later. It was also fortunate that the last two kings were unable to give effect to the "grand design" so that we are left with much of the original building of what was once Louis XIII's hunting lodge, which his son converted into a palace that was admired throughout Europe.
Spawforth rightly sees the palace as a centre of government, a place for living in, and a place for conspicuous consumption, to use David Starkey's classic definition. He may have missed the point made by the late Hugh Murray Baillie in a seminal article, which he cites, that Versailles was not purpose-built. It started as a summer palace before becoming a permanent residence from 1682 onwards. The king's rooms facing north were uncomfortable in winter.
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After 1683, when Queen Marie-Thérèse died, the distance between the king's apartment and the queen's, which were on the south side, ceased to matter. Louis XIV's successors had wives who had to live there. Even when Louis XIV moved his state bedroom to the very centre of the palace, on an east-west axis, contact between a future king and his queen would remain very public. Louis XV felt the need to have a private bedroom, a room away from the official one where the great ceremonies of the lever and the coucher took place. Louis XVI established a secret mezzanine passage between this private apartment and the queen's state bedroom.
The location and quality of lodgings in the palace were determined by an immutable princely and courtly pecking order. The more a monarch or princes of the Blood had surviving offspring, the more a game of musical chairs was played out in the allocation of rooms. As the eighteenth century wore on, and even quite senior courtiers were moved out of the palace itself into its dependencies, the lodgers found accommodation still highly desirable but increasingly uncomfortable, especially once the emphasis on better sanitation became greater. Not everyone had comfortable bathrooms and lieux à l'anglaise (water closets) like the king and queen.
In a chapter entitled, pace Brantôme, "A garden with flowers", Spawforth discusses the role of women at court. Women, he aptly observes, "were skilful at networking, using informal conversations to plant ideas or take soundings while they sat with their needlework at Court functions like the Queen's game in the Salon of Peace". His best example is the nonagenarian maréchale de Noailles, who had succeeded in making her family the most important at court in terms of posts, apartments and influence, by the time of her death in 1748.
Spawforth fully acknowledges that, without William Ritchey Newton's "meticulous and ground-breaking research on courtiers' accommodation at Versailles", a substantial part of his book could not have been so novel and interesting. It is helpful to compare his work with Newton's latest book. Unlike his two major studies, L'Espace du roi and La Petite Cour (reviewed in the TLS, November 17, 2000, and December 14, 2007), Derrière la Façade is a book destined for a more general public.
It is also a thematic account of life above and below stairs neatly arranged in chapters bearing such prosaic titles as "Lodging", "Eating at Court", "Water Supply", "Heating and Lighting", "Cleaning" and "Laundry". There is not much of the "garden with flowers" here; this is a practical property guide. It reveals in much greater detail than Spawforth does the world of public splendour and private squalor that reigned at Versailles.
Courtiers at all levels were not only housed by the king, but many of them expected to be fed by him. The Grand Chamberlain and the Grand Master of the King's Household kept open table, feeding thirty-six people for dinner and supper. Distinguished foreigners found themselves invited as well. The queen's dame d'honneur regularly entertained her mistress and her ladies in waiting.
The king's ministers also kept open table in their wings of the palace. Most courtiers had to make their own catering arrangements, which meant that the palace was full of kitchens and corner réchauffoirs, often in contravention of the royal health and safety regulations. The rule was to bring in caterers. When the visiting king of Denmark was lent the apartment of the duchesse de Brancas, the staff of the Bâtiments, the service which looked after the palace, used the opportunity to dismantle an illegal kitchen which the duchess had installed in her antechamber.
Water was in great demand and caused enormous problems. The fountains used up half a million litres in three hours. In the eighteenth century they were rarely switched on, and in summer the basins emitted pestilential odours. A great reservoir at the end of the North Wing provided water for washing and for the kitchens and stables, usually in an insanitary way. A brisk washing of hands and faces was often sufficient for most courtiers, and perfumes seldom counteracted the remaining body odours.
A bath was a sex aid rather than an act of personal hygiene. Before the water closet became a royal privilege, the chaise percée was the norm. There were 274 of them in Louis XIV's time. The king and leading courtiers habitually gave audience while seated on theirs. The ambitious Parmesan diplomat Alberoni paid a compliment to the homosexual duc de Vendôme as the latter rose from his chaise percée by exclaiming ecstatically "O culo d'angelo", as the duke wiped his backside.
The gist of Newton's findings is that Versailles stank, as courtiers and their servants urinated in corners and on staircases. Drains were inadequate, refuse and dead animals were simply thrown out in the public way, and vidangeurs had the unenviable task of cleaning out stinking cesspools. Newton and Spawforth come to the same conclusion: by 1789, most courtiers would have preferred to live in comfortable, well-designed Parisian houses or in country châteaux with modern conveniences than in a palace which no longer reflected changes in lifestyle.
Spawforth completes the story of the palace. In October 1789, the royal family was forced by a mob to leave the palace for good and to take up residence in Paris. From 1793 onwards the Republican authorities sold parts of the vast royal domain and most of the magnificent furnishings of the royal and princely apartments. At the auctions, aristocratic foreigners and shrewd businessmen eagerly bought valuable works of art which, in many cases, left France for ever.
Napoleon I and Louis XVIII toyed with the idea of returning to Versailles, but contented themselves with protecting and restoring it. Louis-Philippe saved the palace from decay by making it a museum dedicated to "toutes les gloires de la France", but he did untold damage to countless sets of rooms which were ripped out to build his picture galleries.
Because the palace remained a symbol of monarchy and because the victorious Prussians decided that the Hall of Mirrors was the appropriate place to proclaim Wilhelm I as German Emperor in 1871, the Third Republic had a pathological dislike of the place (although it used it briefly, and with further attendant damage to the fabric, as a seat of government). Fortunately, a gifted Renaissance scholar, Pierre de Nolhac (1859-1936), was a long-serving curator who began the slow and arduous process, not only of making Versailles acceptable to his Republican masters, but also of bringing it back to life. He was helped by the fact that Versailles had come to symbolize the humbling of Germany when the 1919 Treaty of Peace was signed in the Hall of Mirrors.
Spawforth leaves out some important elements of the recent story of the palace, for example the impact of films such as Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté (1953) with its star-studded cast, and Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006). Both were followed by impressive exhibitions. The introduction of son et lumière in the 1950s, with a text by André Maurois, helped to revive the splendour of courtly entertainments.
Nowadays, these spectacles threaten the stability of the bassin de Neptune. Spawforth refers to the American contribution to the restoration of Versailles after the First World War with the generous donations of John D. Rockefeller, but does not mention that in 1988 there was a Splendors of Versailles exhibition held in Jackson, Mississippi, reflecting the continuing importance of the United States in fund-raising operations. The refurnishing of the palace began in earnest after 1955, but it took place against a backdrop of bitter curatorial rivalry which Spawforth does not discuss. Formidable logistical problems are created by the very success of Versailles in attracting tourists, all eager, like the Revolutionaries of 1789, to visit the small private rooms of Marie Antoinette.
Madame Campan, née Genêt, was someone who knew Versailles well before the Revolution. She and her sister, Madame Auguié, were bedchamber ladies to Marie Antoinette, with whom Madame Campan remained until the fall of the monarchy in 1792. Madame Auguié committed suicide on being arrested, but her sister survived the Terror by hiding in the country. After the fall of Robespierre, she opened a school for young ladies at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Joséphine de Beauharnais sent her daughter Hortense there.
After Joséphine's marriage to Napoleon, the future emperor's sister, Caroline, was also sent to the school. Napoleon later entrusted Madame Campan with running a state school at Ecouen for the education of sisters, daughters and nieces of members of the Legion of Honour. With the return of the Bourbons, the school was abolished and Madame Campan was out of favour. Disgrace and family bereavements had not prevented her from writing her memoirs of life with Marie Antoinette at Versailles. They were published by F. Barrière after her death in 1822.
This English translation first appeared in 1886. It has now been reprinted, together with Barrière's introduction, notes and appendices. No attempt has been made to update the somewhat Victorian translation or to supplement the annotation. Madame Campan's account remains informative and highly readable. Historians used to treat it with suspicion, but recent research has proved its accuracy, on the affair of the queen's necklace, for example.
There is strong evidence, however, that Madame Campan suppressed the passages relating to Marie Antoinette's private life. She is known to have consulted her former pupil, Queen Hortense, about the propriety of revealing her suspicions as to Marie Antoinette's attachment to the handsome Swede, Count Fersen. He was the only man for whom, Madame Campan told Hortense, the queen had ever forgotten her duties.
"It was love at first sight." Other testimonies have tended to confirm that view, endorsed by Antonia Fraser and Tony Spawforth, even if Madame Campan left it out of her reliable account. Whether, as Napoleon averred, she had told him that Fersen's trousers had been found in the queen's bedroom on the night the mob invaded the palace on October 5, is perhaps doubtful. Her account certainly blows a breath of fresh air to counteract the odours described elsewhere. The palace comes to life again in the pages of these three books.