Books: Mitford’s Monarch

THE SUN KING by Nancy Mitford. 255 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

Life among the humanoids of outer space—if such ever come to light—could not be more remote from the modern world than the bizarre and ceremonious existence of Louis XIV. With learning and flair, Nancy Mitford, the biographer of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, employs an elegant and aphoristic style to match the complexity and splendor of her subject: the building of Versailles, and its principal inhabitant, the Sun King, revered as a demigod by his 20 million subjects.

Mitford’s monarch was a bit of a monster, and although the term would have been unthinkable to a regime based on blood, he was a self-made monster; he lived like the Minotaur, that legendary prince of Knossos, in the center of his own labyrinth.

How did Louis get the idea of Versailles? How does the spider get the idea of its web? Louis was holding court happily enough at the Louvre, and workmen and architects were always improving and fixing things up there, or at Chambord, or wherever he moved. “Nobody,” writes the author, “ever knew when this secret man first conceived the design by which his father’s little hunting lodge was to become the hub of the universe.” Mitford’s tentative guess is the simple explanation that Louis liked the country; he lived on horseback and was a great shot. The hindsight of history alleges that he was afraid of the Parisians, but this was not quite so (“Fear was left out of his nature”).

Other considerations were at work. His boyhood had been poisoned and even endangered by the Fronde—the fratricidal wars among the French nobility. It would be a sound idea to embody and run the state from one place, where he could keep his royal eye on the great nobles. Actually, the idea seems to have been suggested by the ambitions of the Minister of Finance, Nicolas Fouquet, who, at his chateau of Vaux-le Vicomte was unwise enough to out-status the King with “the insolent and audacious luxury” of a house-warming for 6,000 people. With “mingled admiration and fury,” the King banished Fouquet to a fortress and decided to outbuild everyone in the known world. Thus was the Bourbon system brought to its intricate perfection.

Black Arts. War was the main busi ness of the state, and the state, of course, was Louis. He rode often to the wars and received progress reports every day on the building at Versailles. He rode to hounds, but was less diligent in reading dispatches from the front; some bastard of his—or some other kin—was always there to look after the fighting. The best of the lot of left-handed royalty was the Due de Vendome, who “at the age of 54 looked like an old, fat, dirty, diseased woman” and was syphilitic to boot (“his nose quite eaten away”), though on the battlefield he raged like a lion.

Louis was infinitely tolerant of those who could be received at Versailles, but he drew the line at sodomy and laughing too loudly at Mass. The laughter he suppressed, but there was nothing much he could do about sodomy, since his brother, the Due d’Orleans, and his best general, old Vendóme, were notorious sodomites. The black arts were another thing Louis frowned on. Witchcraft, magic, and a Parisian underworld of pimps and professional poisoners had been involved in a plot to eclipse the Sun King.

Popular Ornithologist. Nancy Mitford is no historian—in the sense that she is not at all interested in the forces that shape an age. She writes about aristocrats as a popular ornithologist writes about birds, with an eye for song and plumage but no real concern for their ecology. Unhampered by any temptation to lecture Louis on his failure to found a democracy or even a constitutional monarchy, she is unembarrassed in her warm regard for aristocratic privilege as against any shabby modern notions of equality, or, for that matter, liberty and fraternity. In Louis XIV, she found a rare specimen, now extinct.

The publishers of The Sun King have given the Mitford prose a guard of honor in the shape of an edition designed and composed in London, with printing and color lithography done in Italy. The 54 color and 128 monochrome illustrations would be opulent for an art book. As a presentation of biographical history, the volume is sumptuous indeed; an arrogant oddity in an era when books are either to be read or looked at—seldom both.