CNN Traveller » Sweet smell of excess

Sweet smell of excess

March 2007 Posted in Inside Europe

With Marie Antoinette once again in the spotlight, the Palace of Versailles is now offering visitors the chance to get even closer to the queen. Dan Hayes reports

In my mind the image of 18th-century French queen Marie Antoinette is the one that was in those pictorial history books that were standard issue for Seventies’ children. It featured her in full shepherdess outfit with bonnet, flanked by fluffy – almost gleaming – white sheep wearing, if memory serves, pink collars. It was all very pastoral and idyllic, but you just knew it was not going to end well. Indeed, turn the page and you hit the French revolution – ferocious, gap-toothed sans-culottes wrenching down the gates of the Palais de Versailles, a flinty eyed Robespierre in full cry and an unavoidable appointment with Madame La Guillotine.

Some of the two million people a year who visit Versailles probably harbour a similar mental image. Many more will have in their mind’s eye scenes from the recent Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette, with its vivid portrayals of the opulence and excess of court life in 18th-century France. Neither vision is probably particularly well received by historians, but the Austrian-born princess Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of King Louis XVI, remains one of the most enduring figures in French history and a person whom the vast majority of Versailles’ visitors find intriguing.

Only a select few, however, get to visit her bathroom – and I am now one of their number. The bath is long gone, but a raised rim in the black-and-white tiled floor shows where it would have been. It is strangely like visiting some sort of minimalist shrine; the only other objects in the room are a plastic-shrouded bed, a pair of the queen’s gloves and her travel chest. But what a chest it is, a hefty leather affair with jars, brushes, phials; it must have taken a brace of footmen to carry it. Versailles spokesman and today’s conscripted tour guide, Jean-François Quemin, stands alongside it carrying a bunch of keys that would make a revolutionary gaoler jealous. It is difficult to imagine how all these fragile objects survived the storming of the palace by hordes of furious revolutionaries, but that is because their leaders were thinking of the bottom line even before the gates of Versailles hit the floor.

‘Much of what was in the palace was sold off,’ says Quemin. ‘The revolutionaries needed the money and they were prepared to sell at relatively low prices.’ Many of the beneficiaries of this liquidation sale, he adds, were wealthy English people who travelled across the channel – showing a surprising lack of solidarity with their unfortunate French counterparts in their determination to secure a bargain.

How the bidding went for the queen’s travel chest has not been recorded, but this object is once again a centre of attention at Versailles. Partly that is because of the recent film and the interest it has created, but it is also because a very human link to Marie Antoinette has been rediscovered.

In 2004 Elisabeth de Feydeau, a professor at the Versailles School of Perfumiers, was researching a book about Marie Antoinette’s perfumier, Jean-Louis Fargeon. While searching through the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris she discovered the formulae he used to create the queen’s perfume. ‘It was a big surprise and very exciting,’ she says, ‘I had the impression that Fargeon was talking to me; that I was getting an insight into the way he worked. There were lots of different formulae relying on seasonal ingredients, because perfumes would not keep for longer than two or three months back then.’

She shared her findings with Francis Kurkdjian, a world-famous perfumier who has created fragrances for the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier, Giorgio Armani and Salvatore Ferragamo. ‘Elisabeth told me she had found the formulae and I was very interested to have a look,’ says Kurkdjian. ‘She wanted to understand how the perfume-making process would have worked and to find out how they would have gone from an idea to a finished product.’ The original idea was that the perfume might help market de Feydeau’s book; buyers would receive a free sample and would gain an insight into what 18th-century perfume smelt like. However, the idea grew, Versailles expressed an interest and the palace is now selling the perfume, under the brand name Sillage de la Reine (the Queen’s Wake), for €350 ($450) per 25ml bottle.

The perfume contains essence of cedar, jasmine, lavender, orange blossom, rose, sandalwood and vanilla and has a very distinctive floral smell. It took Kurkdjian over a year to create the finished product and he is convinced it is close to the scent the queen would have worn. ‘We didn’t find anything new in the ingredients or anything odd about the methodology, but the perfumiers of the 18th century didn’t have the chemicals we have today so it was always going to be a different challenge to make it.’

It was also something of a labour of love, he adds. ‘I was one of her aficionados before I heard about this project,’ he says. ‘She was an intriguing figure of French history and in a way she was ahead of her time – particularly in the way in which she was a patron of the arts.’

De Feydeau agrees with this assessment. ‘When you read through Marie Antoinette’s personal archives you build up a picture of a very sensitive, very avant-garde woman – someone who cared about the people in her service, the education of her children and who didn’t fit in with the habits of the Court of Versailles. When you learn more about her you soon realise that she was a much more sympathetic character than the one most of us learned about at school.’

All the same, there is something slightly disconcerting about standing in the queen’s private apartments clutching a small piece of cardboard that has been dipped in a pungent copy of her perfume and is emitting a sweet, orangey odour. Thankfully, it is broad daylight and any olfactorily sensitive ghosts are lying low.

History books tend to teach that Marie Antoinette helped precipitate the French Revolution because of her expensive tastes, and the alleged comment ‘Let them eat cake’, when told of people starving in the countryside. Her personal apartments at Versailles imply a different reality, however. Tucked away behind all the gold leaf and grandiose paintings of the public rooms they seem remarkably small and understated, with their painted yellow floors and blue-upholstered furniture. The worn stairs by which you reach them are narrow and dark and feel more like the servants’ thoroughfare than anything that would have felt the tread of the royal slipper.

Upstairs, I am shown the queen’s second bathroom – the metal bath once again long gone into the revolutionary furnaces – and, there are no closed doors in these egalitarian days, the royal water closet. A running theme amid the paintwork, meanwhile, is the floral touch – a rose here, a petal there, perhaps reflecting the queen’s taste both in life and in perfume. Marie Antoinette would have had, I am told, the final say on the décor of her own rooms.

It is impossible to fail to be astounded by the opulence and sheer size of Versailles, but the numbers of people here and the fact that most of them follow a prescribed route mean the visitor has to work hard not to be swept along from room to room. While the audio tour is now a key part of the visitor experience, there is little that could be described as offering a hands-on experience and that may contribute to the fact that the average length of a visit to Versailles is a relatively modest two hours.

A little more interpretation might make the experience of visiting the château that much more gripping. Certainly, there is no absence of identifiable human stories that are related to the place. One of the more tragic of these, coincidentally, concerns how it is just possible that the queen’s love of cleanliness and all that smelt sweet may have led ultimately to her downfall.

In 1791, two years after their overthrow by the revolutionaries, the royal family slipped away from Paris hoping to travel by coach to the Belgian border. They only made it as far as Varennes, in what is today the Departement of the Meuse, before they were recognised and recaptured. One theory has it that it was Marie Antoinette’s distinctive perfume that gave them away.

Elisabeth de Feydeau’s book A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette’s Perfumer is published by IB Tauris, price $26.95.

RESTORATION DRAMA

HALL OF MIRRORS

Restoration work on the Hall of Mirrors (above) is due for completion in May 2007, following a three-year programme of works undertaken by specialist building company Vinci. The hall was originally built for Louis XIV, with work beginning in 1678, and contains 317 mirrors and 17 windows that offer views of the Versailles gardens. Its walls comprise six different types of marble.

DUST AND SOOT

Renovation work has cost €12m ($15m) and has involved cleaning and repair to paintings, replacement of parquet flooring and the painstaking removal of dust and soot. Wear and tear was recognised as a problem at the hall within a few years of its opening, this was partly due to the condensation caused by the breath of the numerous courtiers who gathered within it and the smoke from the candles that were used for lighting.

HOW TO GET THERE

RER trains run regularly from central Paris to Versailles Rive Gauche – about five minutes’ walk from the palace. Eurostar trains run between London and Paris and, at the Gare du Nord, link with the RER system.

MORE INFORMATION

www.chateauversailles.fr
www.eurostar.com