Versailles

Grandes Eaux

From the Seine, from the Eure, from the Bièvre, from the Yvette, a vast underground network of pipes, some made of pottery, some of lead, some made of wood or cast iron, mile upon mile of them tunneling through the rich black dirt of the Îie-de-France before suddenly breaking free as aqueducts, their troughs filled with sparkling river water destined for Versailles. The rivers keep flowing no matter what the people living around them are up to. They keep idling the arched vaults of d'Orbay's immense reservoirs even after they're no longer needed, the people who relied on them for baths or fountain displays having run away the previous fall, taking refuge here and there throughout the countryside like mice.

It was Louis XIV who set the whole system in motion, sick as he was of the disgusting quality of the water he inherited from his predecessor, so green, so thick, so bad-smelling. "Never," wrote Madame de Sevigne in a letter to her daughter, "have I heard anything more agreeable than what you told me about this great beauty soon to appear at Versailles, fresh, pure, and unaffected, who will put all others to shame."

Later she'd be surprised to find out it wasn't a young woman her daughter had referred to but a river diverted from its course by an army of forty thousand men. So long as the Sun King strode the face of the earth, his dark curls gleaming with health, his virility bursting from every pore, it was possible to believe that, when summoned to him, even the water would arrive girlishly sub — missive and eager to jump into his bed.

Now it's June. The Swan drifts across the surface of the night sky, trailed by the Shepherd's Star. Time to pick the new greens, garden cress and chervil, lamb's lettuce, rocket, and sorrel. Also time to replant. Leeks, scallions. Turnips, cabbages, endive.

Meanwhile the rivers continue filling all the reservoirs of Versailles: d'Orbay's immense churchlike cisterns under the Water Terrace, three shallow rectangular basins along the Rue des Reservoirs, a water tower slyly hiding behind a trompe I'oeil facade on the Rue du Pein-tre-Le-Brun, a deep cylindrical holding tank on Mont-bauron Hill. The rivers fill the reservoirs and then spill from them into Versailles's many pools and lakes and canals. The Mirror Pool, the Pool of the Swiss Guards, the Nymphs' Bath, and the Grand Canal, as well as the basins of all the fountains, Latona and Saturn, Apollo, Flora, Bacchus, and Neptune. The fountains themselves aren't running, since no one's there to turn them on. Even if someone were, it would be a terrible waste — the usual display requiring over 220 gallons of water per second! — since also no one's there to watch.

The rivers feed the reservoirs that feed the millpond in the Queen's little village. Last fall's yellow leaves never got scooped away and now they're black and scummy, adhering to the banks or floating on the glaucous surface of the pond. The silver milk ladle is lying near the stone bench right where the Queen dropped it, its handle snapped in two. The orange Chinese goldfish are dead.

Before he made his getaway last October, Monsieur de La Tour du Pin saw to it that all the buildings were boarded up tight, with massive iron locks clamped on the gates, and guards standing sentry. A place under siege, Versailles, yet even so the sky is clear and blue, not a single cloud in sight. An abandoned place, sorrowful, yet things are coming back. Mignonette and starflower, anemone and rue. The water lilies are in bloom, the doves cooing and guarding their nests in the roof thatch. The farmer and his wife are still living in their little cottage on the far side of the wheat field, tending all the animals the Queen left behind — including the babies she'll never get a chance to feed, all those lambs and bunnies and chicks — and milking Blanchette and Brunette twice a day, though no longer into porcelain basins, but into tin pails.