The Confusion

LA DUNETTE MEANT “POOP DECK,” the high place on a ship’s stern-castle from which the captain could see everything. The name had come to Louis-Fran?ois de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, some twelve years earlier, as he had stood upon the brow of the hill, peering, between two denuded trees, across the frozen bog that would later become the Pièce d’eau des Suisses, at the southern flanks of the stupendous construction site that would shortly become the royal palace of Louis XIV.

 

The King got things built more quickly than anyone else, partly because he had the Army to help him and partly because he hired all of the qualified builders. And so La Dunette was still nothing more than an empty stretch of high ground with a clever name when le Roi had given his cousin, the duc d’Arcachon, a personal tour of the palace. They had lingered particularly in the Queen’s Apartments: a row of bedchambers, antechambers, and salons that stretched between the Peace drawing-room and the King’s guardroom on the upper storey of the palace’s southern wing. The King and the Duke had strolled up and down the length of those apartments once, twice, thrice, pausing before each of the high windows to enjoy the view across the Parterre Sud, and the Orangerie below it to the rise of the Bois de Satory a mile away. The duc d’Arcachon had, in the fullness of time, perceived what the King had wished him to perceive, which was that any buildings erected on or near the crest of the hill would spoil the Queen’s view, and give her the feeling that the de Lavardacs were peering down into her bedroom windows. And so a great pile of expensive architectural drawings had been used to start fires in the H?tel d’Arcachon in Paris, and the duc had hired the great Hardouin-Mansart and implored him to design a chateau altogether magnificent—but invisible from the Queen’s windows. Mansart had situated it well back from the crest of the hill. Consequently, from the windows of the chateau of La Dunette proper, the view was limited. But Mansart had laid out a promenade that swung out along a lobe of the garden and led to a gazebo, perched demurely on the brink of the hill, and camouflaged with climbing vines. From there the prospect was superb.

 

Before dinner was served, the Duke and Duchess of Arcachon invited their guests—twenty-six in all—to stroll out to the gazebo, enjoy the breeze (for the day was warm), and take in the view of the Royal Chateau of Versailles, its gardens, and its waterways. From this distance it was difficult to make out individuals and impossible to hear voices, but large groups were obvious. Out in the town, beyond the Place d’Armes, the Franciscans had lit a bonfire before their monastery and were dancing around it in a circle; from time to time, a few notes of their song would blow past on a slip of breeze. Another revel was underway along the Grand Canal, a mile-long slot of water stretching away from the Chateau along the central axis of the King’s garden. From here, it was a milling mob of wigs. Even the stable-hands out in the Place d’Armes had got a bonfire going, which had attracted hundreds of commoners: townspeople, servants of Versailles and nearby villas, and country folk who had seen the pillars of smoke and heard the pealing of bells, and come in to find out what all the excitement was about. Many of these probably had only the haziest of ideas as to who William of Orange was and why it was good that he was dead; but this did not hold them back from lusty celebration.

 

étienne d’Arcachon raised his glass, and silenced the little crowd around the gazebo. “To toast the death of the Prince of Orange* would be uncouth, even though he was a perfidious and heretickal usurper and an enemy of France,” he said. This oration, being ambiguous, only threw the guests—who were all standing on tiptoe with glasses poised—into utter confusion. They froze long enough for étienne to dig himself out of his own rhetorical hole: “But to toast the victory of the French, the free English, and the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne is honorable.”

 

They did so.

 

“The only event,” étienne continued, “that could make the day more glorious would be a victory at sea, to match the one on land; and voilà, God has answered our prayers accordingly. The French Navy, of which my father has the high honor of being Grand Admiral, has routed the English and the Dutch off Beachy Head, and even now menaces the mouth of the River Thames. France is victorious on all fronts: on the sea, in Ireland, in Flanders, and in Savoy. To France!”

 

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