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Strange Meetings: The Royal Menagerie at Versailles – an Extract from Vintage Script Magazine

Royal Menagerie at Versailles

This month, you’ll find a piece I’ve written in Vintage Script, a new magazine dedicated to all things vintage, historical and retro. What’s most delightful about it is the range of different historical periods, as well as the different approaches taken to bringing them to life. In this month’s edition you’ll find stories on the history of tea time, flapper girls of the 1920s, Durham Cathedral and the truth behind the Scarlet Pimpernel. It really is well worth a read, so do please visit the web site and take a look.

Versailles Menagerie by D'Aveline

The Versailles Menagerie during Louis XIV’s reign, by D’Aveline.

In an attempt to whet your appetite, here’s an extract from my article on the history of the Royal Menagerie at Versailles. You’ll have to take my word for it, but the stuff I’ve cut out here is stupendous, so you really should get the magazine!

We take up the story from Louis XIV’s death. Before the Sun King, the French Royals had not had a permanent menagerie but instead contented themselves with a band of exotic or entertaining animals which followed them around their various royal residences. Louis XIV established two permanent menageries – one at Vincennes and one at Versailles, each with a different purpose and personality. The Vincennes menagerie was used for dramatic fights, such as the battle between a tiger and an elephant staged to amuse the Persian ambassador in 1682. The Versailles menagerie, on the other hand, was a model of order and rationality, where the far more fortunate animals were intended for peaceful display and, as all things at the palace, to augment the glory and prestige of the king. The conflict between these two very different styles of menagerie reflected the conflicts in Louis’ personality and style of leadership, but by the end of his reign the Versailles style had clearly won out, and the Vincennes zoo was closed.

Map of Versailles, by Delagrive (1689-1757), 1746.

Map of Versailles, by Delagrive (1689-1757), 1746 (via Wikimedia Commons), with the location of the menagerie highlighted. Below, the former site of the menagerie today, from Google Maps.

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In some magical way Versailles transformed itself to match the character of the king at its heart, so when the Sun King died and was succeeded by his grandson Louis XV, everything changed. Louis XV was more interested in hunting animals than observing them in his menagerie, and his taste for exotic wildlife restricted itself more or less to Madame de Pompadour and his seraglio of royal mistresses. Animal gifts kept coming from every corner of the ever-expanding French trading empire, but the king lacked both the funds and the inclination to give them much of a welcome. When an elephant arrived in 1772, it was forced to walk more than three hundred miles from the coast to Versailles.

One can imagine the elephant was quite miffed about the debacle (but must have created quite a stir in the towns and villages along the road) and things got no better once it arrived at Versailles. The pond dug for the exotic birds to wade in was full of silt. The wall enclosing the rhinoceros which arrived two years earlier was literally crumbling (not a good thing, as the rhino was no doubt angered by visitors who laughed at its absurdly wrinkled skin). Even the animals in the once beautiful paintings which lined the walls of the observation room were faded and peeling. The elephant stuck it out for as long as possible, but in 1782, broke free of its enclosure and rampaged round the grounds of Versailles. Next morning, a strange new elephant-shaped island was found floating in the Grand Canal.

Sadly, the elephant died too late to witness the last gasp of the royal menagerie. Louis XVI had ascended the throne in 1775, and found a financial and political situation as neglected as the menagerie. Unlike his grandfather Louis XV, Louis XVI could not rely on winning charm to see him through – he had none. He was therefore much more attuned to symbolism, and strove constantly, in the face of an ever-deepening crisis, to project an image of undimmed power and royal prestige.

Although they never knew it, the animals of the menagerie were a perfect instrument for this. The very fact that they were there at all spoke eloquently of the scope and scale of the king’s influence. Overcoming the difficulties of finding and catching such rare and beautiful creatures, overcoming the problems of long distance travel and communication, overcoming the self-interest of every captain and sailor along the way who might have sold his precious cargo, the king had commanded that animals be brought, and they had come. The strength of his will even seemed to overcome death itself: such animals were notoriously difficult to keep alive on long voyages. Exotic birds especially had an irksome habit of dropping down dead when cannon fired, or simply pining away. Whispers began to circulate that the most beautiful birds of all simply could not live without their liberty.

Louis sent out a shopping list to his representatives around the world. “An elephant; 2 zebras, male and female; mandrill and baboon monkeys; 6 guineafoul”. Perhaps Louis wished to tame the zebras and teach them to draw his carriage, as some of his more flamboyant contemporaries did. But Louis was never to receive an elephant and only got one of the zebras he asked for, though the menagerie did benefit from an influx of new inmates, including a lion, a panther, some hyenas, a tiger, some ostriches and several kinds of monkey.

The popularity of the menagerie was also boosted by great vogue for the study of nature that flowered during Louis XVI’s reign. Naturalists had grown tired of studying the dusty tombs of Cabinets of Curiosity, where brown pickled fish bobbed in vinegar and faded birds stood stuffed in a peculiar imitation of life that seemed to startle the thought of death into everyone who looked at them. There was now, prompted by the bestselling work of Buffon, a desire to observe living animals. Now then, the animals of the menagerie had a new torment, as fashionable men and women toured the menagerie, staring deep into the eyes of monkeys and, with a pained expression, wondered aloud “What is it to be human?”. Nobody ever seemed to wonder what it is to be monkey.

As it turned out, of course, even if Louis had managed to obtain a hundred zebras to draw his carriage, they couldn’t have saved him from the coming of the Revolution. Perhaps the animals noticed a glow of torchlight up at the palace on the night in October 1789 when a crowd of thousands arrived to remove the royal family and take them back to Paris (henceforth to be caged and regarded with the same mixture of awed and disgusted curiosity that the inhabitants of the menagerie had been).

The menagerie must have been a sad and dispiritingly quiet place for the next couple of years, as history was written elsewhere, and the fate of a dwindling bunch of pampered pets was of no importance. But, in a perverse way, the violence and inhumanity of the revolution was to foster a new concern for these animals. After a few years, with the Terror in full flow, the bourgeois leaders of the Revolution began to grow concerned that the populace was becoming too accustomed to blood, too wild. They needed to be brought back to the civilising influence of orderly society – and what better way to demonstrate its advantages than through the example of these wild animals. If even a lion, when it is well cared for by enlightened rulers, can be tamed and made gentle, then there’s hope for anyone. This attitude to animals was extraordinary: in 1794, the Paris Commune received complaints about ‘disgusting displays’ of animals in the Place de la Révolution, but none about the twenty guillotinings that took place in the same square every day.

At the last minute, the few remaining animals of the royal menagerie, which had been due to be killed and stuffed, were saved, and made a part of plans for a new state menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Following a ban on animal shows, the authorities had sent out agents to round up all wild animals being kept or sold in Paris for this purpose. The only problem was, there was nowhere to put them except the basement of the museum at the Jardins des Plantes.

The wrinkly rhinoceros died before it could make the journey (run through, according to legend, by a revolutionary’s sabre), but the lion from Versailles was taken to Paris in 1794, and found itself in a room full of the motliest collection of animals since the Ark. Here was a leopard, there a sea lion. Perched on a crate were three eagles, bleating in the corner were three sheep with various lurid deformities, and god-knows-where was what had been promised to be a sea lion when the harassed zookeeper agreed to take it on, but was discovered on arrival to be a polar bear. There were in total 32 mammals and 26 birds.

Gradually a permanent, if very basic, home for these forlorn creatures was put together, and, amid trumpeting revolutionary rhetoric that the animals would “no longer wear on their brows, as in the menageries built by the pomp of kings, the brand of slavery”, its doors were opened to the public. This new, state menagerie was intended to be a pacifying haven of contemplation and rational study. It didn’t quite work out that way. As soon as the doors opened, the citizens of Paris made a beeline for the old lion from Versailles. They pulled at his fur, and shouted abuse when he tried to sleep, and spat at him because, they said, he used to be a king too.

The lion bore his torment for a short while, but in the famine-frosted winter of 1795, when there was no money for food and none to buy anyway, half the animals died, the lion probably among them. After this time, conditions at the menagerie slowly improved, and with the conquests of Napoleon, it was repopulated with inhabitants from new outposts of empire.

Today, there’s no trace of the menagerie beneath the impeccably manicured lawns of Versailles, but a piece of it survives. If you go to the Jardins des Plantes, past the small zoo which still survives and into the Natural History Museum, you’ll find a large glass case, containing a leathery rhinoceros, the first to ever be stuffed and preserved. Today people file by and study him quietly, as civilised and dispassionate as they were always meant to be, save perhaps for the occasional chuckle at his absurdly wrinkly skin. But this is an extraordinary survivor, called across the sea by the last pulse of royal power from France, witness to the end of an era, one of the last beings ever to truly live at Versailles, victim of the violence of the revolution – and yet, here he is. Through all the storms of history and politics, the revolutions and counter-revolutions, monarchies and republics, wars and peaces, the rhinoceros has stood safe in its glass case. Even today, the Versailles menagerie is drawing long-severed worlds into strange meetings.

Louis XV's Rhinoceros

Louis XV’s rhinoceros, at the Natural History Museum in Paris.


The rhinoceros was recently featured in an exhibition at Versailles, ‘Sciences and Curiosities at the Court of Versailles, which I’m bereft at having missed. This nice little video was made to coincide with the exhibition.

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Marie Antoinette and her Children: The queen’s adopted family

Marie Antoinette's adopted children

From the day she arrived at Versailles at the age of only fourteen, one question loomed larger in the life of Marie Antoinette than any other. Versailles was so used to gossip that Whisper was practically its official language, but amidst the idle wagging of tongues and scurillous muck-raking, this question had extremely serious consequences not just for the young Dauphine and Dauphin, but also for the Court, the country and the future of European politics.

Why wasn’t Marie Antoinette pregnant?

Doubts began to germinate on the morning after the young royal couple’s first night together, when their sheets were examined (‘privacy’ being an entirely foreign concept at the palace) and nothing, clearly, had taken place. Weeks turned to months, months to years, and nothing changed. Pressure mounted. Marie Antoinette’s mother, the awesome Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, kept up an unending barrage of questions and criticism on the subject by letter. Every month, messengers raced across the continent to inform the Empress on the coming of Marie Antoinette’s periods, and her continued, growing failure as a Dauphine. The market women of Paris, taking advantage of their peculiar right of access to Versailles, confronted Marie Antoinette directly, demanding of her when she would give France what it needed. Finally, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II was dispatched on what must have been a mortifying visit to Versailles for the young girl, in which he spoke frankly with Marie Antoinette and Louis about the ins and outs of royal duty.

Opinions differ on the precise cause of the delay and its possible physical or psychological components. Essentially though, the problem boiled down to the extreme awkwardness of two people who were by our standards very young and, by nature, shy. Louis especially suffered from an almost crippling lack of confidence and a pronounced sense of his own inferiority. Knowing, as they did, that every detail of whatever happened between them in that vast and imposing royal bed was being talked about – laughed about – by all of Europe, it is unsurprising that intimacy took time to develop.

And though hosts of people seemed to think Marie Antoinette needed constant reminders about the importance of this particular duty, it seems unlikely that anyone felt more strongly about the situation than she did. All commentators on the girl agreed that she had a deep and genuine love of children, which must only have been given added heat by her own inability to become a mother. When the Duchesse de Chartres gave birth to a stillborn child, Marie Antoinette wrote, poginantly, that she would have been happy to have given birth to any child, even a dead one.

Finally, Marie Antoinette delivered her first child, Marie Thérèse, in 1778 – eight long years after her arrival in France. But even before this momentous event took place, it would not be entirely accurate to describe Marie Antoinette as ‘childless’. For though she may not have had children of her own, she became guardian, even mother, to a surprising number of adopted children. This is a topic which many of Marie Antoinette’s recent biographers have overlooked or glossed over, but it is an area that sheds important new light on her character.

From very early on at Versailles, Count Mercy (an Austrian minister charged by Maria Theresa to keep Marie Antoinette in line) complained that the Dauphine kept almost constant company with a 5-year-old boy, the son of her chief femme de chambre, the evocatively named Madame de Misery. Soon, de Misery’s 12-year-old daughter joined in the fun, coming to live with Marie Antoinette. This happy arrangement came to an end following complaints over their extremely noisy games, and the resulting torn clothes and broken furniture. Though stories such as this one were gifts to those who wished to portray Marie Antoinette as empty-headed, frivolous and immature, it is worth remembering that Marie Antoinette, at only fifteen, was pretty close in age to the 12-year-old girl. It is true that her own childhood, during which she was never expected to fill the pivotal role of Dauphine, had included at best a patchy education, and only last-minute attempts at preparing her for the task ahead. She certainly was not ready to engage with adults on their level, especially such forceful personalities as the Royal Aunts, and representatives of the other factions at Versailles which sought to win her favour. Though Marie Antoinette’s retreat into childish behaviour during her early days at Versailles was an extreme reaction, it is in many ways an understandable one.

On another occasion, it is said that Marie Antoinette was travelling in her carriage when the horses ran into a young boy. He was, miraculously, uninjured, but the queen held him in her arms and (so legend has it) declared ‘I must take him. He is mine’. Handily, it turned out that the boy’s mother had died, and his grandmother willingly agreed. He was whisked away to Versailles, and his whole family was placed under royal protection. The boy (called Jacques or Armand, depending on the version of the story) was cared for by Marie Antoinette, who often shared her food with him. His brother Denis was provided with a thorough musical education, becoming Cellist to the King in 1787. Marie Antoinette is even said to have found a way to send Denis money to allow him to embark on his promising musical career after the monarchy fell. Armand’s two sisters were provided with a regular allowance and, according to the marriage contract of one of them, were left a large sum of money following Marie Antoinette’s death.

Armand stayed with the queen until the birth of Marie Thérèse, when he was sent to continue his education, still funded by Marie Antoinette. The tale, however, does not end there, and when the Revolution began, Armand apparently rebelled against his adopted mother, becoming an ardent revolutionary, joining the armies of the Republic and dying, heroically, in battle.

Something has always struck me as a little odd about this story – perhaps it’s the lack of clear, reliable sources for the information, perhaps it’s because so few biographers have made much of what is by any standards a remarkable incident in the life of Marie Antoinette. It has something of the ring of those delicious, intoxicating rumours that Marie Antoinette inspired – a young peasant boy, as good as kidnapped by the childless Queen, scrubbed, dressed up and paraded around the gilded palace, given everything he needs, but who ultimately bites the hand that has fed him so richly. But there is enough evidence both in the story itself and when set in the context of Marie Antoinette’s known history of adopting children to suggest that at least the basics of this story are correct, and these children should rightly be considered a part of Marie Antoinette’s extended family of foundlings.

This family did not stop growing even when Marie Antoinette at last began having her own children. Madame Royale, as Marie Thérèse was known, was a famously difficult child, and it was perhaps in an attempt to soften her intractable character that Marie Antoinette provided her with a companion, in the shape of Marie Phillippine Camriquet, the daughter of one of Madame Royale’s maids. Renamed Ernestine for her new role, the girl initially spent her days with Marie Thérèse before returning to her parents at night. However, when her mother died in 1788, Ernestine was moved into Marie Thérèse’s apartments, and given an almost identical room to the princess. She wore similar clothes and took lessons alongside Marie Thérèse.

Marie Antoinette seems to have been particularly sensitive to the thought of any child being orphaned, and it was usually the impulse to take care of such children that prompted her to bring them into her household. On hearing of the death of one of Louis’ gentlemen ushers and his wife, leaving three orphan girls, it is said that Marie Antoinette immediately declared (much as she had done with Armand) ‘I adopt them!’. The two eldest girls were placed in a convent, but Jeanne Louise Victoire (at 3, the same age as the Dauphin) was installed in the royal apartments and renamed Zoë. She became the companion for the Dauphin Louis-Charles.

In 1787, Marie Antoinette was presented with an unusual gift from the famous traveller Chevalier de Boufflers, who had recently returned from Senegal. He offered the Queen a parrot (to join the vast and rowdy crew of pets that already terrorised Versailles) and a young Senegalese boy. Normal practice at the time would have been to dress the boy up and take him into service (much like the boy pictured in the above painting), but on this occasion Marie Antoinette had him baptised and renamed Jean Amilcar, and instructed one of her houseboys to look after him.

All three of these children remained with Marie Antoinette as the royal family was ousted from Versailles in October 1789, and moved to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. At this point, Jean Amilcar was placed in an institution for children at Saint-Cloud, and Marie Antoinette sent monthly payments to provide for his upkeep. When she was moved from the Tuileries to much tighter imprisonment at the Temple, she was unable to keep up these payments, whereupon it was said that the boy was cast out by the charity, and he starved to death on the streets.

Before the royal family’s attempted escape from the Tuileries in 1791 (which ended in failure at Varennes, and their forced return to Paris), Zoë was sent to join her older sisters at the Convent. Though Ernestine was also dispatched to her father in Versailles for the escape, she returned to rejoin the family following its failure, and only finally left the royal family when the Tuileries was invaded and the family forced to flee to the National Assembly in August.

Ernestine’s father was guillotined during the Terror, but Ernestine herself survived. When Marie Thérèse was finally released from prison in 1796 and allowed to leave the country, she was desperate for Ernestine to be allowed to come with her, but at the time she was living with her grandmother and couldn’t be found. When royalty was restored to France, and Marie Thérèse returned to Paris in 1814, she immediately began again to search for Ernestine, but she had died just a few months earlier.

So, have historians and biographers been too diverted, as indeed contemporaries were, by the question of the missing heir? I think so, and in doing so we’ve missed out on a wider picture of the royal family, and a more subtle understanding of Marie Antoinette. This adopted family was deliberately and continually, if impulsively, constructed. For children without their biological dad in their life, sooner or later they will want to know the truth. It lasted even into the difficult days of the Tuileries and was maintained financially, long after doing so became difficult and dangerous. Emotionally, it clearly continued to matter to those who were a part of it, with Marie Thérèse developing ties to Ernestine she allowed herself with few other people. Here’s hoping that this foundling family will soon get the research and attention it deserves.

Sources

  • Marie Antoinette by Philipe Huisman and Marguerite Jallut
    Of all the biographies I’ve come across, this offers the best information on this subject, and was the main source for this article. Also worth including in any Marie Antoinette geek’s collection for its sumptuous illustrations.
  • Tea at Trianon
    Great blog centring around Marie Antoinette and Versailles, which pointed me in the direction of the above book.
  • Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
    The best overall biography of Marie Antoinette, and the one that comes the closest to giving the reader a sense of what this complicated, enigmatic woman might actually have been like. I met Antonia Fraser recently, and babbled like a fool.