Versailles, Versigh, Versails, Versighs, Versize, Versace: How I Learned to Forget the Crowds and Appreciate Versailles.

Part I: Marie-Antoinette’s Versailles Featuring Lolly Winston

Until recently I’d cringe when visiting friends would ask me to take them to Versailles. Too crowded, too baroque, too empty of furniture, too bold and muddled at the same time. What did I care to know a dîner from a souper, a Louis XV leg from a Louis XVI, Mme de Maintenon from Madame de Pompadour, a petit lever from a grand? As Louis XVI wrote in his diary on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed: Rien. Nothing. Nada.

I’d practically beg visitors to let go of their Versailles fantasies. “You’re only in Paris for four or five days, save it for next time… Oh, you’re staying an entire week? Well then, take a chateau daytrip to Vaux-le-Vicomte. Same creators as Versailles but before they got cocky. True, it’s a pain to get there but isn’t that what real travel is all about?”

But no, it’s always Versailles, Versailles, Versailles: “We have to go to Versailles,” “I’ve always wanted to go to Versailles,” “The kids have got to see Versailles,” “I hear they’ve restored the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”

I think that foreign travelers want to go to Versailles because it’s a word that everyone can pronounce (unless you’re from Kentucky in which case it’s pronounced Versails) and so Parisians can’t make fun of the way you say it unless they want to get picky about the rolled r. For some reason I always think of it as Versize because it’s so big, or as Versighs when exasperated by the thought of going back, or as Versace because it was intended to make a statement. The statement used to be: The king lives here and controls your destiny, but now the statement is simply: Everyone loves to say Versailles so get in line.

I like the way Bill Bryson always seems to arrive someplace by mistake or by desperation, leading to the golly-gee-now-isn’t-this-place-the-pits kind of travel writing that he does so well. But Versailles is a place that even he could get to without a hitch: just get to a train at any of the RER (suburban train) stations along the Left Bank, hold up the appropriate number of fingers at the ticket window and say Versailles, then follow the signs to the right platform and wait 5-10 minutes for a train heading in the direction “Versailles Rive Gauche.”

The relative ease of getting there doesn’t keep people from then standing on the platform asking “Is this the train to Versailles?” and, once on the train, “This is going to Versailles, right?” after which a train-load of fellow tourists will look at each other with a mix of glee and fear as though they’d just boarded Space Mountain.

From the station, a 10-minute, one-turn walk—just follow the crowds or signs—brings you to the cobbled slope leading up to the incomprehensible royal multiplex of Versailles, where lines ostensibly head in every direction yet all lead to essentially the same place: Hell.

Did I say Hell? I meant Hall, the Hall of Mirrors.

Lolly Winston and Versailles

My distaste of Versailles was accentuated last year with the hype surrounding Sophia Coppola’s movie Marie-Antoinette—which I wasn’t prepared to see since her Lost in Translation was such self-pitying, alienated-princess drivel. It was shortly after I declined an invitation from the local tourist board to join on a Marie-Antoinette hype press tour that I got an e-mail from my friend Lolly Winston, telling me that she was coming to Paris, that she hoped to explore the city with me, and that she wanted to be sure I’d take her you know where.

Lolly is the bestselling author of Good Grief and Happiness Sold Separately. In Happiness Sold Separately the protagonist’s husband notes during a marriage counseling session that he admires his wife because she “can tell a Louis XIV from a Louis XV from a Louis XVI chair.” Lolly herself is a chair connoisseur. She traces her love for Louis legs to the times her mother took her to the decorative arts rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where they marveled, she says, at “the entire history of furniture laid out in grand roped off rooms.” Her mother was a designer who loved furniture and would go dump digging to find antiques to refurbish. After her mother died Lolly found all of her notebooks from her design and art history classes—they were filled with doodles and drawings of furniture, cabriole legs, and Grecian motifs.

If you’ve read Lolly’s novels you know that when a character has something on her mind it’s difficult for her to let go. (If you haven’t read them, do.) Obsession—or at least wanting something so long and hard that it hurts—appears to be one of the unifying motifs of her work. Versailles happened to be one of Lolly’s own fixations, and she is not an easy person to dissuade.

Still, I tried my best to convince her that her time and explorations were better spent in Paris proper rather than at the suburban multiplex chateau. There’s very little furniture in the Great Apartments at Versailles, I told her, it’s just a massive, barnacled shell of luxury, power, and world domination. “Let’s stay in Paris and go tearoom hopping,” I said, aware that in addition to being chair obsessed Lolly is a tea addict.

“But it’s my birthday,” she said, “I want to go for my birthday.”

See photo at right and imagine her blue eyes twinkling, eyelids batting, blond her fluttering in the breeze as we stand by the Seine and I try to think of an alternate birthday present. Then imagine me relenting: “OK, OK, I’ll find you some Louis furniture.” And I remembered my invitation to the Petit Trianon, Marie-Antoinette’s little palace on the Versailles grounds.

But this was November and the Petit Trianon was already closed for the season.

Now imagine me taking on a very serious journalist voice and calling the tourist officials for Les Yvelines, the department that comprises Versailles, to ask for special access to Marie-Antoinette’s Domain, mentioning, “Isn’t that Sophia Coppola film about to come out in the U.S.” Sensing that the press attaché wasn’t convinced that I was important enough in the touristic scheme of things to be given individual off-season access, imagine me playing the Lolly bestselling-author Winston card with an “Oh, by the way, I’ll be accompanied by an author with a zillion readers who’s working on a new book that may take place at Versailles for all I know. And could you arrange for us to stop somewhere nice for tea…” Actually I didn’t say all that, but she understood and went to get the keys.

Marie-Antoinette’s Private Domain

Lolly and I didn’t have to get in line to Hell, I mean Hall, of Mirrors. We were met at the train station and whisked around to the side entrance of the park of Versailles which leads directly to the Petit Trianon Palace and Marie-Antoinette’s Domain, lying just beyond the chateau’s mean gardens.

Portions of the Petit Trianon are currently being restored (to be completed in April 2008) to evoke the various women associated with this precious little pleasure palace over the 100-year span from Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Barry to Marie-Antoinette to Napoleon I’s sister Pauline Borghèse and his second wife Marie-Louis to Napoleon III’s wife Eugenia, however the Petit Trainon is and will remain largely associated with Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793). Her presence here is notable enough that it now permeates the place and commercially exploitable enough that the zone comprising the Petit Trianon, the surrounding gardens, the adjacent little theater, and the Queen’s Hamlet has been branded Marie-Antoinette’s Domain.

The Petit Trianon

The Petit Trianon was actually constructed in the 1760s, before Marie-Antoinette arrived at Versace, when this was still a Louis XV brand domain. Louis XV instructed his premier architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, to design a private palace for his favorite mistress Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764). Not completed until after Madame de Pompadour’s death, however, the Petit Trianon was inaugurated by the king in 1769 in the company of his next favorite mistress, the palace’s transitory beneficiary, Madame du Barry (1743-1793), a luscious former prostitute and low-level courtesan who hit the royal jackpot… and was eventually beheaded.

A favorite mistress will inspire a king, but notable architecture inspires structures to come. Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698-1782) had a strong hand in steering French architecture away from the in-your-face flamboyance associated with Louis XIV’s Versailles and towards the less ostentatious, more precious, classical spirit that still dominates notions of French elegance and refinery. His work isn’t so much understated as less overstated than that of his predecessors. Other major works by Gabriel include the Royal Opera in the chateau, Place de la Concorde in Paris, and the royal palace at Compiègne, north of Paris.

The opera in the main palace is therefore architecturally part of Louis XV’s Versailles, but its inauguration with the marriage of Louis not-yet XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 1770 also places it in the sphere of the latter Louis. He was 16, she 15, when their marriage sealed an alliance between France and Austria. Four years later, on the death of Louis XV, they became king and queen. “Lord, protect us,” Louis said upon becoming the 16th, “we are reigning too young.”

Versailles may have been a showroom for art, craft, and luxury but it was first and foremost the seat of power, where every step, misstep, invitation, or averted gaze that didn’t have political overtones had political undertones. The demands of residing at the seat of power were overwhelming, and the new king was as unprepared to rule as the new queen was unwilling to pass every day and night in the oppressive atmosphere of life at the Court of Versailles.

Shortly after he inherited the throne, Louis Seize gave M-A the Petit Trianon as a gift. The little palace wasn’t only Marie-Antoinette’s refuge from the full Court press, it was also a visual escape from the gilt, stucco, and grand-theme paintings strewn dramatically and nauseously through the Great Apartments of Versailles. M-A’s enormous public bedroom in the Queen’s Great Apartment is one of the highlights of the chateau (see below), but it’s as over-the-top as any of the major rooms there.

The interior of the Petit Trianon, like that of the private Louis XVI apartment in the main chateau, is so desperately pale and pensive that it appears melancholy by comparison. One walks through it as though behind a veil of mignonette green or powder grey, albeit a veil outlined in gold. But the impression of melancholy is simply due the absence of the life and sounds of the queen’s stay: the laughter of M-A and her courtiers, the rustle of fashion, the attention of servants, the wit and laughter and silliness of a small party, and eventually the play of royal children. Those palace joys were replaced during our visit by Lolly’s rapture as she bent to examine the delicate floral décor and the simplified armchairs and verily sighed: “Louis Sixteen.”

The Petit Trianon that day was so precious, pale, and, with all due respect to travelers to come, pleasantly empty of other visitors that Lolly and I felt as though we’d been given one of the silver coins that M-A would hand out to select members of the Court (to the jealousy of others) as their invitation to come calling at the Petit Trianon.

The Little Theater

The jewel of Marie-Antoinette’s Domain is her Little Theater, an exquisite 200-seat papier-mâché playhouse where Lolly oohed, “It’s like a Faberge egg.” The theater offers a glimpse of M-A’s early years as queen when she, along with other nobles, acted on stage in various roles. Ironically—or perhaps not, considering that this was off-Versailles—she even invited to have performed here Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, a play that her husband had forbidden because of its resolute critique of noble privilege.

Sex, Children, and the Royal Couple

Overall, both at her private domain and in the public chateau, Louis XVI gave Marie-Antoinette free reign to impose her sense of style and organize entertainment according to her own interests, both of which were resolutely modern. It’s important when visiting her domain to think of this not just as luxury but as modernity, a whimsical queen’s modern get-away-from-it-all dream palace, where the intrigue of pleasure—in games, music, billiards, theater, peasant girl fantasies, even motherhood—might briefly trump the intrigue of power.

In some ways Marie-Antoinette assumed the role that the mistresses of the Louis XIV and XV had once held: defining fashion, making capricious demands, causing jealousy, dabbling in policy. But there remained for Marie-Antoinette the matter of her queenly role: producing an heir to the throne.

Louis XIV had had numerous mistresses as a royal prerogative and Louis XV was basically a lucky horn dog, but Louis XVI remained without a mistress, not for love of the queen (they were more like accomplices) but because he had little taste for sex. The king might occasionally visit with Marie-Antoinette at the Petit Trianon at mealtime, but despite having a dedicated bedroom here he never spent the night.

Happiness was sold separately not only in Lolly’s novel about a childless couple in California dealing with the indignities of IVF but in royal marriages as well. Marie-Antoinette certainly already knew that, of course, having been raised at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna on the assumption that she could have whatever she wanted anyway. She was the 15th of 16 children born over a 19-year period to Francis I and Maria Teresa of Austria, heiress to the Hapsburg’s Holy Roman Empire. Back then a princess understood that marrying into royalty meant learning how to enjoy herself and influence people between birthing heirs. (Lady Di and Princess Masako apparently read romance novels instead of history.)

The fact that Louis and Marie-Antoinette had married so young and that Louis had a strict religious upbringing and, more importantly, an erectile glitch made consummating their marriage a work in progress. The king is presumed not to have had orgasmic sexual relations with Marie-Antoinette until they’d been married for seven years. That was shortly after he was circumcised to release the constraining foreskin that had been preventing him from having a full and fulfilling erection. An aversion to the scalpel combined with his disinterest in sex kept him from accepting medical intervention earlier. Afterwards it wasn’t so much that his appetite for sex grew as much as his reproductive capacities were released, which allowed the royal couple to have four children including two sons, potential heirs to the throne.

The Queen’s Hamlet

During the decade after receiving the gift of the Petit Trianon, Marie-Antoinette had the adjacent land to its east transformed into a modern, English-inspired garden. With its Temple of Love overlooking a little lake (and visible her bedroom window), its Belvedere Pavilion, and its Grotto, this garden is a close relative to Paris’s Parc Monceau, created in the same spirit and at the same time by her cousin-in-law Philippe d’Orléans.

Beyond the garden she ordered construction of her Hamlet, a functioning little dream village complete with peasants (a good gig for a peasant at the time) and farm animals where the queen and her ladies-in-waiting would play shepherdess and peasant farmer. Its presence at Versailles wasn’t solely a sign that M-A and her friends were out of touch with the realities of life outside high society; no such signs were needed since being out of touch with commoners is typically among the aims and privileges of wealth and power. It was also a sign that they were in touch with the philosophically, if not politically, correct call for a return to nature promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau among other figures of the Enlightenment—or at least a watered down version of that call. This is no different from Hollywood celebrities going cosmo-religio-native in Hollywood by learning yoga, cabala light, and carbon-neutral inner peace so as to better reach cosmic union, as long as it doesn’t interfere with a 3 o’clock hairdresser appointment.

No different except that The Queen’s Hamlet is indeed picture perfect as a bucolic, Norman-style, thatched cottage village lacing a carp-filled lake, just the kind of place where you’d want to simplify your life and eat off Sèvres porcelain on a marble tabletop.

Marie-Antoinette’s private domain and her use of it evolved over the 15 years of her residence at Versailles. She too evolved with age and motherhood. While naturally and constantly accustomed to luxury and power, she took on a relative gravitas during her final years at Versailles, which stopped none of her many enemies and detractors from reviling her, both within the Court and in the streets.

Meanwhile, Back at the Chateau

The royal opera and the Louis XVI private apartments in the chateau also have a place on extensive Marie-Antoinette explorations of Versailles, but the main room bearing her imprint there is the Queen’s Bedchamber. Restored as Marie-Antoinette knew it, with styles and fine fabrics from her era combined with the energetic Louis XV rococo décor of her predecessor Marie Leszczinska, the bedchamber is a magnificent, regal room that almost makes you want to attend a royal birthing. It’s as over-the-top as any of the other rooms on the Great Apartments but it’s got something that the other rooms lack: an immediate sense of life and drama. One can imagine the queen choosing fabric, reflecting on sex with a disinterested king, giving birth as the Court presses its nose forward in hopeful anticipation of a boy, and fleeing a mob prepared to slaughter her as it breaks into her wing of the chateau on the critical night of Oct.5-6, 1789.

On Oct. 5, 1789, a procession of 7-8000 people, mostly women, marched from Paris to Versailles to protest the price and lack of bread. The number increased, including many men, by the time it arrived, sounding slogans of hatred more to Marie-Antoinette than to Louis and working themselves into a revolutionary frenzy. During the night the protesters, now a mob, killed a couple of guards and broke into the Queen’s Apartment. Marie-Antoinette escaped through the door by her bed and entered the King’s Apartment behind the Hall of Mirrors. She then gathered her children from their bedrooms and returned again to the King’s Bedchamber. Advised by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had assumed the increasingly untenable role of ambiguous of defender of the king and promoter of democracy, the royal couple appeared on the balcony overlooking the mob crowded in Marble Courtyard and beyond. The mob’s murderous anger may have quickly dissipated but within hours the royal family was leaving Versailles for house-arrest in Paris, never again to return.

The remainder of the Queen’s Apartment is largely charming disappointment after her bedchamber, as one’s own thoughts turn to returning to Paris or at least to visiting the gardens. But one last image of Marie-Antoinette is found along the way, an idyllic painting of her and her children, an ordinary, happy family, at home at Versailles.

(Continued with Part II: Louis XIV’s Versailles)

© 2007 by Gary Lee Kraut

Links and Opening Times
Chateau de Versailles: www.chateauversailles.fr. Open daily except Tuesday, 9am-6:30pm April-Oct., 9am-5:30pm Nov.-March. The Petit Trianon is open daily noon-6pm April-Oct. The surrounding gardens and the Queen’s Hamlet are open until 7:30pm.