gallery became a scene of confusion. The musicians ceased playing and
began to chatter; the pages dashed about to remove the service, and
every body was in motion. Observing that your —— was standing, undecided
what to do, I walked into the railed area, brushed past the gorgeous
state-table, and gave her my arm. She laughed, and said it had all been
very magnificent, and amusing, but that some one had stolen her shawl! A
few years before, I had purchased for her a merino shawl of singular
fineness, simplicity and beauty. It was now old, and she had worn it, on
this occasion, because she distrusted the dirt of a palace, and laying
it carelessly by her side, in the course of the evening, she had found
in its place, a very common thing of the same colour. The thief was
deceived by its appearance, your —— being dressed for an evening party,
and had probably mistaken it for a cashmere. So much for the company one
meets at court! Too much importance, however, must not be attached to
this little _contre tems_, as people of condition are apt to procure
tickets for such places, and to give them to their _femmes de chambre_.
Probably half the women present, the “_jeunes et jolies_” excepted, were
of this class. But, mentioning this affair to the old _Princesse de ——_,
she edified me by an account of the manner in which _Madame la Comtesse
de_ —— had actually appropriated to the service of her own pretty
person, the _cachemire_ of Madame _la Baronne de_ —— in the royal
presence; and how there was a famous quarrel, _à l’outrance_, about it;
so I suspend my opinion, as to the quality of the thief.
LETTER X.
TO R. COOPER, ESQ., COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK.
We have been to Versailles, and although I have no intention to give a
laboured description of a place about which men have written and talked
these two centuries, it is impossible to pass over a spot of so much
celebrity, in total silence.
The road to Versailles lies between the park of St. Cloud and the
village and manufactories of Sèvres. A little above the latter, is a
small palace called Meudon, which, from its great elevation, commands a
fine view of Paris. The palace of St. Cloud, of course, stands in the
park; Versailles lies six or eight miles farther west; Compiègne is
about fifty miles from Paris in one direction; Fontainebleau some thirty
in another, and Rambouillet rather more remotely, in a third. All these
palaces, except Versailles, are kept up, and, from time to time, are
visited by the court. Versailles was stripped of its furniture, in the
revolution, and even Napoleon, at a time when the French empire extended
from Hamburgh to Rome, shrunk from the enormous charge of putting it in
a habitable state. It is computed that the establishment at Versailles,
first and last, in matters of construction merely, cost the French
monarchy two hundred millions of dollars! This is almost an incredible
sum, when we remember the low price of wages in France; but, on the
other hand, when we consider the vastness of the place, how many natural
difficulties were overcome, and the multitude of works from the hands of
artists of the first order it contained, it scarcely seems sufficient.
Versailles originated as a hunting-seat, in the time of Louis XIII. In
that age, most of the upland near Paris, in this direction, lay in
forest, royal chases; and as hunting was truly a princely sport,
numberless temporary residences of this nature, existed in the
neighbourhood of the capital. There are still many remains of this
barbarous magnificence, as in the wood of Vincennes, the forests of St.
Germain, Compèigne, Fontainebleau, and divers others; but great inroads
have been made in their limits, by the progress of civilization and the
wants of society. So lately as the reign of Louis XV. they hunted quite
near the town, and we are actually, at this moment, dwelling in a
country house, at St. Ouen, in which tradition hath it, he was wont to
take his refreshments.
The original building at Versailles was a small _château_, of a very
ugly formation, and it was built of bricks. I believe it was enlarged,
but not entirely constructed, by Louis XIII. A portion of this building
is still visible, having been embraced in the subsequent structures,
and, judging from its architecture, I should think it must be nearly as
ancient as the time of Francis I. Around this modest nucleus was
constructed, by a succession of monarchs, but chiefly by Louis XIV., the
most regal residence of Europe, in magnificence and extent, if not in
taste.
The present _château_, besides containing numberless wings and courts,
has vast _casernes_ for the quarters of the household troops, stables
for many hundred horses, and is surrounded by a great many separate
hotels, for the accommodation of the courtiers. It offers a front on the
garden, in a single continuous line, that is broken only by a projection
in the centre, of more than a third of a mile in length. This is the
only complete part of the edifice that possesses uniformity; the rest of
it being huge piles, grouped around irregular courts, or thrown forward
in wings, that correspond to the huge body like those of the ostrich.
There is on the front next the town, however, some attempt at simplicity
and intelligibility of plan, for there is a vast open court lined by
buildings, which have been commenced in the Grecian style. Napoleon, I
believe, did something here, from which there is reason to suppose that
he sometimes thought of inhabiting the palace. Indeed, so long as France
has a king, it is impossible that such a truly royal abode can ever be
wholly deserted. At present, it is the fashion to grant lodgings in it,
to dependants and favourites. Nothing that I have seen gives me so just
and so imposing an idea of the nature of the old French monarchy, as a
visit to Versailles. Apart from the vastness and splendour of the
palace, here is a town that actually contained, in former times, a
hundred thousand souls, that entirely owed its existence to the presence
of the court. Other monarchs lived in large towns, but here was a
monarch whose presence created one. Figure to yourself the style of the
prince, when a place more populous than Baltimore, and infinitely richer
in externals, existed merely as an appendage to his abode!
The celebrated garden contains two or three hundred acres of land,
besides the ground that is included in the gardens of the two Trianons.
These Trianons are small palaces erected in the gardens, as if the
occupants of the _château_, having reached the acmé of magnificence and
splendour, in the principal residence, were seeking refuge against the
effects of satiety, in these humbler abodes. They appear small and
insignificant after the palace; but the great Trianon is a considerable
house, and contains a fine suite of apartments, among which are some
very good rooms. There are few English abodes of royalty that equal even
this of _le Grand Trianon_. The _Petit Trianon_ was the residence of
Mad. de Maintenon; it afterwards was presented to the unfortunate _Marie
Antoinette_, who, in part, converted its grounds into an English garden,
in addition to setting aside a portion into what is called _la petite
Suisse_.
We went through this exceedingly pretty house and its gardens, with
melancholy interest. The first is merely a pavilion in the Italian
taste, though it is about half as large as the President’s House at
Washington. I should think the Great Trianon has quite twice the room of
our own Executive residence, and, as you can well imagine from what has
already been said, the capitol, itself, would be but a speck among the
endless edifices of the _château_. The projection in the centre of the
latter, is considerably larger than the capitol, and it materially
exceeds that building in cubic contents. Now this projection is but a
small part, indeed, of the long line of _façade_, it actually appearing
too short for the ranges of wings.
_Marie Antoinette_ was much censured for the amusements in which she
indulged, in the grounds of the Little Trianon, and vulgar rumour
exaggerating their nature, no small portion of her personal unpopularity
is attributable to this cause. The family of Louis XVI. appears to have
suffered for the misdeeds of his predecessors, for it not being very
easy to fancy anything much worse than the immoralities of Louis XV. the
public were greatly disposed “to visit the sins of the fathers on the
children.”
_La petite Suisse_ is merely a romantic portion of the garden in which
has been built what is called the Swiss hamlet. It contains the
miniature abodes of the Curé, the Farmer, the Dairy-Woman, the _Garde de
Chasse_ and the _Seignieur_, besides the mill. There is not much that is
Swiss, however, about the place, with the exception of some resemblance
in the exterior of the buildings. Here it is said the royal family used
occasionally to meet and pass an afternoon in a silly representation of
rural life, that must have proved to be a prodigious caricature. The
King (at least so the guide affirmed) performed the part of the
_Seignieur_, and occupied the proper abode; the Queen was the
Dairy-Woman, and we were shown the marble tables that held her porcelain
milk-pans; the present King, as became his notorious propensity to
field-sports, was the _Garde de Chasse_, the late King was the Miller,
and, _mirabile dictu_, the archbishop of Paris did not disdain to play
the part of the _Curé_. There was probably a good deal of poetry in this
account, though it is pretty certain that the Queen did indulge in some
of these phantasies. There happened to be with me, the day I visited
this spot, an American from our own mountains, who had come fresh from
home, with all his provincial opinions and habits strong about him. As
the guide explained these matters, I translated them literally into
English for the benefit of my companion, adding that the fact rendered
the Queen extremely unpopular, with her subjects. “Unpopular!” exclaimed
my country neighbour; “why so, sir?” “I cannot say; perhaps they thought
it was not a fit amusement for a Queen.” My mountaineer stood a minute
cogitating the affair in his American mind, and then nodding his head,
he said—“I understand it, now. The people thought that a King and Queen,
coming from yonder palace to amuse themselves in this toy hamlet, in the
characters of poor people, _were making game of them_!” I do not know
whether this inference will amuse you, as much as it did me at the time.
Of the gardens and the _jets d’eau_, so renowned, I shall say little.
The former are in the old French style, formal and stiff, with long
straight _allées_, but magnificent by their proportions and ornaments.
The statuary and vases that are exposed to the open air, in this garden,
must have cost an enormous sum. They are chiefly copies from the
_antique_. As you stand on the great terrace, before the centre of the
palace, the view is down the principal avenue, which terminates at the
distance of two or three miles with a low naked hill, beyond which
appears the void of the firmament. This conceit singularly helps the
idea of vastness, though in effect it is certainly inferior to the
pastoral prettiness, and rural thoughts of modern landscape gardening.
Probably too much is attempted here, for if the mind cannot conceive of
illimitable space, still less can it be represented by means of material
substances.
We examined the interior of the palace with melancholy pleasure. The
vast and gorgeous apartments were entirely without furniture, though
many of the pictures still remain. The painted ceilings, and the
gildings too, contribute to render the rooms less desolate than they
would otherwise have been. I shall not stop to describe the saloons of
Peace and War, and all the other celebrated apartments, that are so
named from the subjects of their paintings, but merely add that the
state apartments lie _en suite_, in the main body of the building, and
that the principal room, or the great gallery, as it is termed, is in
the centre, with the windows, looking up the main avenue of the garden.
This gallery greatly surpasses in richness and size any other room,
intended for the ordinary purposes of a palace, that I have ever seen.
Its length exceeds two hundred and thirty feet, its width is about
thirty-five, and its height is rather more than forty. The walls are a
complete succession of marbles, mirrors and gildings. I believe, the
windows and doors excepted, that literally no part of the sides or ends
of this room show any other material. Even some of the doors are loaded
with these decorations. The ceiling is vaulted, and gorgeous with
allegories and gildings; they are painted by the best artists of France.
Here Louis XIV. moved among his courtiers, more like a god than a man,
and here was exhibited that mixture of grace and moral fraud, of
elegance and meanness, of hope and disappointment, of pleasure and
mortification, that form the characters and compose the existence of
courtiers.
I do not know the precise number of magnificent ante-chambers, and
saloons through which we passed to reach this gallery, but there could
not have been less than eight; one of which, as a specimen of the scale
on which the palace is built, is near eighty feet long and sixty wide.
Continuing our course along the _suite_, we passed, among others, a
council room, that looked more like state than business, and then came
to the apartments of the Queen. There were several drawing-rooms, and
ball-rooms, and card-rooms, and ante-rooms, and the change from the
gorgeousness of the state apartments, to the neat, tasteful, chaste,
feminine, white and gold of this part of the palace was agreeable, for I
had got to be tired of splendour, and was beginning to feel a
disposition to “make game of the people,” by descending to rusticity.
The bed-room of _Marie Antoinette_ is in the _suite_. It is a large
chamber, in the same style of ornament as the rest of her rooms, and the
dressing-rooms, bath, and other similar conveniences, were in that
exquisite French taste, which can only be equalled by imitation. The
chamber of the King looked upon the court, and was connected with that
of the Queen, by a winding and intricate communication of some length.
The door that entered the apartments of the latter, opened into a
dressing-room, and, both this door and that which communicated with the
bed-room, form a part of the regular wall, being tapestried as such, so
as not to be immediately seen, a style of finish that is quite usual in
French houses. It was owing to this circumstance that _Marie Antoinette_
made her escape, undetected, to the King’s chamber, the night the palace
was entered by the fish-women.
We saw the rooms in which Louis XIV. and Louis XV. died. The latter, you
may remember, fell a victim to the small-pox, and the disgusting body,
that had so lately been almost worshipped, was deserted, the moment he
was dead. It was left for hours, without even the usual decent
observances. It was on the same occasion, we have been told, that his
grandchildren, including the heir, were assembled in a private
drawing-room, waiting the result, when they were startled by a hurried
trampling of feet. It was the courtiers, rushing in a crowd, to pay
their homage to the new monarch! All these things forced themselves
painfully on our minds, as we walked through the state rooms. Indeed,
there are few things that can be more usefully studied, or which awaken
a greater source of profitable recollections, than a palace that has
been occupied by a great and historical court. Still they are not
poetical.
The balcony, in which La Fayette appeared with the Queen and her
children, opens from one of these rooms. It overlooks the inner court;
or that in which the carriages of none but the privileged entered, for
all these things were regulated by arbitrary rules. No one, for
instance, was permitted to ride in the King’s coach, unless his nobility
dated from a certain century, (the fourteenth, I believe,) and these
were your _gentilhommes_; for the word implies more than a noble,
meaning an ancient nobleman.
The writing cabinet, private dining-room, council room in ordinary,
library, &c. of the King, came next; the circuit ending in the _salle de
gardes_, and the apartments usually occupied by the officers and troops
on service.
There was one room we got into, I scarce know how. It was a long, high
gallery, plainly finished for a palace, and it seemed to be lighted from
an interior court, or well; for one was completely caged, when in it.
This was the celebrated Bull’s Eye, (_oeil de boeuf_) where the
courtiers danced attendance, before they were received. It got its name
from an oval window, over the principal door.
We looked at no more than the state apartments, and those of the King
and Queen, and yet, we must have gone through some thirty or forty
rooms, of which, the baths and dressing-room of the Queen excepted, the
very smallest would be deemed a very large room, in America. Perhaps no
private house contains any as large as the smallest of these rooms, with
the exception of here and there a hall in a country house; and, no room
at all, with ceilings nearly as high, and as noble, to say nothing of
the permanent decorations, of which we have no knowledge whatever, if we
omit the window glass, and the mantels, in both of which, size apart, we
often beat even the French palaces.
We next proceeded to the _salle de spectacle_, which is a huge theatre.
It may not be as large as the French Opera house at Paris, but its
dimensions did not appear to me to be much less. It is true, the stage
was open, and came into the view; but it is a very large house for
dramatic representations. Now, neither this building, nor the Chapel,
seen on the exterior of the palace, though additions that project from
the regular line of wall, obtrudes itself on the eye, more than a
_verandah_ attached to a window, on one of our largest houses! In this
place, the celebrated dinner was given to the officers of the guards.
The chapel is rich and beautiful. No catholic church has pews, or, at
all events, they are very unusual, though the municipalities do
sometimes occupy them in France, and, of course, the area was vacant. We
were most struck with the paintings on the ceiling, in which the face of
Louis XIV. was strangely and mystically blended with that of God the
Father! Pictorial and carved representations of the Saviour, and of the
Virgin abound in all catholic countries; nor do they much offend, unless
when the crucifixion is represented with bleeding wounds; for, as both
are known to have appeared in the human form, the mind is not shocked at
seeing them in the semblance of humanity. But this was the first attempt
to delineate the Deity we had yet seen; and it caused us all to shudder.
He is represented in the person of an old man looking from the clouds,
in the centre of the ceiling, and the King appears among the angels that
encircle him. Flattery could not go much farther, without encroaching on
omnipotence itself.
In returning from Versailles, to a tithe of the magnificence of which I
have not alluded, I observed carts coming out of the side of a hill,
loaded with the whitish stone, that composes the building material of
Paris. We stopped the carriage, and went into the passage, where we
found extensive excavations. A lane of fifteen or twenty feet was cut
through the stone, and the material was carted away in heavy square
blocks. Piers were left, at short intervals, to sustain the
superincumbent earth; and, in the end, the place gets to be a succession
of intricate passages, separated by these piers, which resemble so many
small masses of houses among the streets of a town. The entire region
around Paris lies on a substratum of this stone, which indurates by
exposure to the air, and the whole secret of the celebrated catacombs of
Paris, is just the same as that of this quarry, with the difference that
this opens on a level with the upper world, lying in a hill, while one
is compelled to descend to get to the level of the others. But enormous
wheels, scattered about the fields in the vicinity of the town, show
where shafts descend to new quarries on the plains, which are precisely
the same as those under Paris. The history of these subterranean
passages is very simple. The stone beneath, has been transfered to the
surface, as a building material; and, the graves of the town, after
centuries, were emptied into the vaults below. Any apprehensions of the
caverns falling in, on a great scale, are absurd, as the constant
recurrence of the piers, which are the living rock, must prevent such a
calamity; though it is within the limits of possibility, that a house or
two might disappear. Quite lately, it is said, a tree in the garden of
the Luxembourg fell through, owing to the water working a passage down
into the quarries, by following its roots. The top of the tree remained
above ground, some distance; and, to prevent unnecessary panic, the
police immediately caused the place to be concealed by a high and close
board fence. The tree was cut away in the night, the hole was filled up,
and few knew any thing about it. But it is scarcely possible, that any
serious accident should occur, even to a single house, without a
previous and gradual sinking of its walls giving notice of the event.
The palace of the Luxembourg, one of the largest and finest edifices of
Paris, stands quite near the spot where the tree fell through, and yet
there is not the smallest danger of the structure’s disappearing some
dark night, the piers below always affording sufficient support. _Au
reste_, the catacombs lie under no other part of Paris, than the
_quartier St. Jaques_, not crossing the river, nor reaching even the
_Fauxbourg St. Germain_.
I have taken you so unceremoniously out of the _château_ of Versailles
to put you into the catacombs, that some of the royal residences have
not received the attention I intended. We have visited Compèigne this
summer, including it in a little excursion of about a hundred miles,
that we made in the vicinity of the capital, though it scarcely offered
sufficient matter of interest to be the subject of an especial letter.
We found the forest deserving of its name, and some parts of it almost
as fine as an old American wood of the second class. We rode through it
five or six miles, to see a celebrated ruin, called _Pierre Fond_, which
was one of those baronial holds, out of which noble robbers used to
issue, to plunder on the highway, and commit all sort of acts of genteel
violence. The castle, and the adjacent territory, formed one of the most
ancient _seigneuries_ of France. The place was often besieged and taken.
In the time of Henry IV. that monarch, finding the castle had fallen
into the hands of a set of desperadoes, who were ranked with the
leaguers, sent the _Duc d’Epernon_ against the place, but he was wounded
and obliged to raise the siege. Marshal Biron was next despatched, with
all the heavy artillery that could be spared, but he met with little
better success. This roused Henry, who finally succeeded in getting
possession of the place. In the reign of his son, Louis XIII. the
robberies and excesses of those who occupied the castle became so
intolerable, that the government seized it again, and ordered it to be
destroyed. Now, you will remember, that this castle stood in the very
heart of France, within fifty miles of the capital, and but two leagues
from a royal residence, and all so lately as the year 1617, and that it
was found necessary to destroy it, on account of the irregularities of
its owners. What an opinion one is driven to form of the moral
civilization of Europe, from a fact like this! Feudal grandeur loses
greatly, in a comparison with modern law, and more humble honesty.