Kathryn Davis: Versailles

An unfortunate site for the seat of Bourbon power, really: a hillock of unstable sand in the middle of a swamp in a wind tunnel of a valley.

Of course subsequent French theoreticians have embraced the idea of Versailles's misalignment, perhaps in the same spirit with which they consider frog legs a culinary triumph.

It's always better to make something out of nothing — that's the French way.

And then the bed curtains part. How many nights? A thousand and one, give or take a few?

Though instead of telling tales I scratch my husband's flea bites, the only itch he'll let me scratch, poor thing. The bed curtains part and in he comes, my very own King of France, just as he did that first night so many years ago, his little eyes blinking uncontrollably in what I took to be a colossal effort to see me in all my tender dishabille, though I now know he was merely trying to stay awake. The sound of wind, of rain pattering onto the leaves of the orange trees, and, even at so late an hour, feet racing up and down the Stairways of the Hundred Steps.

Versailles in the spring — beloved Versailles! — frogs croaking deep within the basins of her fountains, in the puddles left by the afternoon's storm. The anguished cry of a star-crossed lover, a few far-off rumbles of thunder like dice flung across a gaming table. All the remembered sounds of my earliest acquaintance with the place, but muffled, muffled, and then, for the briefest fraction of an instant, vivid again…

It was my wedding night. I had just stepped out of my bridal gown embroidered with white diamonds the size of hazelnuts. The bed curtains parted and there was my new husband's face, strangely bridelike itself in its frame of white organdy and displaying the same slack-jawed expression I'd noticed earlier that evening on his grandfather's face, bored to death — as any sensible person would be — by the endless hands of cavagnole and endless trays of hors d'oeuvres, though without the old King's dark catlike eyes, his interest in female anatomy, my breasts in particular. The old King was looking straight at them as he warned his grandson not to overeat and made no effort to conceal his annoyance when Louis sagely observed that he always slept better on a full stomach.

Which is probably why he chose to bring a plum tart with him into the nuptial chamber, holding it tenderly on his palm like a pet. He took his place on the right side of the bed and, without saying a word, began to cut the tart into many tiny pieces with the same pocketknife I'd seen him use on the Host. Singing off key, a song about the hunt, lalalalala, and then waving the blade in my face, grudgingly, as if to suggest that if I were really hungry I could scrape clean the knife — no thank you! — with my teeth.

A tall fellow, Louis, a regular hop-pole, narrowly built and long-boned, though you could hardly tell since the lanky youth he might've been if he hadn't been forced to be King when all he really wanted was to draw maps and forge locks had already gotten swaddled in layers and layers of flesh.

If he seemed sullen on our wedding night it wasn't so much because he didn't want to share the tart with me. It wasn't even the bed he didn't want to share. It was the life.

Sweet smell of orange blossoms mixed with other less intoxicating smells, smoke in the wall hangings, shit in the hallways. Shit, not excrement, for that is how I am, have always been and always will be — I adore the vernacular!

Lean close to a man and you can smell it on him, no matter how diligently he strives to hide it. Lean close and you can also see a constellation of flea bites on the delicate skin behind the ear, but try to kiss him there — just go ahead and try — and he'll brush your lips away like you're the flea.

Ma petite puce, I teased, practicing my French, and through clenched teeth he replied, Laissez-moi, which I knew enough to know meant Leave me alone. Not even a flicker of humor, or that widening of the wings of the nostrils that, in my brother Karl at least, always meant he was suppressing a laugh. I crooked a finger and began to scratch first one bite, then another, until I had him moaning with pleasure. Louder, I prompted, because of course I knew they were all there, the Queen's Guard and a thousand revelers, laughing and drinking and fornicating on the other side of the Bull's Eye window, waiting for some sign that the Dauphin wasn't, to use his grandfather's phrase, a "laggard in the service of Aphrodite."

In those days I was also compared to Hebe, Psyche, Antiope, Flora, and Minerva, though in the case of the last less due to her braininess than the way she started life as one colossal headache.

Eventually I drew blood. Voilà! I said. Just a measly drop or two — but once the court laundresses spread the word, let the court gossips draw their own conclusions.

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.