Transcription
[Music] Louis the 14th, so powerful, he took his name from the Sun [Music] itself. So dominant, he made the haughtiest aristocrats bend to his will. So insatiable, that no one mistress could satisfy him for [Music] long. Throughout a long and turbulent life, he sought magnificence in all things. He strived for it in love, in battle, and in art. But above all, he wanted magnificence at Versailles. By creating a building so spectacular, it would outshine any palace on Earth. Taken from intimate memoirs and official records, this is the story of how a king's obsession created one of the wonders of the world. [Music]
It started in a swamp. It was here, in a stretch of mosquito-infested marshland, that Louis, the 27-year-old King of France, decided to construct his new palace. Near a small and unremarkable country town called Versailles. His courtiers were far from impressed. It was almost as though Louis had deliberately picked the worst possible site for his magnificent palace, in order to prove to the world that his will was was greater than [Music] nature.
Louis had a sentimental reason for choosing Versailles. It was the site of his father's old hunting lodge, and as a boy, he'd played and hunted here. The original shadow of Louis's father was on top of a hill. The problem, if you wanted to turn it into a grand palace, was that you weren't going to be building on flat land. Louis was told, "This is not a great place for a big expansion of your father's shadow." As a monarch with absolute power, Louis wasn't used to being told what to do, and he didn't much like [Music] it.
From the outset, Louis was thinking big. He started by hiring the greatest architect of the age, Louis Le Vau, to transform the hunting lodge into the palace of his dreams. Louis was to devote much of his energy to his new project, but he was always sure to make time for his other great passion. Although married to Queen Marie Thérèse, he had numerous affairs. His current mistress was a young aristocratic beauty called Louise de La Vallière.
Louis's attitude towards women was one of tremendous enthusiasm. He really loved women. Um, he didn't just love them um for sex. He loved their company, he loved their conversation, he loved their elegance. He loved women who who were witty and refined. Um, most of all, I think he he loved women because they teased him, they made him laugh. He loves, he had a tremendous sexual appetite. He would quite often, if his mistress was too slow in taking her dress off, have a turn with her ladies-maid while he was waiting, or a passing servant in in the corridor. At Versailles, um, he made love the way he did everything else, with enormous gusto.
A French king was expected to have a mistress. It sort of symbolized the virility of the nation. And you know, 100 years later, poor Louis the 16th, the French were furious with him because he didn't have a mistress. Louise de La Vallière was Louis the 14th's first official mistress. She was a lady-in-waiting at the court. She was, uh, gracious, charming, daughter of a good family, and she adored the king. And it was irresistible because she convinced him, quite genuinely, that she loved him for himself. And I think this is what the young king wanted to hear. I think he had a very good time. Louise was very important to him. He did love her. They had two children together. He made her a duchess. But it was, it was a young man's crush rather than a profound passion.
Whatever his feelings for Louise, Louis was always careful to fulfill all of his obligations to his wife. His marriage to Queen Marie Thérèse was politically vital. It had ensured peace between France and Spain for many years, and he needed to father children with her to ensure that his dynasty lived on. Louis did feel a duty towards the queen. He he made love to her frequently. Um, and she would always have a special mass said the day afterwards, and everybody would nudge each other at court because she'd look very pleased as as she came into the chapel. Um, he was attentive to her, polite to her. They they had children together. Her, but she simply didn't have the looks, or the education, or the spirit, or the charm to captivate a man like that. She accepted his infidelity, as did most royal and aristocratic women of the time, as being part of of of marriage.
Louis's mosquito-bitten courtiers also had to accept their king for what he was. Like all 17th-century monarchs, Louis believed himself appointed directly by God. Nobody could tell him what to do. He was quite simply the only power in the realm. And having had this consciousness since he was a very, very small child, I think it meant that he was without any arrogance or or hubris, um, of the opinion that he was pretty much a God himself. As a kind of living God, Louis liked nothing more than being the center of everyone else's attention.
Louis was brought up in a theater-mad age. As a young man, he took dancing lessons, which seemed to have completely transformed his self-confidence. He was actually a very accomplished dancer, and he clearly enjoyed greatly taking part in these, um, performances, which were mainly in front of a court audience. I think all his contemporaries were extremely impressed by him. He was astonishingly handsome, with his long golden hair and his almost cherubic face. He was indeed god-given, as his mother, Anne of Austria, called him. Louis liked dressing up, and not just for fun. It was part of his public image. He chose as his role model the Greek god Apollo, represented in classical imagery as the Sun. [Music]
Louis was very interested in the Sun as a symbol. It's a very powerful symbol because it sheds its light everywhere. It's obviously very beneficial, but it's also a symbol of, uh, domination, because all the other elements are subordinate to the Sun. These, in a sense, above everything. The Sun King seems to be an appropriate title. It was one that was a piece of propaganda when he was young, but like many bits of propaganda, I think it became fact.
Le Vau's plans for the remodeling of Versailles were complete and ready to present to his demanding boss. [Music] Louis certainly knew that what he wanted was a building which had that shock and awe effect. There's absolutely no doubt that he wanted a building that would be sensational. Le Vau's model was impressive, but had a major flaw. He planned to destroy the old hunting lodge. The idea of Louis the 14th was to keep always a little shadow of his father, so that was a problem for an architect, because architects prefer to destroy everything and to build a new, a new building. So Le Vau sent the architect away, and he told him, "I want this little shadow preserved." [Music]
With Le Vau sent back to the drawing board, Louis turned his attention to the landscape. He wanted to expand the existing garden, adding ornamental lakes and groves lined with dazzling fountains. But he'd picked an awful [Music] site. There were no views. It's hemmed in by the sides of a valley, and also Versailles wasn't naturally endowed the region with the sort of trees which Louis wanted for his garden. Louis's chief gardener was the century's most celebrated landscape designer, André Le Nôtre. Versailles would be the greatest challenge of his career. But the Sun King did not want to wait for his earthly paradise, or for his trees to grow from saplings. Louis the 14th wanted results, and he wanted them fast. This was really a theme of the whole sort of project. Versailles, and the solution was to uproot mature trees from other parts of France and bring them in. And a special contraption was invented, a horse-drawn contraption, which would, um, allow these mature trees to be transported on, as you can imagine, these terribly bad roads from other [Applause] provinces.
With major new building work on hold, Louis instructed Le Vau to upgrade the interior of Versailles. On his inspection tours, Louis was accompanied by his entourage, including mistress Louise de La Vallière. But Louise now had a rival. Madame de Montespan. [Music] [Music]
After a while, he became quite bored with Louise, and she hung around at court desperately to try and get his attention back. She never really did. So I, I think she probably suffered quite a lot. I think the king could pick and choose. Power is a great aphrodisiac, and a crown even more so. So naturally, I think he picked very beautiful [Music] women.
Louis liked to display his power. After winning a war against Spain, he celebrated with a huge party in the gardens of Versailles. It was also a chance for the king to show off the woman who had now replaced Louise as his favorite mistress. Her name was Madame de Montespan, and she was one of the most beautiful women in France. Madame de Montespan is such an attractive figure. I think she was a tremendous goer. She loved everything to do with pleasure. She loved jewels, she liked marvelous clothes, she liked food, flowers, gardening, and above all, she liked sex. You see, and he did too. Um, so he found the absolutely the right match for him. And she knew about having wonderful feasts and about having entertainments. So she was exactly the kind of person Louis envisaged as being suitable. At the same time, she was so beautiful that ambassadors thought she contributed to the legend of the Sun King.
The Sun King's festivities were about more than pleasure. They had real political significance. Louis was slowly turning his new palace into the most important and the most fashionable seat of power in Europe. The party at Versailles, um, they've been described as pagan masses, fireworks, rides along the canal in gondolas, balls for 3,000 people under the stars, um, plays, ballet with 100 dancers by Lully, everything you could possibly imagine, all at once in in this tremendous circus of celebration for the king. The great parties were intended to show the nobility and the rest of of Europe how powerful the king of France was, what wonderful artists he had, what wonderful musicians, how superior his court and his culture were to every other court and culture in Europe.
The king's former mistress, Louise, eventually gave up trying to win him back. After years of neglect, she decided to enter a convent, leaving behind the children she'd had with Louis. I don't think she felt guilt about leaving them behind because she knew that they were going to be very well treated. So I don't think she felt that kind of guilt, because I think her big guilt, she wanted to expunge with penance and fasting and all that in the convent. And when she finally got away, I think she was much happier. She became a very hardline nun, you know, haircut, hair shirt, um, praying and repentance, and generally ended her life more or less in the odor of sanctity.
Because Louis was spending more and more time at Versailles, he decided to move his entire government there. To accommodate the new officials, Le Vau suggested a brand new idea: keeping the old hunting lodge, but enclosing it with massive new buildings on three sides. The design was known as the envelope. The shadow was preserved, but it was enveloped in this new building, in a completely different style, which looked like a palace. What he also did with Le Vau was to build pavilions for his ministers. Now, this was very important. What this meant was that for the first time, Versailles could function as a seat of monarchy, a place from which the king could govern. [Music]
Building the envelope was a massive task, requiring thousands of [Music] workers. The largest number of workers were 40,000 people. At the same time, it was a very dangerous place, also, because the work to be done was not done in a secure way, of course. It was, uh, with accidents and people dying. Louis was impatient to get the job done quickly. Work went on day and [Music] night. There was no health and safety regime, and the workers who were most at risk were the ones who were working high up. So, for instance, the roofers, the carpenters. We do know that there were a lot of accidents on [Music] site, and there were times when the, um, death rate, the mortality rate was high. And in order not to demoralize the workforce, the corpses would be removed at night. [Music]
Louis's mistress, Madame de Montespan, was already married, but that didn't stop her spending most of her time with the king, and he made sure she got the VIP treatment. She had a suite of 20 rooms, whereas the queen had to make do with 11. Um, they were gorgeously appointed, and he spent a lot of time in them. They included, um, a bathroom, most unusual for the time, in which apparently he and Madame de Montespan spent, uh, many happy hours. Despite her elevated status, Montespan found it hard to share Louis, even with his own [Music] wife. Was [Music] I don't think she was really jealous of the queen, because after all, she had everything of Louis's real love, and she knew it. But I think she made scenes about the other mistresses when they came along. As the years passed, and I think there are some men, possibly Louis among them, who rather like it if a woman is jealous and shows signs of caring, you know. She certainly complained like mad if she felt he had strayed from what was, in fact, an illegitimate relationship.
Louis kept a close eye on the building works, but one inspection visit brought a nasty surprise. A mother, angry at the death of her son killed on site, was waiting for him. [Music] We're told that she just let fly at Louis the 14th. I mean, he was very surprised. He said, "Is that me?" This was a courageous thing for this mother to have done, because there were guards everywhere, and of course, as soon as she had said this, she was very quickly, uh, hustled away for her punishment. [Music] [Music] [Applause]
Le Vau's ambitious plans were finally taking shape, and Louis's dream of creating the most spectacular palace in Europe was slowly becoming a reality. Louis's great gardener, his real gift was for rearranging the landscape, basically, and dividing it up on a grid, and then you treat the units within the grid essentially as outdoor rooms. And then you would bring in all sorts of other people, water engineers, sculptors, architects, essentially to furnish these [Music] rooms. The envelope around the old hunting lodge was complete. Louis's ministers were in stalled in their new apartments, and the king began governing from [Music] Versailles. Now, Louis decided he would make the palace his permanent home and insisted that leading French nobles come and live there [Music] too.
There's no no question that for Louis, the nobility, particularly the great court nobility, were an essential aspect of his kingship. They surrounded him with glory, status. This is a state where the ultimate decider on granting favor or refusing favor is in the hands of the king. If you were looking for a military command, if you were looking for favors for many of your clients, supporters, and family, then the way to achieve this was by getting access to Louis, and to a lesser extent, by gaining access to the ministers around Louis. But housing all the nobles would mean yet more building work. Louis's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, worried about the cost. [Music]
Louis wanted the nobility at Versailles in order that he could keep an eye on them. The message he wanted to give to his nobles was this: "You don't need to rebel to get what you want. What you have to do is come and pay your court to me." [Music] The original architect, Louis Le Vau, died before his project was complete. His replacement, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, had ideas of his own. Mansart, at the Great, there to have big wings each side of the envelope to make some accommodations for the princes and the court. So it was a huge design, and I think he, he had a great idea of what would be a great palace for a great [Music] king.
Mansart's most ambitious proposal was to build a fabulous gallery lined with mirrors. [Music] [Music] [Applause]
Mansart, however magnificent the plan, Louis's experience with his builders was a familiar one. Everything took much longer and cost far more than the estimates, and they made a terrible mess. Nothing is more false than these gracious pictures of Versailles. It shows this stately place with everything perfect, you know, everybody gliding about. Actually, it was a huge building site. All the court ladies complained about it. "The work went starting at 6:00 a.m., my dear. The dust and the smell of wet plaster, which got in their hair." It's exactly like today, exactly like what we feel on a tiny scale when our neighbors go [Music] building.
It must have been an amazing site. I mean, the first day in at Versailles, everybody starts jostling, jostling, jostling for bigger rooms and better rooms and a better position. In the meantime, the lesser folk, you know, they were trying to get from the attics, get better rooms, and always to get as near as possible to the king. At night, there was this sort of great unrolling of mattresses all over the palace, as servants and soldiers, guards would, um, you know, they'd go to sleep on the floor. The lavatory arrangements were pretty kind of basic. Servants would think nothing of relieving themselves in the corridors of Versailles. So you have this extraordinary attention on outward appearances and magnificent clothes, but alongside you have all these smells. I mean, you could have been in a farmyard. Hello! I think many of the nobility would have resented the chaos and lack of order, and D has complained about this at length. But I think one shouldn't underestimate the compulsive desire of most of the great nobility to attend at court, to be around the king.
Louis's desire for magnificence extended to every aspect of his life, especially his wardrobe. He dressed in the finest cloth and expected his courtiers to do likewise. And when his hair began to recede, he adopted the fashion for elaborate wigs. A half-inch of lace on a cuff, a gold or a silver button, whether your pearl was here on your collar or here, these could mean life and death to the courtier. Fashion was hugely important, and it was a very important way for the aristocracy to distinguish themselves from the ordinary people. Louis influenced fashion to some extent. When he was a young man, he dressed quite flamboyantly, lots of cavalier silks and laces and ribbons. He was a bit on the short side, so he introduced a fashion for high-heeled shoes. His mistresses, perhaps, were were more influential on fashion. Madame de Montespan invented various outfits, including one, um, the "Glorious Déshabillé," which was a sort of tunic worn over trousers. And she invented this because it was very easy to take off. Um, normally, a lady's dress required two women to stand behind her to undo all the strings. And of course, Louis was an impatient man, he couldn't be bothered waiting. So she invented this outfit so that he could undress her discreetly and easily in [Music] private.
With so many courtiers now craving his attention, Louis kept them busy by turning his daily activities into public rituals. When he gets up in the morning, that's the Royal Lever, with a great queue of great nobles who hand him different articles of clothing. At night, it's all reversed. It's the Royal Coucher, and he takes things off and gives them to nobles. Great nobles would quarrel with one another as to which of them had the right to hand him his shirt, because it had to be the person of highest rank in the room. They couldn't go off to the country on their estates and start raising armies, meddling. It meant that they had to stay there, quarreling about who's turn it was to give the king his napkin. Even the king's meal times turned into a performance, where the nobles stood and watched the king eat, waiting for him to speak to them. One of the phenomena of Versailles was the sight of leading nobles adopting these very deferential poses. This was actually a very, very powerful signal that the monarchy was back in charge. The courtiers' flattery became a way of life. For instance, one courtier, a great nobleman in his province, Louis says to him, "When is your wife's baby due?" And this nobleman says, "When Your Majesty wishes." [Laughter]
As well as accommodating thousands of courtiers and officials, Versailles was also used by the king to promote France itself. There was a deliberate intention to create a showcase for French manufacturers and to rival or outdo Italy, above all, which was the great source of taste in the 17th century. The magnificence of the interior, of course, it was all about the splendor of the monarchy and the splendor of Louis the 14th. Louis personally loved rich materials and fine craftsmanship, but it was also a careful orchestration of Louis the 14th's, France's claim to lead Europe in terms of taste and the arts. As building progressed, Louis commissioned hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and other decorations, many containing images of himself as the embodiment of French glory. This was no accident. If you compare Louis with rulers before, it is remarkable how he had professional advice. So he's not presenting his image by himself. There was a whole backup team of intellectuals, writers. This is a real innovation, that there should be a small committee of people who are simply working on how to present the king's image in the most grand manner possible. The great French painter Charles Le Brun was recruited to the [Music] cause. Louis's image-makers liked art that presented him as a conquering hero, drawing on figures from ancient mythology like Jupiter and his favorite, Apollo. The association with the images of very powerful men of the past, uh, were part of the strategy, uh, being the best king and the most powerful and most important king of the the time. Louis's public image may have included a fair amount of 17th-century hype, but he was was certainly a remarkable man. He goes hunting three times a day, he goes to council meetings three times a day, he's a very hard worker, he makes love three times a day. Uh, we must conclude the man had amazing energies. [Music]
Louis's restless pursuit of glory and magnificence found expression in the gardens of Versailles. But even the king could not change the geography of a region that was critically short of running water to power the hundreds of new fountains that Le Nôtre had installed. And so, when the king took a stroll, his gardeners had to turn the fountains on as he approached, and then off again once he had walked past. [Applause] [Music]
The problem of getting supplies of fast-running, high-pressure water were never adequately solved. Various attempts were made to find alternative sources from quite far away from Versailles. The celebrated Machine of Marly, a series of vast water wheels, which were intended to bring water up from the Seine and deliver it to the palace of Versailles. This provided water, but not enough. The great and final scheme involved building a full-scale Roman-style aqueduct. This was abandoned as being too expensive, and the result, of course, was that the great gardens of Versailles never had enough water to drive all the fountains [Music] simultaneously.
Fortunately, there was enough glass to furnish the palace's most ambitious development. The result of six years' intense work. This was Mansart and Le Brun's most stunning achievement: the Hall of Mirrors. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
I think the effect of the gallery is more a dream, wonderful light given by the mirrors, and it's, I think it's, it's very impressive and and [Music] astonishing. Versailles is undoubtedly one of the great palaces. Louis would have wanted us to think of the chateau as an integrated whole, not to focus on specific items, whether the Hall of Mirrors or the great canal. And as an integrated unit, it completely outshines, I think, almost every other palace ever conceived or built. [Music]
Louis said of his house, "Versailles is Louis. He was his house. If we understand one, we understand the [Music] other." The king wishes to assert his authority and maintain his position. He has to do it through display. Versailles is an ideal theater set on which he can act out what he regards as his royal duties. Versailles, from this point of view, fulfills those requirements better than almost any other building that could be imagined.
Louis's love affair with his palace lasted longer than any of his human relationships. After 14 years, nine pregnancies, and seven children, Montespan was beginning to lose her looks and her hold on the king. Madame de Montespan began to fall out of favor because, inevitably, after nine pregnancies, her figure wasn't quite what it was. She became rather blousy, uh, she drank too much, she gambled too much, she made a nuisance of herself with her tantrums. And I think, as happens to a lot of women, the more she felt her man slipping away from her, the more needy and clingy she became. And the more needy and clingy she became, the more she drove him [Music] away. But I think Louis was also undergoing quite a significant personal transformation. He was becoming much more religious. Madame de Montespan was a married woman. Um, committing adultery with an unmarried woman was one thing, but double adultery was sacrilege. It was a tremendous scandal, and he was becoming conscious of the fact that his way of life was was really compromising the state and compromising his kingship.
Louis turned to a very different woman: Madame de Maintenon, governess to his illegitimate children. Maintenon was pious, quiet, and intelligent, qualities that a middle-aged Louis had come to admire. Poor Madame de Maintenon had to do everything. She had to act as a cook, a plumber, a gardener, as well as a teacher and a nursemaid. It was exhausting, and she did this so well that Louis began to pay attention to her. He noticed this, this intelligent woman, this calm presence. Slowly, slowly, Madame de Maintenon began to seduce the king.
Madame de Maintenon rejected mistress Montespan was distraught. I think it was the rise of Maintenon in the first place which really riled her, because she found she'd made a mistake. She'd underestimated another woman. Maintenon was poor and a widow and innocuous and very pleasant and intelligent, and she didn't spot that Louis might actually fall in love with a woman like that, you know, and it might be a very seductive thing to him in quite a different way from her own seductive paws. And I think for a couple of years at least, she was extremely angry.
When Louis's long-suffering Queen Marie Thérèse died, he was free to marry again, and he turned to the quiet governess. She'd not only won his heart, she'd convinced him she could help save his soul. The 17th-century mentality was very different. The attention paid to salvation, dying in a state of grace, so you didn't go to hell, was enormous. And Louis, who in some ways was quite simple, took this very, very seriously. And I think Maintenon persuaded him that she could help him towards his salvation. As as Maintenon was a commoner, the king could only marry her behind closed [Music] doors. He did need a secret church wedding, a morganatic wedding, as they're called, in the presence of clergy and witnesses. After that, he's all right with God and the church, he can go to communion, it's all perfectly [Music] okay. And it's interesting that Louis never declared the marriage because she wasn't a princess. He had his own values, that is, he would have his private life, but in public, he was [Music] solitary.
In public, Louis concentrated on running his palace and his court. Life at Versailles became ever more formalized. I think the establishment of the full court at Versailles really turned it into the great social, political power-broking center of France. Versailles was exciting if you thought like a French nobleman, because Louis the 14th was your host. You would spend the evening in the physical presence of the King of France. You would be admitted to his gaming table, you would be invited to dance in front of the king. Now, for nobles, this was an enormously prestigious, an enormously flattering thing. [Music]
The court of Versailles could be seen as a cross, perhaps, between Royal Ascot and the dealing floor of the futures exchange. A combination of a very socially elite group who already know each other and can interact with each other, and at the same time, a group of hardened professionals who have their own language and their own codes, who know how to strike deals and to extract the best possible advantages from a particular situation. Versailles was the original hotbed of scandal. The phrase with which everyone began their conversation was "On dit." "It's being said," "They're saying this," "They're saying that." All day, these whispers of of rumor would travel about the palace, and people would send each other little bulletins by sedan chair to report on what was going on in in the different rooms. And that, of course, made it a tremendously claustrophobic place to live. You couldn't do anything, anything without everybody knowing about it. It was this extraordinary networking center. Everyone who was anyone in France was now at Versailles. So to be excluded was disastrous for a French nobleman. The worst thing that a nobleman could hear from the king was, "He's a man I never see." People would spend literally years trying to hear what one word or have a gesture from the [Music] king.
What with the nobility now so dependent on him, Louis could fully immerse himself in the role he was born to play. He emerges as this absolutely consummate performer. The whole regime at Versailles hinged on your having this extraordinarily charismatic figure who could perform in all the right ways for this enormous audience which he had assembled around him. But Louis was only human, and after years of good health, he began to suffer from a serious medical problem: an anal fistula. This was an extremely serious condition in the context of the 17th century. The risk of it becoming gangrenous, that the pus would seep into the rest of the body and infect, was very great indeed. Untreated, it would almost certainly have killed the [Applause] king. The, the only way that it was likely to be cured was through invasive surgery. Uh, such surgery had had a very poor success rate. But Louis instructed his doctors to go ahead. His senior physician devised a new instrument especially for the operation. The doctors involved in the operation practiced on a number of others who had anal fistulas beforehand, but it was nonetheless still a very risky operation. In a 17th-century, the doctors were much more likely to kill you than cure you. Huge effort was made at Versailles to keep the details of this secret, because it was felt so likely that the king wouldn't survive, that the diplomatic repercussions of this would sweep through [Music] Europe. Majesty? Yeah. [Music] He was so stalwart during the operation. He never spoke at all. Imagine the pain, no anesthetic. This extraordinary self-control he had. He just gritted his teeth and conducted himself with great dignity. [Music] And that night, he took a council meeting. Extraordinary. Very pale, a sort of sheen of sweat, but he made [Music] it.
Louis recovered his health, but other troubles were looming. His fame and success had earned him many enemies. Two years after his operation, France began a costly war against Spain, England, and Sweden. As the fighting dragged on, some of Versailles' silver was quietly removed and melted down to pay the king's soldiers. Unable to win the war, Louis signed an unfavorable peace treaty, conceding territory to his enemies. The Sun King was finally in decline, and although he continued to make small improvements to his great palace, he lost much of his enthusiasm. After just four years of peace, a new crisis threatened. The Spanish king died, leaving his empire to Louis's grandson. If Louis accepted on the boy's behalf, he knew the other European powers would try to stop him. But if he refused, the territories would go to France's rivals in Austria. He was in an impossible situation. Louis was damned if he did, damned if he didn't. Faced with an issue which concerns the honor of his dynasty, is perhaps not surprising that he opts for the acceptance of the Spanish offer, but inevitably therefore provokes war with the other major European powers. This, the most grueling war of Louis's reign, lasted for 12 years and brought France to the brink of [Music] ruin.
As Louis grew old and frail, he fell ever more under the influence of his devout wife and now shunned the lavish amusements that had once filled his beloved palace. I think Versailles became a chilly, tedious place in many respects. Once Maintenon got Louis into her grip, it became this sort of rather dreary world where whatever the King of France was doing, you could set your watch by. You could look at a clock at any hour of the day and know exactly where Louis was. And his whole life became this, this endless choreography of etiquette and ritual, with Madame de Maintenon sitting there in the corner like some sort of holy spider, watching it all. [Applause] [Music]
Maintenon was a comfort to Louis when he needed it the most. Illness took the life of many members of his family, including a son and grandson, and he was haunted by the legacy of his wars. I think Louis was a tragic figure in his final days. I think the tragedy began with the sudden deaths of so many of his nearest and dearest. Louis had Maintenon by his side, but she said about him that sometimes he would be alone with her, he'd shut the doors, and then he would just weep about the way things had gone. I think it was a very sad old age, you know, outliving his descendants and having led France into these wars which seemed so wonderful when he was winning them, and became so ghastly when he wasn't. Aged 76, and after 72 years on the throne, Louis was once again taken seriously ill. No one expected Louis the 14th to live as long as he did. When Louis finally weakens in the last year of his life, it's a result of a gangrenous infection which gradually spreads from his leg to the rest of the left side of his body. Even Louis's own death became a public [Music] performance. In spite of their long intimacy, Maintenon wasn't actually at the king's side when he died, and that was not the practice. By her own wish, she went off to a convent to be among ladies who would succor her and sympathize with her, and and leaving him to priests and ultimately to God. He died rather slowly, and so she came back once, I think twice, um, to be with him again, but ultimately it was time for her to [Music] go.
The heir to the throne was a really tiny child, the little 5-year-old boy, and he's brought in to see his grandfather, and his grandfather sort of tells him to be a good king, but says, "I have loved war too much." Very sad dying words from Louis the 14th, certainly true. [Music] [Music]
Throughout his long reign, Louis sought to bring glory to himself and his country. That lifelong devotion, expressed in the extraordinary palace he built at Versailles, is the reason he's become part of the very essence of France. He didn't just leave glorious monuments, beautiful buildings, fabulous paintings. He left a sense of identity which has endured until today. Louis certainly embodies, I think, the idea of the greatness of France. He was the king, and you were the subject, and there was never any doubt about that. He imposed his will on the world so splendidly in in every respect. He wanted to impress everybody, and he, I think he succeeded. The scale of the vision is breathtaking. No one did it like Louis. [Music]