In spite of all this, no sober-minded student of art or history will ever consider Versailles, the palace and the park, as other than a superb and a spectacular demonstration of the taste of the times in which it was planned, built and lived in.
Versailles was begun in 1624 by Louis XIII, who built here a humble hunting-lodge for the disciples of Saint Hubert of whom he was the royal head. So humble an erection was it that the monarch referred to it simply as a "petite maison" and paid for it out of his own pocket, a rare enough proceeding at that epoch.
The critical Bassompierre called it a "chetif chateau," and Saint-Simon referred to it as a "house of cards." Manifestly, then, it was no great thing. It was, however, a comfortable country-house, surrounded by a garden and a more ample park.
It was not Lemercier, the presiding genius of the Louvre at this time, but an unknown by the name of Le Roy, whom Louis XIII chose as his architect.
Boyceau traced the original parterres with a central basin at a crossroads of two wide avenues. Each of the four compartments thus made was ornamented with broderies and trimmed hedges, and the open spaces were ingeniously filled with parti-coloured sands, or earth. A parterre of flowers immediately adjoined the palace and rudimentary alleys and avenues stretched off towards the wood. Although designed by Boyceau, this work was actually executed by his nephew, Jacques de Menours, who, with difficulty, collected his pay. His books of account showed that in five years, from 1631 to 1636, he had drawn but once a year a sum varying from fifteen hundred to four thousand livres while in the same period the king had spent on the rest of the work at Versailles two hundred and thirty-eight thousand livres, thirty-two sols, six deniers, nearly one million one hundred thousand francs of the money of to-day.
The first of the outdoor embellishments of the palace at Versailles is the great Cour Royale, or the Cour d'Honneur, which opens out behind the long range of iron gates facing upon the Place d'Armes. At the foot of this entrance court is an extension called the Cour de Marbre. This Cour de Marbre, on January 5, 1757, was the scene of the infamous attack on Louis XV by Damiens, just as the king was starting out for the Trianon.
A thick redingote saved the king's life; but for "this mere pin-prick," according to Voltaire, the monarch went immediately to bed, and five times in succession sought absolution for his sins. Sins lay heavy even on royal heads in those days.
Damiens was but a thick-witted, superstitious valet, who, more or less persecuted by the noble employers with whom he had been in service at various times, sought to avenge himself, not on them, but on their king, as the figurehead of all that was rotten in the social hierarchy. Louis, heretofore known as the "Bien Aimé," had become suddenly unpopular because of the disastrous war against England and Germany, and his prodigal dissipation of public moneys.
Cour de Marbre, Versailles