The Queen's Lover Read Online Free PDF Page B

as they kept away from the royal apartments) had a habit of snacking as they ambled through Versailles—a lamb chop here, an apple or pastry there—and bits of food could be found scattered throughout hundreds of rooms: in the upholstery, under the edge of carpets, in the bottom folds of curtains…. Well, the rodents had a ball. No courtier ever loved a palace as much as rats loved Versailles. They mostly feasted at night, and every morning their droppings were serpentinely scattered throughout the
Schloss
, to be swept into closets or under the carpet byindolent domestics. All kinds of diseases were obviously spread by this negligence. Beyond the habitual ailments that yearly decimated hundreds of courtiers—typhoid, smallpox—various respiratory and digestive illnesses were spread by the nightly visitors. Versailles habitués were constantly wheezing, coughing, aggravating the dire conditions created by the vagrant barefoot children, prostitutes, and inebriated courtiers who pissed and defecated in corners of the grand galleries.
    Versailles’s rats were night creatures. Come daylight and the mice prepared for their
grand bal
, having caused court ladies, for over a century, to react with various degrees of hysteria. Mademoiselle de la Vallière, the gorgeous, ill-fated blond waif who had been among the first of Louis XIV’s favorites, used to leap up on the top of her spinet in fear of the creatures, creating cacophonous sounds as her feet hit the keys. The XV’s wife, Marie Leczinskaya, is said to have jumped up on chairs at the sight of the mice, emitting shrieks that her husband, in his first, enamored years, found adorable. On the other hand Marie-Thérèse, legal wife of the XIV, was so used to all forms of critters that she amiably swallowed whatever spiders floated on her hot chocolate.
    But Versailles’s filth did not repel me as much as a more vexing blight: its sheer stench. Coming from a nation in which cleanliness is looked on as being close to you-know-what-ness, in which even those not fortunate enough to own a bathing vessel take a daily plunge into the nearest pond, the first time I walked down the Galerie des Glaces amid its great crowd of unwashed nobles I came very close to fainting. I had the wits to head for a corner of the gallery; I collapsed right behind a large chair, rolled up like a child, my kerchief held close to my face, recalling that Toinette, brought up in the same principles of hygiene as I, was thought to be bizarre for insisting on a daily bath. So there I was behind my chair when a kindly woman, someone’s chambermaid, came to my aid with a whiff of smelling salts—never did the scent of lavender seem more paradisiac than at that moment. Upon fully coming to Idecided never to enter this space again without covering my face with a large handkerchief, as the queen was often seen doing. Suffocation if not asphyxiation, I decided, was the essence of Versailles. Think of it: the palace that the rulers of Europe’s greatest capitals—Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Stockholm—most aspired to emulate was a vast compound reeking of filth and befouled with ordure.
    No wonder many courtiers followed suit, and stank as powerfully as the site. Take one particular high-ranking noble, for instance, the Vicomte de Saint-Aignan, whose malodorousness reached legendary proportions. He was a tall, elegant, enormously amiable man, always fastidiously dressed, loving to show off his jewels and decorations, whose smell was detectable two or three rooms away. Writing to Sweden, I kept searching for similes to describe his stench: he smelled like several dozens of pigs who had just rolled in their excrement, like several dozens of overripe, foot-wide Camembert cheeses stored for months in a warm closet. It was said that even as a child he had refused as much as a monthly bath; and that in his late teens, the day of his presentation at court, when his attendants tried to force him into a tub he fought