The French sandwich insists on elegance and simplicity. Where American sandwiches feature a profusion of ingredients (oh, I’ll have a turkey bacon avocado sandwich with brown mustard and lettuce—this sounds all too plausible and delicious), the French sandwich only uses a few simple ingredients, combines them, and c’est tout.
So therefore, my prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella sandwich featured only those two things with bread, with no extraneous ingredients around to possibly sully the star attraction’s taste.
It’s not necessarily a better taste, but it is different and welcome.
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Versailles is grand: Versailles astounds, Versailles hypnotizes, Versailles overwhelms. Louis XIV got what he paid for in Versailles, the ultimate expression of his myth and his power. It turns out that these things, for the Sun King, were one and the same, as his myth coerced his subjects into following him to ruinous defeat.
Revel writes, revealingly, on page 79 of “The Court”: “No one in 1661 could guarantee that young Louis was the handsomest and most accomplished man in the kingdom, but it was critical that people convinced themselves that he was.” Louis’ greatest asset was his ability to propagate his own myth, for in mythmaking, he won over the public and deceived the nobility. The myth was that Louis was all-wise and all-powerful. Certainly the power-play against Nicolas Fouquet helped his reputation, but it is clear that from the descriptions of court life in Revel’s essay that the nobility ceded the field to Louis and instead chose to frolic in Louis’ place of myth, Versailles.
But the play was not so good, in two senses. In Revel’s discussion of the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs, it is important to note that while the Duc is incredibly cynical about court life, it is a narrow cynicism. It refuses to reimagine the political sphere. This is the first failing of court life—it stifles the body politic. Second, the Duc’s critcism merely deals with the double-dealings, hypocrisy and stultifying nature of court life—so it wasn’t as if the nobles were actually happier. The Duc’s account is confirmed by the revealing quotation later in the work, in which the women admit that they spoke of clothes and fashion strictly to avoid offense. Louis trapped them in his orbit.
Criticism like the Duc’s or the lieu de memoire only served as an aid to Louis. The latter criticism focused on the idea that other courts had been more mannered, more graceful than the present. Of course this abdicates the political to Louis. It makes his only responsibility to the nobles to provide a spicy court life, which he proved adept at.
Versailles itself serves Louis’ mythmaking admirably. The grounds are built chiefly to impress. Hence, their vast size. Hence also the hodgepodge of architectural style present. One can see neoclassical, classical, French classical and baroque architectural styles sharing the same space, to disastrous results. Versailles refuses elegance in favor of opulence. The gardens are practically the only elegant feature of Versailles. The rest is kitsch, which is otherwise so rare in France. The comparisons to Greek gods and then the self-comparisons only fit in with the atmosphere of kitsch.
The actual saga of building it underlies the actual visual impressiveness of the grounds (for however visually overcrowded it is, one must admit the mass is wondrous). That Louis XIV deposed a powerful noble in order to build it is one part of the story; that he took undesirable grounds and made them desirable still another. The story is myth, and that myth served to convince onlookers that Louis XIV was “L’Etat.”
The consequences of the myth were narcissism: “Versailles contemplated and admired Versailles.” (Pommier) This narcissism meant ignoring the great problems of the day, for while only a powerful country could build something as vast as Versailles, the poverty and external enemies of France meant it was dangerous to watch oneself too much.
In all this, Louis XIV’s gargantuan opulence myth reminds me of our own country. Looking at the luxuries we buy for ourselves, the $10 million parties our plutocrats throw for themselves, the “Mission Accomplished” banners our politicians hang, I can’t help but detect an air of self-congratulation reminiscent of Versailles in Louis’ time.
The dangers of this self-congratulation are an obsessive focus on the details we should be congratulating ourselves on. Take these two incidents from Revel’s “The Court”. The first, quotation, about Madame de Sévigné, “She kept informed about the goings-on there [in Versailles], but still felt ill-educated.” The second, that interminable passage of a letter, obsessing over the writer’s sons, who were “princes of the blood” and therefore got to be addressed as such-and-such instead of such-and-such. Versailles served as focus for the nation’s wealthy, for its attention and its status. That focus served Louis XIV’s short-term goals, at the cost to his nation.
The echoes of our culture are too strong. Celebrity culture is the analogue of the first; the obsession over the “right schools” and other conspicuous consumptions the second. For us, the focus is wealth and the hedonistic life that follows from it. Both the life of nobility of Louis’ day and the life of wealth of ours are tokenist, materialist conceptions of the good life that distract at the expense of community welfare (not to mention the expense of one’s own happiness). It got the French in to trouble; hopefully we can pry ourselves away from our distractions to avoid our troubles.
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Apparently, according to my possibly faulty translation of Le Monde Dimplomatique, Sarkozy wants to move towards a more American-style health system. Well that’s suspicious. It’d be one thing if he were the guy trying to do some belt-tightening, but moving to an American health care system is like taking up bulimia as an alternative.
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The ride to Versailles shows that modern side of Paris. Here are the gleaming glass buildings! Here are the cranes! And yet, intermixed with that are small square French houses, so that you’re reminded that you cannot quite leave.
This is welcome. Something awful about most modern glass titans is how indistinguishable they are. If you took some from France, some from London and some from New York and switched them, I doubt anyone would notice but the occupants. Some are distinctive, true, like the egg-shaped building sitting near the Thames, but in general, they are all too interchangeable.
Not being an expert on the subject of urban architecture, I wonder why this is? If I were forced to guess, I would attribute it to globalization and the rise of the international superstar architect, an I.M. Pei or Lehry. They all have specific visions, and that’s all well and good, but their visions do not seem to be distinctive to the specific city. Insofar as we see a city as something other than a commercial and residential hub, this is a problem.
That something other is a distinctive way of life, a spirit that is represented by its buildings that can be called a work of art. My memories of London architecture are the stately white columns and crescents of residential London. When I leave Paris, I will remember the French Classicism, the grand boulevards and the mastery of perspective. These things are unique, are spiritual. Those modern glass hulks, while occasionally beautiful, share more with themselves than with the city they inhabit.
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I’ve become a regular at the neighborhood patisseries. The proprietors are now trying to guess my orders. It is my duty to outwit them.
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Modern Versailles is the Tower of Babel built anew. I heard German, Italian, French, English, Asian languages, a whole hue and gibbering cry. I heard the din while I trudged along with them, as Versailles herds the masses along in a preordained route. Like the King that built it, Versailles very much insists on routine.
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Do I look trustworthy or something? People have been asking for my directions and advice a lot.
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So I saw someone wearing a St. Louis Rams Kurt Warner jersey. I got into a disagreement about whether this was a French or American person. The arguments for both sides are strong: on one hand, it’s a pretty random jersey for a French person to wear (they do wear American athletic apparel, but it is of a more current vintage), on the other, no American would wear a St. Louis Rams Kurt Warner jersey, seeing as it’s not old enough to be retro, nor is it new enough to be current (Kurt Warner doesn’t play for them anymore.) It’s a mystery.
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