Versailles: The Man Who Would Be Queen

Tags

Alexander Vlahos, Chevalier of Lorraine, Comte de Guiche, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Homosexuality, Louis XIV, Philippe of Orleans, Versailles

One of the things that really stands out in Versailles is its depiction of Louis’ brother Philippe, the duc d’Orleans (Alexander Vlahos), as blatantly and unrepentantly homosexual. So this post is going to look at how accurate that depiction is.

 

In the Show

Versailles’ Philippe lets it all hang out, so to speak. In the first episode, he makes out with his boyfriend, Philippe, the Chevalier de Lorraine (Evan Williams) as servants wander by. (To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to this Philippe as the Chevalier.) He openly flaunts the Chevalier in front of his wife Henrietta (Noémie Schmidt) and pretty much everyone else. He has a taste for group sex with men. Most startlingly of all, in one episode he comes to a formal event wearing a dress (well, skirts and a corset without a proper over-dress–thanks, Frock Flicks, for pointing that out!) and when someone sniggers about it, Philippe draws a knife and stabs the man in the eye.

Vlahos as Philippe, getting very unhappy that someone doesn’t like his outfit

The Chevalier eventually gets entangled in a plot to overthrow the king and gets sent into exile, but early in season 2 he’s back and being fabulous, making grand statements about which color is going be the winter color this year. At the same time, someone poisons Henrietta, who dies in bloody agony.

 

In Reality

The show’s depiction of Philippe is broadly accurate. If anything, it tones him down.

Louis and Philippe were the sons of Louis XIII, who had a great deal of trouble with his younger brother Gaston, who was Louis’ presumptive heir until the birth of his nephew Louis in 1638, just four years before the end of Louis XIII’s reign. That fact made Gaston the center of a great deal of intrigue and he twice had to go into exile for plotting against his brother. When the Fronde (a revolt of the nobility against the Crown) broke out, Gaston fought on both sides, and at the end of the revolt, he was sentenced to internal exile at Blois. As a result of this, Louis XIII’s queen, Anne of Austria, was extremely worried that Philippe might grow up to become a problem for her older son.

Philippe, duc d’Orleans

Anne feared that Philippe might some day challenge Louis or become a center of opposition to him, so she seems to have intentionally tried to cultivate a taste for feminine things in her son as a way to make him less threatening and perhaps even distasteful to the nobility. She referred to him as “my little girl,’ declared that he was “the prettiest child in the whole world,” and dressed him more as a girl than as a boy. That shaped him for life. As an adult, he was always comfortable in women’s clothing, and frequently attended balls dressed as a woman. He was noted for his love of ribbons, perfume, rouge, and high heels, although those things were not necessarily gendered female in the 17^thcentury. Both Louis and Philippe was quite short and wore heels to add inches to their stature. So the show could put him in women’s clothing a lot more than it does without distorting the facts. This is a rare case of the media toning down historical excess instead of exaggerating it or making it up.

That’s Philippe on the right

Anne was probably relieved when Philippe began to show a taste for men. In 1658, when Philippe was 18, rumors began to circulate that the duke of Nevers had “corrupted” Philippe with the “Italian vice”, and it was around that time that he first made contact with the Chevalier, with whom he formed a life-long, though hardly faithful, relationship.

Throughout his life, and regardless of his two wives, Philippe displayed a marked taste for handsome young men, whom he tended to shower attention and money on. He blew them kisses as he walked through Versailles, and much court gossip turned on the question of his favorites. Since Philippe was the king’s brother (and accorded the courtesy appellation of Monsieur, something the show leaves out), he was invariably an important political figure, although after the birth of Louis’ first son, his importance declined slightly. Who he was sleeping with was therefore an issue that could affect politics, especially in the intrigue-filled environment of Versailles.

The Chevalier de Lorraine

The Chevalier was, strictly speaking, not French, since Lorraine was outside the royal domain. He was described as being “as beautiful as an angel,” although portraits of him don’t apparently do him justice, at least not by modern standards, He was considered vain, arrogant, greedy, and manipulative, and Philippe was an ideal partner for him. The perception at court was that he could easily manipulate Philippe into doing what the Chevalier wanted, since Philippe loved him deeply.

The result of this was that Philippe’s domestic life was exceptionally complex, even by the standards of a Jerry Springer show. Philippe’s first wife, Henrietta, was understandably jealous of the Chevalier, who lived in the same household with her. Philippe told her that he needed the Chevalier’s permission to sleep with her. In 1670, she persuaded King Louis to first imprison the Chevalier and then exile him. But Philippe prevailed upon his brother to call the Chevalier back after just a few months. When Henrietta died a few months later, there were rumors that the Chevalier had orchestrated her poisoning, although an autopsy determined that she had died of peritonitis. (Note that the show gets both the order of events and the cause of Henrietta’s death wrong.)

Henrietta of England

In 1682, the Chevalier got in trouble again, this time for introducing Louis’ illegitimate son Louis de Bourbon to part of their circle. Philippe and the Chevalier had established a sort of secret club for men who liked men. This club met at taverns and brothels and had elaborate rules of a somewhat sacrilegious nature. When Bourbon was 15, the Chevalier introduced him to the club and required him to sign an oath of obedience to the club’s rules, an oath signed not in ink but in Bourbon’s semen, which the Chevalier helped him to collect. Eventually rumors of the club’s orgies reached the king, Most of the club’s members were exiled as a result, but Bourbon simply got sent to fight in the Netherlands, where he died the next year..

Back at court a few years later, the Chevalier got in trouble a third time for orchestrating the illicit marriage of Philippe’s son to one of Louis’ illegitimate daughters.

But Phillipe living with his wife and his boyfriend was just the start. He was also involved with another member of his household, Armand, the Comte de Guiche, who like the Chevalier was handsome, vain, and manipulative. Armand was Philippe’s lover, but he is widely thought to have been Henrietta’s lover as well. That apparently wasn’t enough for Guiche, because in 1665 he also tried to romance Louise de La Valliere, who was Louis’ chief mistress at the time. Louis exiled him in 1662 for plotting with Henrietta to break up Louis and Louise.

The Comte de Guiche

On top of all that, Philippe also found time for a relationship with Antoine Coiffier, a minor noble who served as his head huntsman (whose father, incidentally, may have been a lover of Louis XIII). He is also rumored to have had a mistress, who might have been the married duchess of Mercoeur, since he flirted with her in public.

That last one demonstrates that Philippe might have been bisexual. He definitely had a complicated relationship with his first wife, with whom he had four children, as well as two miscarriages. When he married his second wife, the German Elizabeth Charlotte, he remarked that her plainness meant it would be hard for him to make love to her, but he still managed to father three children with her, including his only surviving son. So while he clearly had a strong preference for men, he doesn’t seem to have been exclusively homosexual as the show presents it.

 

Philippe and Louis

The two brothers had a rather complicated relationship, something the show manages to capture. In the show, Philippe says on more than one occasion that he was raised to not be the ‘cloud that covers the sun’, and whether or not the real Philippe ever said that, it certainly does describe the way their childhood played out. Anne expected Louis to be a very studious boy, but discouraged Philippe from book learning and encouraged him to play and be frivolous. The duc de Saint-Simon, whose enormous memoires are our best window into life at court, says that as an adult, Philippe was weak of mind and body, excessively timid, obsequious to his brother, and loved to gossip, often making up rumors just to see what would happen. He was also quarrelsome. But despite that, he was well-loved and a central figure at Versailles. When he died of a stroke in 1701, he was deeply mourned and Saint-Simon says that the court felt lifeless and still.

Louis, perhaps following Anne’s advice, worried that Philippe could have become a threat to him and worked to keep him away from any real power, and generally ordered him to leave when it was time for Louis to conduct business. Despite that, Louis adored his brother, who was his only sibling and probably the only person who could really understand him. We might imagine that Louis envied Philippe a little the freedom that he had. Although Louis seems to have despised homosexuality, which was a capital crime in 17^thcentury France, he tolerated Philippe’s taste in men, although he was not willing to extend that tolerance to Philippe’s lovers when their other affairs became public. When Louis’ second wife complained that he needed to stamp out homosexuality at the court, Louis replied “should I start with my own brother?” That may explain why Louis was willing to turn a blind eye to the same-sex shenanigans at his court. He loved his brother too much to punish him, but punishing other examples of homosexuality at court would have made him look too much of a hypocrite.

To add further complexity to their relationship, Philippe was a far better soldier than Louis was. In 1667 he handled himself well during an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1677, he led the French forces at the Battle of Cassel against William III of Orange. He routed William and won the admiration of the court, but his victory irked Louis, who wished to be seen as a conqueror, and who may have worried that Philippe’s accomplishments were making him a threat. As a result, Louis never allowed his brother to participate in military matters again. What seems to have impressed people the most about Philippe’s victory was his intense bravery during the battle; it was joked that he was more afraid of getting sunburned or blackened from gunsmoke than he was of getting hit by a musket-ball.

Louis loved paintings that presented him as a conqueror

So overall, Versailles’ depiction of Philippe and his relationship with his wives, his brother, and the Chevalier all seem pretty reasonable. Although the show tones down some of the luridness of Philippe’s private life, I think it captures something of his complex relationship with Louis and with the Chevalier. Was he actually as frustrated with his situation as the show makes out? I don’t know, but it’s not an unreasonable take on him.

If you’d like me to review a particular film or show, please make a donation to my Paypal account and request one.

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

There’s not a lot available in English about Philippe. Nancy Nichols Barker’s Brother to the Sun King: Philippe Duke of Orleans is probably the best option. But it’s been criticized for a very negative depiction of Philippe’s homosexuality, so read it with care. You might also think about reading Saint-Simon’s Memoires, which are a remarkable and lively account of life at the court of the Sun King. Lucy Norton’s translation has been much praised for its style (although it is not the full text).

If you want to know more about homosexuality in Europe in this period, take a look at The Pursuit of Sodomy, edited by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma. It has articles on a range of issues.

Versailles: The Queen’s Baby

Tags

Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Elisa Lasowski, George Blagden, Louis XIV, Maria Theresa of Spain, The Black Nun of Moret, Versailles

I’m a bit late to the party on this show, but I finally found the time to sit down and watch Versailles, the Canal+ series about the court of Louis XIV. I’d heard that the show was pretty wackadoodle, but as I watched the first episode, I didn’t see anything that I thought was outrageous. Then I got to the end of the episode and, yeah, ok, I see why some people think the show is over the top. There’s a lot for me to talk about in the first season, so you’re gonna get a number of posts on it. Hope you like the series.

The first season is nominally set in 1667, but in reality it covers events from that year down to about 1670 or a little thereafter. Instead of offering a look at Louis (George Blagden) as an somewhat jaded older man, as most film treatments of the subject tend to, it offers us a Louis of only about 30 who is still working to master his kingdom. In the first season he decides to turn Versailles from a hunting lodge into a grand palace (in reality, that project had already begun in 1661), and he offers his court a vision of Versailles as the cultural center of the universe. Naturally, for any story set at Versailles, literal palace intrigue plays a major role in the story.

Incidentally, if you want to know about the show’s visuals, the ladies at Frock Flicks have rendered their verdict on the costuming and it’s not bad, other than the poofy shirts the men frequently sport. I was very skeptical about the hair, since Louis’ reign was famous for men in wigs, but apparently the wigs were more of a fashion statement later in Louis’ reign and the hairstyles in the show are not unreasonable for the 1660s and 70s.

 

The Baby

At the start of the show, Louis’ wife Maria Theresa (Elisa Lasowski) is pregnant. She’s presented as a dark-haired Spanish beauty, instead of the rather plain-looking blonde woman she was (like all the Hapsburgs, she had a great deal of German blood). At the end of the episode she goes into labor and much to the surprise of the king and his physician, she gives birth to a black girl. The official word is that the baby was stillborn.

Lisowski as Maria Theresa

 

The physician offers the rather improbable sounding theory that Maria’s black dwarf jester Nabo played a joke on her and scared her so badly that it darkened the baby she was carrying. While that theory would be pretty bizarre if a modern obstetrician proposed it, 17^thcentury doctors were constantly offering that sort of guess because they believed that a mother’s emotional experiences during pregnancy could have a profound effect on the fetus (a theory that was still circulating at the end of the 19^thcentury). (And in fact the comment is based on something that Maria Theresa herself actually said.) Nevertheless, everyone who knows about the black baby assumes that the queen was getting it on with Nabo, and by the end of the second episode, Nabo turns up dead in a fountain.

In the third episode, Louis receives a visit from a Senegalese prince, and since he met the queen once before, it’s broadly hinted that he might be the real father. During the negotiations between Louis and the prince, Louis uses the baby girl as a bargaining chip of sorts, and the episode ends with the prince taking the baby with him.

So is there any truth to it?

 

Surprisingly…

Yes. Not much, but a little. First, it has to be said that the show takes liberties with the timeline (I know, shocking that an historical show would do that, right?). There is no way that Maria Theresa had a baby of any kind in the summer of 1667. On January 2^nd of that year, she gave birth to the king’s fourth child, Marie-Therese, who was very definitely white. She gave birth to their fifth child, Philippe Charles, on August 5^thof 1668. Even if Louis had knocked up his wife immediately after Marie-Therese was born, the baby wouldn’t have been born until October, and Louis would certainly have allowed his wife to recover for a few months before resuming intercourse with her. In 1667 he had two known mistresses, so it’s not like he was having trouble finding a date.

That being said, in 1664, Maria Theresa gave birth about a month prematurely to a baby girl named Marie-Anne, who died about a month later. Maria Theresa had been sick for more than a month before the birth and only recovered in January of 1665. Our best source of information about Marie-Anne was the duchess of Montpensier, a cousin of the king who is today remembered for her memoires, an important source of information about Louis’ court. Montpensier says that Philippe, Louis’ younger brother, told her that the baby was born with a very dark, almost violet complexion. If true, the cause of the baby’s coloration was probably a lack of oxygen. Maria Theresa was devoted to Louis, and also probably quite aware of the danger of cuckolding the king, since that would be treason punishable by death. So it is rather improbable that she had an affair with Nabo, or a visiting African prince, or anyone else. The fact that he remained married to Maria Theresa until her death in 1683 is perhaps the best evidence against the rumor that she had given birth to a black child. But the fact that the queen was quite fond of Nabo may well have helped trigger the rumor that he had fathered a baby with her.

But there’s another complication to the story. The same year that Marie-Anne was born and died, another black girl was born. This girl, Louise Marie-Therese, grew up to join the Benedictine convent of Moret-sur-Loing, and was known as the Black Nun of Moret. Although not a lot is known about her, she clearly had some connection to the royal court. Her portrait was painted by an unknown artist who also painted portraits of 22 French kings including Louis XIV. She is mentioned by at least six different authors with connections to the royal court, including Montpensier; one of Louis’s mistresses; and Louis’ second wife, Madame de Maintenon. The duke of Saint-Simon, another important memoirist about court life at the time, says that Louise once greeted Louis’ son as “my brother”. Louis arranged for a rather handsome pension for her. As a result, some have conjectured that Marie-Anne did not actually die but was smuggled out of court and dropped off at Moret.

Louise, the Black Nun of More

 

However, that scenario is probably untrue, because there’s a much better candidate for her parents. Louis had a Moorish (that is, black African) coachman who had a baby girl. Louis and Maria Theresa acted as godparents for the girl, a not-uncommon gesture for royal servants. After the coachman and his wife died, Madame de Maintenon arranged for the child to be placed in a convent as a favor to the parents. However, that’s not slam-dunk proof, because sometime around 1683, Maintenon secretly married Louis. Her claim that she had given this baby to a convent only dates from the period after the marriage, and it looks like it could be an effort to suppress the rumor that the unusual black nun at Moret could actually have been Marie-Anne. Could Maintenon have lied about the baby in order to help cover up the evidence that Louis was a cuckold?
It’s possible, but like I said, I doubt it. The best evidence points toward Marie-Anne being dark-skinned because she was premature and sickly. But it’s worth noting that what happened to Nabo is unknown. Maybe Louis did have him drowned in some fountain somewhere.

The up-thrust of this is that it’s wildly unlikely that Maria Theresa gave birth to a Senegalese prince’s son. But at least Versailles grounded its rather dramatic story in an actual rumor that was circulating at the time and didn’t just resort to making shit up whole cloth (cough Reign cough).

 

Want to Know More?

Versailles is available through Amazon.

Louis XIV has been the subject of numerous biographies. Anthony Levi’s Louis XIV is well-regarded.

Vatel: Food, Entertainment and Intrigue at the Court of the Sun King

Tags

17th Century France, Ancien Regime, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Gerard Depardieu, Kings and Queens, Louis XIV, Marquis de Lauzun, Tim Roth, Uma Thurman, Vatel

Vatel (2000, dir. Roland Joffé) tells the story of Louis XIV’s three day visit to the Chateau de Chantilly, the palace of Louis de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé in 1671, during the lead-up to the Franco-Dutch War. It centers on Condé’s Master of Festivities and steward, François Vatel.

Vatel was one of the most celebrated chefs of his generation. He started as a pastry chef and came to work for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s first finance minister. In 1661, when Louis came to visit Fouquet, Vatel orchestrated such a sumptuous festival that Louis used it as an excuse to arrest Fouquet for embezzlement (since he had already intended to ruin Fouquet). After that, Vatel came to serve Condé, one of the greatest generals of his day and a patron to a number of important French authors, including both Racine and Moliere.

Vatel is often, though falsely, credited with inventing whipped cream, which is sometimes called Chantilly Cream, especially in France. He may not have invented it, but he might have played a role in popularizing it.

The Chantilly Festival

In 1671, Louis announced his intentions to pay Condé a visit at his chateau at Chantilly. Such visits were a tool that Louis used to keep his powerful nobles in line, because they were an honor that could not be refused, but they carried with them the staggering burden of having to house, feed and entertain the entire royal court, which included around 600 nobles and several thousand royal ministers and servants. Forcing a noble to drain his financial reserves to host the king left them with less money with which to cause trouble for him, and made them dependent on him for financial favors.

The chateau de Chantilly

Louis gave Condé and Vatel barely two weeks to make all the arrangements, and the unfortunate Vatel reportedly got little sleep in that period. He was a man of extremely high standards and became increasingly upset over small hitches in the execution of his grand festival.

Our best source for what happened at this festival is the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose letters to her daughter and daughter-in-law are one of the most important records of life at the French court. Although she was not at the Chantilly festival, she apparently learned the details from another member of the court. The best way to describe the incident is to quote extensively from one of her letters.

“The King arrived Thursday evening; there was everything that one could wish: hunting, lanterns, moonlight, a walk, the meal in a spot carpeted with daffodils. People ate; there were a few tables where there was no roast, because there were several more people eating than had been expected. Vatel obsessed over this, saying several times “I have lost honour; here is an affront that I can’t bear”. He said to Gourville, “My head is spinning; I haven’t slept for 12 nights. Help me to keep things going”. Gourville helped how he could, but Vatel couldn’t stop thinking about the missing roast at the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth tables (though not at the King’s table). The Prince went to Vatel’s room and said to him, “Vatel, everything is fine: nothing was as beautiful as that dinner for the King”. Vatel said to him, “My Lord, you are too kind. I know that there was no roast at two tables”. “Not at all,” said the Prince. “Don’t fret about it, everything is fine”.

“Night fell, but the fireworks, which had cost 16,000 francs, were a flop because it turned foggy. At 4 a.m., Vatel was everywhere (fretting) while everyone else was asleep. He met a small supplier doing a morning delivery, who had only two loads of fish. Vatel said to him, “Is this all?” The supplier replied, “Yes”. He didn’t know that when Vatel said “all”, he had been referring to the requests he had made from all the ports. Vatel waited a while, but no other deliveries came. He got in a frenzy, thinking he would have no other fish. He found Gourville and said, “I won’t survive this insult; my honour and reputation are at stake”. Gourville made light of it.

“Vatel went up to his room, put his sword against the door, and caused it to go through his heart; he had to do this three times, because the first two hadn’t wounded him deeply enough to kill him.

“At this point, fish deliveries began arriving from all over. People were looking for Vatel for instructions; they went to his room, forced the door, and found him in pool of his own blood. Some ran to tell the Prince, who was plunged into despair. The Duke cried, because he had come to Burgundy because of Vatel.

“The Prince told the King, with great sadness, that people were saying it was because of Vatel’s pride; people were both praising and blaming his courage. The King said he had put off coming to Chantilly for five years because he understood how much stress his visits caused. He said that from now on, the Prince should only worry about feeding two tables of people, and not worry about the rest. He said he wouldn’t allow the Prince to go to such great effort anymore, but that it was too late for poor Vatel.

“Gourville undertook to make up for the loss of Vatel, and did it. Everyone ate well, walked, played, hunted, the perfume of daffodils was everywhere, everything was enchanting. Yesterday, which was Saturday, everyone did the same again, and in the evening, the King went to Liancourt, where he ordered a late supper.”

It seems clear that Vatel’s suicide was driven by a combination of high standards, the stress of being responsible for the entire royal court, lack of sleep, and what he saw as a disastrous stroke of bad luck. We might also suspect he was a high-strung man.

The Film

Roland Joffé (working from a script by Jeanne Labrune and Tom Stoppard) turns the Chantilly festival into an exploration of the French court under Louis XIV. In the film, which explicitly declares itself to be a ‘true story’, Condé (Julian Glover) is informed by the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth) that Louis wishes to visit and enjoy the simple pleasures of the country, which, Lauzun explains, means that Condé should spare no expense whatsoever to entertain the king. Condé then tells Vatel (Gerard Depardieu) that he has good news and bad news. The bad news is that the king is coming to visit Chantilly and the good news is that France might go to war with Holland. Condé is bankrupt and needs the king to pay his debts, and war means that the king will need Condé’s services as a general. So, if the festival goes well and war does happen, Condé will probably be able to get the king to pay his debts. (The idea that Condé was bankrupt is improbable; he was an extremely rich man.)

Depardieu and Glover as Vatel and Condé

And so the film unfolds as the French court descends on Chantilly and Vatel works to orchestrate this enormous festival. The film is chiefly interested in two things: the enormous effort it takes to feed the court and stage the entertainments, and the complex intrigues of the French court. In this second plotline, the chief figures are Lauzun; the king’s brother (known as Monsieur); and Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman), a minor member of the court who is the king’s most recent lover. Lauzun wants to sleep with Montausier, who is not interested in him, but she grows increasingly interested with Vatel because he is not interested in the complex games played by the court, while Monsieur is sexually attracted to Vatel’s adolescent protégé and grows offended when Vatel refuses to give him to Monsieur.

Someone who is clearly much more knowledgeable than I am about Louis’ court wrote a very lengthy discussion of the courtly characters of the film, which you can read here. So rather than commenting of the accuracy of the characters, I’ll focus on other things.

Perhaps the most valuable thing about the film is the way that it focuses so much attention on what goes on behind the scenes at a 17^th century palace. Vatel’s scenes concentrate very heavily on his efforts to direct the enormous army of cooks and servants who are critical to the success of the festival. We watch Vatel overseeing the cooks, telling them how to prepare various dishes. When problems arise, he improvises a variety of solutions. (when he realizes that he does not have enough meat to serve everyone at the first dinner, he orders a cook to produce a dish with mushrooms. When someone asks what meat is in the dish, he replies “unicorn”.) Lauzun asks Vatel to produce a spun sugar masterpiece to impress Montausier. Because he is so busy, Vatel refuses, until Condé orders him to do it, and so we get to watch him produce a bowl of fake sugar fruit.

Vatel working with spun sugar

The film also addresses the various problems of supply that Vatel faces. Early on, the tradesmen of Chantilly refuse to provide him with any further supplies until Condé pays their bills. Vatel explains that unless the festival is a success, Condé will not be able to pay, so they have to extend him further credit to have any hope of getting their money. While this may not be historically accurate in Condé’s case, it is an excellent example of a real problem that nobles and the businessmen they patronized experienced. In another scene, an entire shipment of glass candle-globes arrive broken because the roads were too rough, and Vatel has to improvise a replacement for them.

Equally interesting are the entertainments themselves. The film shows us two elaborate theatrical spectacles offered for the king’s amusement. Here’s the first one:

The second one involves an elaborate fireworks show that accompanies the arrival of an enormous whale, which opens its mouth to reveal a singer who is lifted above the banquet by a complex system of pulleys. I don’t know enough about 17^th century engineering to know whether these two shows were actually possible with the technology of the time (if I had to guess, I’d say the film is probably exaggerating somewhat), but they are certainly suggestive of the kinds of entertainment that 17^th century kings liked to see, and of the theatricality of Louis’ court, which was key to his success as a monarch.

The fireworks at the second banquet

The Court

The other half of the film dwells on the life of the court, and here I think the film is somewhat less true to its source material. The members of the court as shown as being extremely decadent. Louis has brought both his formal mistress, Madame de Montespan and his actual mistress, Montausier, and Lauzun wants to sleep with the latter, even if it means blackmailing her. When he sends her Vatel’s impressive fake fruit masterpiece, she doesn’t even look at it before rejecting it, so Lauzun randomly selects another woman of the court to receive the gift; the message here is that Lauzun and Montausier are too jaded to appreciate it for the work of art that it is. In another scene, Monsieur takes revenge on Vatel by casually breaking the whale prop.

The court gambles constantly. Early on, Condé makes the mistake of playing too well and has to start losing intentionally, just to please the king. (“Has Condé lost his chateau?” “Not if he plays his cards wrong.”) Later, Louis and Monsieur casually bet expensive jewelry in another game. Condé tries to demur, saying he has nothing so valuable to wager, but Louis orders him to wager Vatel. Vatel, who is devoted to Condé and has trusted him enough to make major sacrifices, is upset to learn of the betrayal.

The whole point of these scenes is to contrast the jaded nobles, who have no regard for anyone beneath them, with Vatel, the commoner who is far more moral and decent than the people he is keeping entertained. The only member of the court who has any morals is Montausier, who increasingly feels a connection to Vatel as the only decent man around her.

Lauzun hitting on Montausier

When Vatel finally commits suicide, no one seems to actually care. The king is told that Vatel did it because the fish hadn’t arrived, but that’s not the real reason. But Madame de Sévigné’s letter makes clear that many people were in fact distressed by Vatel’s suicide, and the king seems to have acknowledged his role in the man’s death. So the suggestion that the court was too decadent to value human life is unfair.

Depardieu’s Vatel seems a very different man from the real one. Whereas the real Vatel was stressed out, deeply concerned with his honor and reputation, and probably suffering from sleep deprivation, the cinematic Vatel is not concerned with honor and reputation so much as being a decent man. When the king summons him to compliment him, Vatel refuses because he is too busy. He wants the festival to go right, not because it’s a matter of honor, but because he’s committed to doing what he’s said he will do and because he wants Condé to do well. He’s not high-strung; he’s quite solid and serious, more so than the people around him. His suicide has little to do with the fish; that problem is simply the last straw, and he seems to have decided to kill himself already.

So the film’s treatment of the court of Louis XIV is somewhat negative and acts mainly to establish the protagonist’s virtue. But the film is worth a look for its depiction of a facet of court life that is too rarely shown, the hidden underside of the cooks, the purveyors, the servants, and the other little people. Unlike recent productions like Downton Abbey, the film isn’t interested in most of them as people, but more in the work they are doing to feed and entertain the court. This nameless army are as much the heroes of the film as Vatel.

Want to Know More?

Vatel is available on Amazon.

I doubt there’s much written on Vatel himself, but if you want to know about Louis XIV,  there are a lot of biographies, such as Richard Wilkinson’s Louis XIV (Routledge Historical Biographies). This is a little off-topic, but one of my favorite books about Loui’s court, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (Magic in History)deals with the occult demimonde of 17th century Paris; it goes into considerable detail about the complex social and sexual hierarchies at court.