Versailles

Envelope

Twenty-eight by thirty-four toises. Thirty-two by forty. Invite carriages into the courtyard. No! Keep the horses out…

It was an endearing quality of the Sun King that he couldn't make up his mind.

From the beginning, of course, he knew he wanted Versailles to be the hub of the universe, and that the original chateau, a modest brick "hunting lodge" built to provide his father with the ideal setting (i.e. as far from his wife as possible) for post-hunt parties and amorous adventures, was really much too small.

On this point Louis XIV and his advisors were in perfect accord: the hub of the universe had to be a whole lot bigger. Where they hit a snag, however, was in determining the limits of filial devotion: just because he was Sun King, the advisors pointed out, didn't mean his sentimentality should be given free rein, particularly if it meant trying to find some way to cram his father's chateau into the heart of the new building like a "precious jewel," rather than tear it down like the architectural catastrophe everyone agreed it was. Tear it down? Louis roared. Am-poss-EEE-bluh! But to have to build around the old chateau would be like building around a sinkhole in a bog, the advisors whined.

It was May 1668. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had just been signed and, as usual after signing a treaty, the Sun King was filled with a deep need either to start another war or begin building a monument to his own brilliance. At such moments he couldn't be stopped. Go ahead and try tearing my father's house down, he replied. As fast as you do, I'll be rebuilding it, brick by brick and stone by stone. At which point the advisors gave up. Okay, they said. Keep the stupid house. Or words to that effect.

But when you insist on cleaving to the past, no matter how enchanted your memory of it might be (through the window a round white moon and a white spray of stars and swaying among the silver branches of the lindens hundreds of yellow lanterns, and a beautiful woman with round white breasts swinging to and fro on a golden swing, playing a lute and singing, il y a longtemps que je t'aime, over and over, t'aime t'aime, as the horses whinny and stamp their hooves on the marble paving stones and the nightingales go chook chook chook…) you have to endlessly revise the present to accommodate it.

Construction began in October; the following June the King wrote a memorandum. "His Majesty wishes to make use of everything newly made," he said, by which he evidently meant that having at last seen what the beautiful and the ugly looked like sewn together (to paraphrase Saint-Simon), he'd changed his mind and wanted the old chateau razed to the ground.

But Kings are almost never left to their own devices, and Louis was lucky enough to have Jean-Baptiste Colbert as his Overseer of Buildings. Colbert, like many cold-blooded people (his emblem was a grass snake), understood the value of collaboration. Immediately he called in his fiddlers three — Le Vau, Le Brun, and d'Orbay — and together they came up with the idea of the Envelope, a revolutionary design that sprawled in the Italian manner rather than towering in the French (so as not to dwarf the old chateau but rather to embrace it, albeit diffidently), the excessive length of its walls disguised by the insertion at regular intervals of columns and pilasters, the flatness of its roof by the addition of an ornate balustrade likewise interrupted at intervals by giant sculptures of Kings riding into battle, or by cloaks and flags and sunbursts, or by gods having their way with mortal women. Like a burned-out husk of a palace, observed Saint-Simon. Or maybe more like one whose roof and final story were always just about to be built and never finished. A monument to vastness and constriction.

One hundred toises from the Place d'Armes to the first of two ornate golden fences, fifty toises from the first fence to the second, forty-two toises across the Royal Court and up six long steps to the Marble Court, then thirty-four to the front entrance of the Old Chateau, looking less like a precious stone set in the heart of the new building than like the monstrously big head of a monstrously long-armed baby reaching out to draw you in. According to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, this was as it should be: the King's power had to be monstrous and his palace a grasping triumph of advertising, every gorgeous thing in it, every stick of inlaid furniture, every silk swag or linen napkin, every blown-glass goblet or emerald pendant, of French manufacture.

A toise equals six feet; that is, two manly strides or at least eighteen of the tiny gliding footsteps required to perfectly execute the "Versailles Walk," in which the soles of a woman's slippers — a queen's diamond-soled slippers, for example, invisible beneath the hem of her Rose Bertin gown — were made to glide soundlessly across the marble so she'd look like she was floating, like she wasn't entirely human but part queen, part ghost, in preparation for things to come.

I was a pretty girl; I glittered like the morning star. My red lips would open and it was anyone's guess what would come out. A burst of song. Something by Gluck, a pretty girl in pain maybe, impaled on the horn of the moon. The Kings of France, starting with Charlemagne. A joke.

You can make yourself remember almost anything, as long as it isn't too boring.

Louis XIII. Louis XIV. Louis XV.

The Old Rogue. The Sun King. Beloved.

Louis Louis Louis Louis. Louis as far as the eye could see. And what would my Louis be called?

Often when my tutor was talking to me I'd picture my brain like a storm drain in a Paris street, but whenever we put on plays I always took the biggest part and never needed prompting. War broke out after Prussian troops marched into Saxony in August of 1756. War broke out, not, How sweet the breeze, how bright the stars, here in the pine grove.

At a moment's notice I could dress like a lady's maid or a courtesan or a Greek goddess. Put on an accent, sway my hips. At a moment's notice I could assume a new identity, as opposed to being forced to be a witness to history. I didn't really want to be a witness to anything, except maybe my own life as I watched it play like dappled sun across the faces of friends and loved ones.

Whereas seeing your life reflected in the face of an enemy — Madame Du Barry's face, to be specific — is more like enduring an interminable account of, say, the Punic Wars. You are denied a role, your lips criticized for being too thick, your eyes for being without eyelashes. You die before the curtain comes up.

The Du Barry had a lavishly decorated suite of rooms at the palace, linked by a secret staircase to the King's, and for the most part she remained there, nestled in his lap like a large pink baby, dispensing advice on matters of the gravest political consequence. That she hadn't a clue, that before she was Louis XV's mistress she'd been a streetwalker, and not an especially good-looking one at that, was completely beside the point.

The King adored her. "Royal," she called him. "My thweet." The lisp was said to be an affectation. On fine afternoons she'd sashay forth to take the air, her Bengali page, Zamor, trailing behind in his pink velvet jacket and trousers and his snow white turban. Sometimes he would protect her big round head from rain or sun with a frilled parasol. Sometimes she would stumble, either because she was drunk, or because she insisted on wearing shoes that were too small, or because her legs were worn out from parting for the King.

Everyone knew he couldn't get enough of her; needless to say that was all she needed to lord it over me and my poor indifferent Louis. Just as everyone knew she was the sworn enemy of the King's chief minister, Choiseul, who'd urged an alliance between France and Austria for years, as well as my marriage to the Dauphin.

Boring boring boring. Could it possibly be more boring, aside from the people themselves, or the way I felt myself slipping between events like a goldfish between lily roots?

"The King's character resembles soft wax on which the most dissimilar objects can be randomly traced," Choiseul once observed. And in fact, for all his good looks and winning ways, the King wasn't particularly smart, his three specialities being coffee making, stag hunting, and knocking the top off soft-boiled eggs.