True Pleasures (16 page)

In 1662, the ageing duc de La Rochefoucauld fell in love with the youthful Madame de Lafayette. Until his death in 1680, every day he climbed the great hill on the Left Bank from rue Bonaparte to rue Vaugirard to visit
his mistress. In Madame de Lafayette's cozy salon they pored over his maxims, and refined her novella of passion,
La Princesse de Clèves
, which Nancy Mitford would translate into English three hundred years later. The couple never displayed affection in public or gave the least sign of their attachment to each other. But they spent every day together. One of their friends, Madame de Sévigné's cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, remarked of their relationship:
In such cases there is always love, and even when old age has intervened there is still something left which, in the eyes of the Church, is as inadmissible as love itself
.

This story was very important to Nancy Mitford; she told it many times as fact and fiction. To her it signalled the perfection of the classical love story. There must have been a deep resonance for her in La Rochefoucauld's opinion that
Good marriages do exist, but not delectable ones
.

Nancy Mitford was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease shortly after relocating to Versailles in 1967. The disease meant years of excruciating pain and multiple operations. As her illness advanced, she stopped receiving most visitors, preferring to conduct her friendships by letter. Gaston Palewski was one of the few whom she saw.

One morning her lover of nearly thirty years had a sudden and overwhelming intuition. He hurriedly made the trip from Paris to Versailles, and arrived just as Nancy was falling into unconsciousness. He sat beside Nancy and took her hand. He thought he saw her smile. He was the last person to see her before her death.

It was a fitting end to her own entirely classical romance.

As I wander down rue Monsieur, the old man returns on the other side. We bow and smile to each other as we pass by.

‘We are going to a house,' says Rachel emphatically, ‘a
house
. Why are these people dressed for a hiking trip to the wilderness?'

Rachel and I are on the train to Versailles, and frankly, this is not an inspiring start to the trip. The Americans look appalling. What is it with microfiber tracksuits and huge sports shoes?

‘Maybe they think they'll need a helicopter rescue,' I say, ‘and it'll be easier to pick them out in those fluorocolors.'

‘And why,' asks Rachel, ‘do they need great hulking backpacks with supplies for a month?'

I once read an article about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the early days of their famous and golden marriage. In a gesture of extreme romanticism, one that had a Hollywood
Roi Soleil
kind of grandeur about it, Tom Cruise acquired Versailles for a day. According to the reports, the beautiful couple wandered hand-in-hand through the gardens and the château. Alone, untroubled. No queues, no hawkers, no backpacks blocking their view. Just their radiant orthodontic perfection and the glories of Versailles. I remember feeling a bitter pang both at their privileged access to beauty and history, and, snobbishly, peevishly, at their ignorant unworthiness of it.

But now I wonder: what could those two possibly have thought of it all? The main château at Versailles is, I think, rather a disappointment at first. It's far less grand than you expect. And there are certainly prettier places in Paris itself – the Hôtel de Soubise for example, in the Marais, gives you a far better sense of aristocratic seventeenth-century living. As you wander Versailles you feel rather
disconcerted by the empty rooms, the cracked mirrors, the uneven layout. In the main château at least, there isn't the parade of revolution-provoking excess that the visitor secretly craves.

The thing is, Versailles unpeopled makes no sense. The whole point of Versailles was the crowd. The soldiers, the courtesans, the nobles, the gawking foreigners, the aspirants, the supplicants. Like Tom and Nicole, the
Roi Soleil
needed an audience. I think about this as we pass the African hawkers at the gate, and the busloads of Germans, and the hiking Americans. All the world came to Versailles to pay homage to the aura of power around the Sun King. All the world still does.

This time, however, Rachel and I aren't going to do the regular tour. Three days ago I rang and organized for us to attend a tour of
Les Petits Appartements de Louis XV
or, as we gleefully referred to them, the mistresses' rooms. The voice I spoke to was very polite and very competent. I was careful to make sure I understood what she said and to make myself understood in return. I
may
have asked her one time too many to repeat dates and times to be sure that I had got it right. But on the whole I thought my French wasn't too bad. Not too bad at all.

Evidently she didn't agree.

‘Madame, I assure you that all conversation will be in French. There will be NO opportunity for discussion of any kind whatsoever at all in English.'

‘OK,' I said.

‘You will follow the tour exactly as instructed.'

‘OK,' I said.

‘There will be no opportunity for you to ask any questions.'

‘OK,' I said.
Gee
.

At the entrance it's not hard to spot our group. The men and women are on average five kilos lighter than the hikers. The women wear light trench-coats and scarves, with sensible court shoes and handbags. Their hair is shiny, short and neat. The men all wear tailored jackets. Rachel and I have found ourselves among the French
bourgeoisie
, practical, sober, nicely cut. Our tour guide is another refined and solemn French woman. We sidle up behind them as our tour begins: mortified by my telephonic rebuke, Rachel and I are determined to blend into the group just as neatly as two slices in a baguette basket.

Our first stop is an engraving of the famous Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees, where the King seduced Jeanne, Madame d'Etioles, later Madame de Pompadour. The ball took place, we are told, in February 1745, when Jeanne was just twenty-four years old. For this masked ball the King devised a unique romantic ploy. He and seven other men covered their heads in tall masks, shaped like clipped yew trees. Everyone knew the King was under one of these ridiculous masks, bobbing loftily around the ballroom, but it was impossible to tell which one. While one of his fellow conspirators kept a hopeful Duchesse conspicuously engaged, the King dashed into the corner with the pretty and accomplished Madame d'Etioles. It was the beginning of the love affair that lasted until she died twenty years later.

I smile, at the solemn rendition as much as at the absurd tale. Rachel chuckles as she examines the engraving. But the rest of the group merely nods gravely. A kingly romance, even conducted under a tree mask two feet high, is apparently no laughing matter.

Now we head up the stairs to
Les petits appartements
. We
wander through a series of small and charming rooms, and rooms within rooms, which are clearly made for living, not posing. There's lovely gold and white wood panelling and gilded fireplaces and a golden parquet floor. Here and there we see pieces of furniture, reminders of the exquisite artistry of the period. A table of black lacquer and gilt, inlaid with delicately colored birds on the tip of flight. An oyster silk chair covered with roses. A vase as fresh-minted as a bunch of flowers. With la Pompadour installed here, this became the new heart of Versailles, with a traffic jam of art dealers, philosophers, travellers, artists, architects and craftsmen, musicians and messengers crowding into la Pompadour's cozy and intimate rooms. Every now and then the King would turn up and everyone would bow deeply and scurry off, only to return later. The duc de Cröy expected to disapprove of the bourgeois mistress, but came away enchanted:
I found her charming, both in looks and character; she was at her
toilette
and couldn't have been prettier
. Voltaire, whom Pompadour was instrumental in appointing to the lucrative and influential positions of court historian and gentleman-in-ordinary to the King, concluded that:
It was more profitable to say four words to a king's mistress than to write a hundred volumes
.

Our French guide tells about La Pompadour's magical life at court with the tidy sobriety of a Sunday school mistress. The group nods and rests its chin thoughtfully on its hand.

From la Pompadour's we move on to Madame du Barry's rooms. Contemporaries sometimes called La Pompadour a whore, but Madame du Barry was the real thing. She was well known in Paris and counted several members of the court among her clients. Legend has it that the jaded Louis XV caught sight of Jeanne du Barry
in 1768 in the Hall of Mirrors. When summoned to meet him she did the unthinkable – she gave a deep curtsy and then kissed the King on the lips, smiling roguishly out of her hooded aqua eyes.

As we stroll through her rooms our guide acknowledges Madame du Barry's low beginnings, but assures us that Madame du Barry became a woman of considerable culture and refinement, adding her own luster to the glories of France. The group nods in grave agreement. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

We see the small but elaborate library, to discover that its only purpose was to disguise the secret doorway to the King's staircase. We see Jeanne's tiled English-style bathroom where she spent hours and which provides a clue to her beauty: while all the other courtiers were powdered and puffed and perfumed, she was simply, radiantly clean. Golden blonde hair, milk and roses complexion, and most of all, those eyes. One English visitor to the court said simply of the new mistress:
Her eyes are of a lively light blue and she has the most wanton look in them that I ever saw
.

Then we come across a long reclining statue. It's a full-length nude of Madame du Barry in white marble. As she lies there in her glass case on a black gilded base, Louis XV's mistress appears rather like a pornographic Snow White. Her jutting breasts, her turning bottom, her curving hip … even the marble fabric which winds around her body seems sinuous and erotic. True to form, our tour group murmurs solemnly as it walks past the case. Not a hint of a knowing smile, no risqué comments, not even an admiring glance at the superb physical confidence of the subject or the beauty of the marble form.

I want to say something to Rachel. Trying to ascribe to Madame du Barry the same level of culture as Madame du Pompadour would be foolish. She was a poor girl, a vulgar girl. She knew nothing about art, or architecture or culture. She didn't read serious books or play music like La Pompadour. Why pretend she did? And yet, she was an uncommonly kind and decent person. All the records show that you could count on Madame du Barry's tender heart and her gift for friendship.

And still our group retains its earnest demeanor.

It's a cliché that Australians are irreverent about our history. But it's true that we lack a certain awe. After all, our national story is brief, makeshift, often brutal and somewhat inconclusive. If we didn't laugh about it, we'd probably cry. It must be very different to be French. There's that long and complex history to sustain, the grand national narrative to be nourished and fortified. For the sake of
la gloire
, it seems that even naughty Madame du Barry must be made respectable.

As the tour comes to an end, Rachel and I finally let down our guard. We are about to giggle and nudge each other, when, to our surprise, a member of the tour group approaches us.

‘You are the Australian student, no?' she says, in English.

‘Yes,' I say.

‘My name is Professor Verdy. We spoke on the phone.'

She smiles, and I suddenly see the good humor in her soft brown eyes. I realize now she's been watching Rachel and I behave ourselves.

‘Thank you so much,' we say. ‘It was wonderful, fascinating.'

‘When you come to Versailles next time, ring me,' she says. ‘Come again.'

It's a curious thing, the charm of the French woman. The reserve, the coolness, and then the unexpected surge of warmth.