“Since none of my courtiers will admit Monsieur de Molière to their table,” said Louis, “I must needs set him down at mine, and show them that I count it an honor for the King of France to wait upon so great a man.”
Here, in this bed that Belloc and Molière had made together, Louis Quatorze died. From under the crimson and gold canopy which had witnessed the eternal levers and couchers, Louis rebuked the violent grief of two young pages who stood within the balustrade, that sanctum sanctorum which none under a prince of the blood or a high chancellor dare pass at any other time; they were weeping bitterly. “What!” exclaimed the king, “did ye, then, think I was immortal?” There was a time when he himself seemed to have thought so; but viewed by that vivid light that breaks through the mists of death, things wore a different aspect in his eyes; and the adulation which would fain have treated him as immortal, and which was during life as the breath of his nostrils to Louis, showed now as the empty bubble that it was.
No one ever again slept in the bed which had been honored by the last sigh of the Grand Monarque; the room remained henceforth unoccupied, and, with the exception of the pictures which have been removed, is still just as he left it. Louis carried his favorite pictures about with him wherever he went. “David,” by Domenichino, his best beloved of them all, is now to be seen at the Louvre; otherwise little has been altered in the chambre du roi; the bed and the ruelle are in their old place, also the table, on which a cold collation was laid every night in case of the king's awaking and feeling hungry; this precautionary little meal was called the en cas; and the name with the habit, which had given rise to it, is still perpetuated in many old-fashioned French families. Louis Quinze, from some superstitious feeling, could never bring himself to sleep in the death-chamber of his illustrious great-grandfather; he took possession of what was then the salle de billiard, a noble room opening [pg 102] into the œil-de-bœuf (bull's eye), so called from its having an œil-de-bœuf over the large window at the north end. In an alcove in this billiard hall, Louis XV. died. The adjoining œil-de-bœuf was filled with the courtiers, who dare not venture within the polluted atmosphere of the royal chamber, but stood outside it, consulting together in “guilty whispers” as to what they ought to do; dreading on one hand the reward of their cowardice if the king should recover, and fearing on the other to fly too soon with their servile congratulations to his successor. In the great court below another crowd was assembled, watching in breathless silence for the signal which was to proclaim the king's death. What a spectacle it was!—what a lesson for a king! The flatterers who yesterday had been his slaves, pandering to his vices, and helping to make him the abject creature that he was, abandoned him now that he was struggling with grim Death, and, all absorbed in selfish cares for their own interest, in speculations of the favor of the new king, they had no pity in their hearts for the master who could pay them no more. It came at last, the signal; the small flame of a candle was seen flickering through the darkness, and then held up at the window of the œil-de-bœuf. “Suddenly there was a noise,” says the historian of that ghastly scene, “like a roll of thunder, it was the courtiers rushing from the antechamber of the dead king to greet his successor.” Only his daughters had been brave enough to stand by the bedside of the dying man, and, now that he was gone, there was not one in all that multitude who could be induced to perform the last office of mercy towards his poor remains. It was imperative, nevertheless, that the body should be embalmed, and this appalling task devolved upon Andouillé, the late king's surgeon. The Duc de Villequier went up to him and reminded him of it; he knew that the operation must insure certain death to the operator, but that was not his concern.
“It is your duty, monsieur,” said the duke; and he was coolly turning away when Andouillé stopped him. “Yes,” he replied, “it is my duty, and it is yours to hold the head.” De Villequier had forgotten this; he made no answer, but left the room, and nothing more was said about the embalmment. The body was hustled into a coffin, and smuggled rather than conveyed in the dead of the night to S. Denis, a few menials accompanying the King of France to his last resting-place. The spirit of French loyalty may be said to have been buried with Louis Quinze; “the divinity that doth hedge a king” was that night laid low in France, wrapped in the shroud that covered the unutterable mass of corruption consigned like a dog to the ready-made grave in S. Denis. Le roi could never again be to the nation what he had been heretofore. Le roi est mort, vive le roi![73] ceased to be the watchword of its fealty; le roi, that being invested not merely with supreme authority, but with a sort of vague personal sacredness that has no parallel in modern loyalty, died with Louis Quinze, never to be resuscitated. The miserable death of the libertine prince, fit ending to an ignoble life, came upon his people in the light of a divine judgment, swift and awful, and dealt the last blow at that prestige which had for generations been the bulwark of king-worship and shaded with its mysterious reverence the iniquities of the throne. No man suffers alone for his sins, but [pg 103] how much more truly may this be said of kings! Who could measure the depth of the gulf that Louis XV. had dug through his long reign for those who were to come after him, and realize the consequences of his evil deeds to future generations of Frenchmen? There is no greater fallacy than to attribute to an age the responsibility of its own destinies; none probably ever saw the beginning and end of its own history, for good or evil, but less than any other can the period of the Revolution be said to have witnessed this unity. We must look much further back to trace the rising of the red flood that inundated France in '93. It was the insane extravagance of Louis XIV.'s reign and the official depravity of the succeeding one that sowed the harvest that was to be reaped in fire by the innocent victims of a corruption which for a whole century had been seething as in the caldron of the Prophet's vision, till it boiled over in the mad frenzy of the Revolution, and swallowed up not only the monarch, but the soul and reason of France, in a deluge of exasperated hate and suicidal revenge. Louis Seize, the martyred king who was to expiate the follies and crimes of his predecessors, next passes before us along the galleries of Versailles. There is an interval of peace, a short halcyon time of pastorals and idyls, we see Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in Arcadia, we hear Trianon ringing with the music of her light-hearted laughter, we see her choosing a friend,[74] and braving the jealous anger that makes a crime of her friendship though it be wise, and rebukes her mirth though it be innocent; but the queen turns a deaf ear to all warning sounds and shuts her eyes to the gathering clouds. Imprudent Marie Antoinette! Ill-adapted wife of timid, hesitating, magnanimous Louis Seize, the Bourbon of whom it was written with truth:
“Louis ne sut qu'aimer et pardonner,
S'il avait su punir, il aurait su regner.”[75]
He loved and forgave to the end, but he never learned to punish. Warnings were not wanting, but he would not heed them. See him standing in the embrasure of the window of that cabinet du roi whence Louis Quatorze ruled the kings and peoples of Europe; a new power has arisen; it is the people's turn to rule the king, his brow is clouded, his lip trembles, not with fear—that base emotion never stirred the soul of Louis Seize—but with anguish, perplexity, doubts in himself that amounted to despair. He listens to the murmurs of the crowd down below; and to De Brézé, who repeats, in tremulous accents, Mirabeau's message of tremendous import: “Go tell the king that the will of the people has brought us here, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence!” That force he knew full well would never be appealed to; it was not the people who should be driven hence, it was they who would drive the king. Presently we see the ponderous state coach jolting slowly down the Avenue de Paris, the first stage of the royal martyrs towards the guillotine; the mob, in a frenzy of drunken triumph, jostled it from side to side, pressing rudely through the windows to stare at their victims, and insulting them by thrusting the red cap into their faces, and shouting as they go: “The baker and the bakeress! now we have caught them, and the people shall have bread!” This journey dates a new era in the annals of Versailles, it is the death-knell of the pleasant days of royalty; [pg 104] there are to be no more fêtes pastorales at Trianon, no more merry children of France careering over the flowery terraces, making the sombre alleys bright and the gay flowers brighter with the sweet melody of child laughter; all this is gone, and passed like a dream. “The old order of things has vanished, making place for the new.” Soon we shall see the palace of Louis Quatorze stripped of its costly furniture, invaded by the rabble, and pillaged from garret to cellar. The Convention will deem it right to utilize the “foregoing abode of the tyrants” by turning it into a hospital; they will transport the invalids to Versailles, but the rheumatic old heroes will find the apartments of the Grand Monarque too grand to be comfortable, they will complain of their pains and aches being aggravated by the draughts, and beg to be taken back to their homely quarters, and the Convention, in its benevolence, will accede to the request.
Louis XVIII. was anxious to fix his residence at Versailles, and went the length of spending six millions of francs on repairing the façade, which had been sadly battered by the Revolution, but he found that the expense of refurnishing the palace would have been too much for the exhausted finances of France; so he gave up the idea.
Louis Philippe restored it to its ancient splendor, but not for his own use; he made it over to the nation as a museum, where they might go and enjoy themselves, and see all the glories of their country commemorated. Many of the victories of the grande armée were painted to his order to complete the series already decorating the walls. Versailles has retained ever since this national character. Under the Second Empire it was used occasionally for fêtes given to foreign princes; the most magnificent of these was the one prepared for the Queen of England when she visited Napoleon III. after his marriage.
France has undergone many strange vicissitudes, and her palaces have harbored many unlikely guests; but among the strangest on record none can assuredly compete with the recent experiences of Versailles. If the spirit of Louis XIV. be permitted sometimes to haunt the scene of his earthly pride, what must his feelings have been during the last two years! What did he feel on beholding the halls which had echoed to his conquering step held by the victorious soldiers of Germany, and vacated by them to make way for the President of the French Republic? But this crowning enormity stopped short at the threat. The chambre du roi was indeed placed at the disposal of the President, but whether it was that he shrank from the profanation, or feared the vast proportions of the great king's palace, as likely to prove too large a frame for the representative of a republic, he declined taking up his abode there. Versailles continues still to be the resort of the people and of travellers from all parts of the world.