Versailles

Marble Court

Beginning with Louis XIII, the royal bedchamber of every King who lived at Versailles looked out across the Marble Court, facing east toward Paris. Even before it was Versailles, when it was merely a glorified haymow for Louis XIII to romp in with his girlfriends, the King's Bedchamber was strategically positioned. Louis XV had a secret window installed through which he could see the world but the world couldn't see him; Louis XVI, in a rare farsighted moment, added a telescope.

The day's first sun falls across the black and white paving stones that give the court its name. Italian marble, luminous and fine-textured, ordered during the second building campaign by Louis Le Vau, who'd no sooner watched it set in place than he began to cough up blood and die. It was his idea to lay three new steps atop the existing two, preventing carriage access, to sink a pool in the center of the courtyard, and to position huge cast-iron birdcages in the corners, filled with disoriented birds from foreign lands who'd sing their exotic songs at all hours of the day and night. By the time Louis XV was lying dead in the royal bedchamber, the birdcages were gone and so was the pool, and it was once again possible to admire the perfection of Le Vau's black-and-white diaperwork pattern, especially if you shared the dead King's habit of wandering around on the roof after dark, conversing with your guests down the chimney flues.

The King is dead! Long live the King! Hours had elapsed since that cry rang through the chateau's rabbit warren of hallways, its last echoes still trapped in vast stone reservoirs far below the ground. The sun had reached the height of its arc and now was plummeting past the Lizard Fountains and into the Grand Canal, setting the windows of the Hall of Mirrors aflame and filling the Marble Court with the building's own shadow. Ordinary birds were singing, larks and warblers; most of the carriages ferrying the frightened courtiers from the house of pestilence had arrived at their destination, and everyone was letting out deep sighs of relief. Checking to make sure no unusual blemishes lurked under their face powder. Toasting their good fortune.

Meanwhile in the royal bedchamber there was work to be done.

"You must open the King's body and embalm it," said the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Chief Surgeon, who knew that to do so was to sign his own death warrant.

"I will if you'll help by holding his head," the Chief Surgeon craftily replied.

And so it happened that Louis XV's heart — unlike the heart of every other King of France before him — wasn't removed from his chest cavity and pickled in herbs and spices before being sent to one of the Paris churches, where it would be accorded the kind of adoration generally reserved for a piece of the true cross. No, Beloved was buried at Saint- Denis with all his organs intact, albeit liquescent, inside him.

Nor would his heart be among those royal hearts sold during the Revolution to a painter named Martin Drolling. It was said that Drolling pounded them into "mummy," and that they lent the pigment he used in painting L'Intérieur d'une Cuisine (a cozy view of peasants at work) unusual brilliance and luster.