Road to Versailles.--Origin of Versailles.--The present Chateau.--The
two Trianons.--La Petite Suisse.--Royal Pastime.--Gardens of Versailles.
--The State Apartments.--Marie Antoinette's Chamber.--Death of Louis XV.
--Oeil de Boeuf.--The Theatre and Chapel.--A
Quarry.--Caverns.--Compiègne.--Chateau de Pierre-font.--Influence of
Monarchy.--Orangery at Versailles.
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 forest of St.
Germain, Compiègne, 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 hatch it, he was wont to
take his refreshments.
The original building at Versailles was a small chateau, 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 chateau, 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 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 chateau, having reached the acmé of magnificence and
splendour in the principal residence, were seeking refuge against the
effect 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 Madame
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 chateau. 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 its 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 Dairywoman, the Garde-de-Chasse, and
the Seigneur, 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
Seigneur, 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 _gentilshommes_; for the word implies more than a noble, meaning an
ancient nobleman.
The writing cabinet, private dining-room, council-room in ordinary,
library, etc. of the King, came next; the circuit ending in the Salles
des 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
surround 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 transferred 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 anything 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.
Jacques, not crossing the river, nor reaching even the Faubourg St.
Germain.
I have taken you so unceremoniously out of the chateau of Versailles to
put you into the catacombs, that some of the royal residences have not
received the attention I intended. We have visited Compiègne 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 sorts 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.
It was easier, however, to order the Chateau de Pierre-fond to be
destroyed, than to effect that desirable object. Little more was
achieved than to make cuts into the external parts of the towers and
walls, and to unroof the different buildings; and, although this was
done two hundred years since, time has made little impression on the
ruins. We were shown a place where there had been an attempt to break
into the walls for stones, but which had been abandoned, because it was
found easier to quarry them from the living rock. The principal towers
were more than a hundred feet high, and their angles and ornaments
seemed to be as sharp and solid as ever. This was much the noblest
French ruin we had seen, and it may be questioned if there are many
finer, out of Italy, in Europe.
The palace of Compiègne, after that of Versailles, hardly rewarded us
for the trouble of examining it. Still it is large and in perfect
repair: but the apartments are common-place, though there are a few that
are good. A prince, however, is as well lodged, even here, as is usual
in the north of Europe. The present king is fond of resorting to this
house, on account of the game of the neighbouring forest. We saw several
roebucks bounding among the trees, in our drive to Pierre-fond.[13]
[Footnote 13: Pierre-fond, or Pierre-font]
I have dwelt on the palaces and the court so much, because one cannot
get a correct idea of what France was, and perhaps I ought to say, of
what France, through the reaction, _will_ be, if this point were
overlooked. The monarch was all in all in the nation--the centre of
light, wealth, and honour; letters, the arts, and the sciences revolved
around him, as the planets revolve around the sun; and if there ever was
a civilized people whose example it would be fair to quote for or
against the effects of monarchy, I think it would be the people of
France. I was surprised at my own ignorance on the subject of the
magnificence of these kings, of which, indeed, it is not easy for an
untravelled American to form any just notion; and it has struck me you
might be glad to hear a little on these points.
After all I have said, I find I have entirely omitted the Orangery at
Versailles. But then I have said little or nothing of the canals, the
_jets d'eau_, of the great and little parks, which, united, are fifty
miles in circumference, and of a hundred other things. Still, as this
orangery is on a truly royal scale, it deserves a word of notice before
I close my letter. The trees are housed in winter in long vaulted
galleries, beneath the great terrace; and there is a sort of sub-court
in front of them, where they are put into the sun during the pleasant
season. This place is really an orange grove; and, although every tree
is in a box, and is nursed like a child, many of them are as large as it
is usual to find in the orange groves of low latitudes. Several are very
old, two or three dating from the fifteenth century, and one from the
early part of it. What notions do you get of the magnificence of the
place, when you are told, that a palace, subterraneous, it is true, is
devoted to this single luxury, and that acres are covered with trees in
boxes?