To the scaffold (17 page)

ing ladies, with those of lesser rank bringing up the rear. "We walked four or five abreast," Henriette wrote, "the young ones trying to be on the outside and those who were considered to be in fashion—among whom I had the honor to be included—taking great care to walk close enough to the line of courtiers to be able to catch the pretty things whispered to them as they passed."

To pass through the long Galerie des Glaces without stepping on the train of the lady in front took considerable skill. One never raised one's feet off the parquet, but rather glided along, swanlike, never looking at the floor but mindful of avoiding the yards and yards of velvet and taffeta and silk that swirled everywhere and threatened to cause an accident. Once the gallery was safely crossed, each lady "threw her train over one of her paniers and, making sure she had been seen by her servant who would be waiting with a large, gold-fringed, red velvet bag, she rushed to one of the side galleries of the chapel, trying to find a place as close as possible to the gallery occupied by the King and Queen." The red velvet bag contained a missal and other necessities.

When Mass and dinner were over, Henriette and the other ladies were able to take their leave, though etiquette required them to pay brief calls on Provence and Artois and the royal aunts before retiring to their own rooms. Henriette enjoyed visiting Artois, whose youth and good looks held considerable allure. "Great efforts were made to please him," she recalled, "for to succeed was a guarantee of fame." After these obligatory calls the ladies were on their own for a few hours, and returned to their own apartments where they took off their stiff formal gowns, dined and socialized. Rest was impossible because of the stylish high coiffures, but they could at least sit down and relax until shortly before seven in the evening, when the card games began and the ladies-in-waiting had once more to be in attendance.

"We had to be there before seven," the Countess wrote, "for the Queen entered before the chiming of the clock. Beside her door would be one of the two cures of Versailles. He would hand her a purse and she would go around to everyone, taking up a collection and saying: Tor the poor, if you please.'" E^ch lady was expected to donate a silver coin, each man a gold louis. Often this small collection came to as much as 150 louis, which the cur^ would distribute among the neediest of his parishioners.^

Without minimizing the artificiality of the royal court, the

I

To the Scaffold ii^

stiffness of its manners, the awkwardness of its dress, the Countess's memoirs nonetheless reveal its moments of extraordinary beauty and graciousness. Many years after her period of service, when the glories of Versailles were long past, she and others brought to mind the shimmer of the silken gowns and the glitter of diamonds, the magnificence of the huge palace theaters, all gold and glass, lit by hundreds of chandeliers, the splendid ballrooms transformed by papier-mache greenery and silk flowers into forests, the gallantry of the men and the allure of the women. The suppers, the Countess recalled, were the quintessence of this exquisite hothouse culture. The guests, carefully chosen for their cultivation, wit and worldliness, their ability to be at ease in polished company, arrived at half-past nine.

"All the toilettes, all the elegance, everything that the beautiful, fashionable society of Paris could offer in refinement and charm was to be found at these suppers."^ There was fine food, scintillating conversation, brilliance and glamour nuanced with flirtation and enticement. Music played, wine flowed, there was laughter, life was very sweet. The talk went on until long past midnight, when the candles burned down and the women, hiding their yawns behind their jeweled fans, were escorted back to the tiny closets allotted to them to snatch an hour or two of sleep before morning.

>^11^

^HE Scottish philosopher David Hume, who visited Versailles ten years before Louis XVI began his reign, J was enraptured by the palace. "I eat nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but

incense, and tread on nothing but flowers," he wrote in his ecstasy. The grandeur of the place had clearly befuddled his senses. In actuality Versailles was a vast cesspool, reeking of filth and befouled with ordure.

Peasants from the surrounding villages brought their garbage to the palace and dumped it in the gardens. Indoors, the walls, woven hangings and costly upholstery gave off an unpleasant sooty smell; the chimneys drew badly, and the rooms were fiill of smoke from November until August. The odor clung to clothes, wigs, even undergarments. Worst of all, beggars, servants, and aristocratic visitors alike used the stairs, the corridors, any out-of-the-way place to relieve themselves. "The passages, the courtyards, the wings and the corridors," a contemporary wrote, "were full of urine and fecal matter. The park, the gardens and the chateau made one retch with their bad smell."*

English travelers accustomed to the "neatness" of royal and noble houses in their own country were repelled by the "unclean manner" in which the "noble apartments" at Versailles were maintained. The paintings and statues were neglected, the furniture was allowed to become dirty and shabby. People were careless about their bathing and grooming. "I shall never get over the dirt of this country," Horace Walpole grumbled, and he had traveled

extensively.2 The approach to Versailles, the English agreed, was magnificent, along wide roads shaded with stately trees. But the squalor inside was unspeakable.

One afternoon, not long before she became Queen, Antoinette and her sister-in-law the Comtesse de Provence went to call on Victoire. On leaving Victoire's apartments the two women paused in a courtyard to look at a sundial. From a second-story window someone flung a pail of waste water into the courtyard, and the two Princesses were drenched. Possibly the drenching was no accident, for the window was in Madame Du Barry's apartments and her servants had no love for the dauphine. But more likely than not it was just one of many such incidents, quite unintentional and too commonplace to record.^ It was no wonder Antoinette kept fresh flowers in her rooms and burned flower essences in china perfiime-braziers and ornamental oil pots; it was to drive away the stinks that beset her.

There were dogs and cats all over Versailles, many of them wild. The mayhem and dirt caused by Antoinette's dogs has already been mentioned. But Lx)uis too kept dogs, and had a large and capacious dog kennel in the main reception room of Fon-tainebleau. This was a miniature palace in itself, made of oak painted white with gilt pilasters and moldings, and decorated with painted sprigs of flowers. Each dog had three mattresses inside, upholstered in red velvet.'*

Madame de Guemenee, a favorite of Antoinette and governess of Louis's sisters Clotilde and Elisabeth, was always attended by a great many small dogs. "She offered to them a species of worship," Mercy told Maria Theresa, "and pretended, through their medium, to hold communication with the world of spirits."^ Whatever their value for psychic communication, the little pack must have made her apartments unlivable.

Contributing to the dirt and disorder were the wide array of people, many of them uncouth and unsavory, who wandered freely through the palace and its grounds.

Virtually anyone could enter the palace. Some effort was made to keep out people who had recently had smallf>ox, but everyone else was admitted. The only requirement was that the men possess a hat and a rapier, and these could be rented from the concierge. Parisians with muddy boots tramped through the elegant salons and down the long galleries, admiring the fiimishings

and objets d'art, touching them, coveting them. Though there were servants everywhere, contemporary accounts do not mention guards who watched the transient visitors to prevent them from stealing small treasures or cutting the golden tassels from the curtains to sell once they got home.

We may safely assume that the palace held a free-floating population of light-fingered thieves who preyed on the courtiers and lived on their gilded pickings. On the evening of Artois's marriage, a masked ball was held in celebration. A number of "richly dressed" burglars were admitted to the ball, and proceeded to relieve the guests of their watches and purses, their snuffboxes and jewelry.^ Antoinette's wedding ring was stolen from her in 1771 (though she believed she had lost it when washing her hands) by a woman who used it "in sorceries to prevent her having any children." The thief confessed her malevolence to the cure of the Madeleine de la Cite many years later, and the cure sent the ring to Madame Campan's husband with an explanatory note. He of course gave it to Antoinette, who was happy to have it back and made no effort to discover or punish the thief.

Ambassadors and other dignitaries from foreign courts brought their entourages to Versailles, complete with slaves, camp followers and exotic pets. Entertainers of all sorts, from the actors and musicians of the Paris theaters to the bear-keepers and animal trainers who made their living on the boulevards, came to the palace to perform. Even the prisoners of the chain gangs, on their way to service in the galleys at Brest, were marched through the town of Versailles—though their route was eventually changed during Louis XVFs reign because the kindhearted King was freeing too many of them and they were a hazard to the community.^

Madmen and idiots were not excluded from Versailles, provided their behavior was not violent. Madame Campan recorded how Antoinette "put up with the most troublesome importunities from people whose minds were deranged," and was reluctant to order them taken away.

One such madman was a pale, thin nobleman from Bordeaux, a man whose "sinister appearance," Campan wrote, "occasioned the most uncomfortable sensations." His name was Castelnaux, but he was generally referred to with derision as "the Queen's lover," for such he declared himself to be. Taciturn, humorless, and vaguely threatening, Castelnaux shadowed Antoinette every-

where she went, and for ten years and more she tolerated his presence on the fringes of her life. As his status gave him the entree at court, he was able to attend every ceremony during the day and evening, and indeed he was invariably present, sitting as close to the Queen as he could when she went to Mass, staring at her throughout dinner, placing himself directly in her line of sight during the evening card-playing and never taking his eyes from her face. When she went to the theater, he was there, when she stayed at the Petit Trianon he was there as well, walking endlessly around the garden, at the edge of the moat. Rain never deterred him, or ice-cold winds, or searing heat; like some ghostly sentry, he was always at his post near the Queen's side. When the court moved to Fontainebleau or Marly he always anticipated its move, so that he could be waiting for Antoinette when she arrived. When she stepped down from her coach, Campan says, his melancholy face was always the first she saw.

After many years "the Queen's lover" ceased to be a joke and became, in Campan's words, "an intolerable annoyance." Antoinette still would not let anyone restrain Castelnaux, but she did talk with a celebrated attorney to see whether he could persuade the madman to give her some peace. The attorney did his best, talking to Castelnaux for nearly an hour and then returning with good news: the madman had agreed that, "since his presence was disagreeable to her, he would retire to his province." The Queen was relieved—briefly. Half an hour later Castelnaux was back, requesting an audience with Madame Campan. "He came to tell me," she wrote, "that he withdrew his promise, that he had not sufficient command of himself to give up seeing the Queen as often as possible." She reported the conversation to Antoinette, who took the news philosophically.

"Well, let him annoy me!" she said, "but let him not be deprived of the pleasure of being free!"^

Castelnaux was no menace to the health or hygiene of the palace, but other perpetual hangers-on were. Prostitutes solicited in the courtyards and public rooms, knowing that they would be tolerated as long as they kept out of the royal apartments themselves. Ragged, barefooted children, many of them homeless, ran up and down the great staircases carrying messages, stole food from the kitchens and snatched what sleep they could in the stables and outbuildings. Hungry ex-servants, down at heel and far

from clean, stood about in groups, hoping to hear of openings in the household and looking enviously at their more fortunate peers who wore the King's livery. Cleanliness was impossible with such, people constantly underfoot, and in any case the servants were more concerned about their prerogatives than about carrying out the humble tasks of sweeping and cleaning, washing the floors and removing offensive refuse.

If the environment of the court was unhealthy, it was also full of inconvenience. With its hundreds of servants, it was an unwieldy mechanism, and inefficient. At times it broke down altogether. On one occasion the court was in the process of moving from Choisy to Versailles. The move did not disturb the routine of the King's hunt, which went on as usual. Antoinette decided to follow the hunt in a coach, with her three aunts. When the coach came to a river, however, the aunts became worried that it might overturn, and insisted on getting out even though they were in "an extremely boggy place." Antoinette got out too, and began the long trek back to Choisy. There were no servants to rescue her or her aunts—all the servants had gone on ahead to Versailles—and the walk proved to be long and very wet. She lost one of her shoes in the mud, and the rest of her clothes became very bedraggled. Fortunately she was able to dry herself at a hearth fire, though her clothes were scorched. At last she went on to Versailles, where she hoped the servants would have prepared the palace for the return of the court. But her apartments had somehow been neglected, the rooms were not heated, and she soon came down with a cold.9

Inconvenience was a way of life for the courtier. Living in cramped, dark quarters, keeping very long hours, forever jostling for space in the overcrowded salons, surrounded by "an appalling crowd, that makes a most fatiguing racket," as one of them wrote, the denizens of Versailles suffered for their status. They dared not relax, or look tired, or reveal how bored they were. To be agreeable was a necessity, to smile when one's tight brocade shoes pinched and one's scalp itched and one's rival was gaining in favor. An experienced official passed on this advice to a novice: "You have to do three things: say nice things to everybody, solicit every post that is likely to become vacant, and sit down when you can." 10