The Splendid Century

 The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, by W. H. Lewis

I've always been terrible at French literature and history, and I find them intimidating.  So I'm quite proud of reading this description of life in the 17th century under the reign of Louis XIV, the one who called himself the Sun King and moved the court from Paris to Versailles.  It's not at all a difficult or heavy-duty tome, but a lively and fascinating overview of a society, perfect for someone like me.

Warren H. Lewis was C. S. Lewis' brother and, in later life, acted as his secretary and wrote books about French history.  But before that he made his career in the army, serving as a supply officer from 1914 until his retirement in 1932.  He therefore knew about everything there was to know about military logistics, especially horses, and this really comes through in his chapters about the French army -- and even his judgement of Louis' character, who he describes as so obsessed with details that he couldn't see the forest for the bark on the trees.  Louis, he thinks, would have been an excellent junior officer, but made a terrible general.

Lewis dedicates each chapter to a particular facet of life, starting, naturally, with Louis himself, who had an awful childhood, became king as a fairly young man, and dedicated himself to ruling and to splendor in equal parts.  The magnificence of his court was, to him, an integral part of a king's duty; it wasn't fun or comfortable in any way.  A gentleman scorns mere bodily comfort and expects the same of everyone else.  Life at Versailles sounds awful, but then so do many aspects of life in Paris (which could be smelled two miles away) and much of the countryside.  I am very glad not to be a 17th-century person.

After tackling the King and the court, we tour everyone else: the people, the church, the army and navy, town and country life, and several other topics.  I found the church chapter difficult, as it starts with an incomprehensible description of the Jansenists, but after that it got better and ended with a sort of little cult.  The persecution of the Huguenots is very well-covered and pretty much shows the French shooting themselves in the feet by being awful to a Protestant minority that was hard-working and a profit to the country. 

The army chapter is fascinating because Lewis knew so much about such things and makes it so; the navy is mostly about the lives of men sentenced to the galleys and is pretty disturbing.  There's a great chapter on the state of medicine (you don't want to know) and another on Mme. de Maintenon's successful efforts to improve education for women, which was pretty nonexistent.

Lewis is fun to read and puts in lots of interesting little asides or anecdotes, so I collected quite a few quotations:

Mme. de Maintenon complains bitterly of the discomfort of her room at Fontainebleau where there is a window the size of an arcade, to which she is not allowed to fit a shutter because it would mar the external symmetry of the facade, with the result that the room was freezing in winter, and baking hot in summer.  Magnificence was what was aimed at in a seventeenth-century house, not comfort.

...as a contemporary remarks, if the Devil himself had been given a free hand to plan the ruin of France, he could not have invented any scheme more likely to achieve that object than the system of taxation in vogue...

Fire brigades did not exist before 1699, and, somehow or other, the Capuchins had become expert firefighters; in emergencies, in which the modern Londoner dials 'fire,' the seventeenth-century householder sent for the Capuchins.

[On the University of Paris' medical faculty] Its unpublished, but nonetheless firmly held, creed was that medicine was invented by Apollo, improved by Aesculapius, and brought to perfection by Hippocrates; though if you were of modernist leanings, it was permissible to maintain that Galen had perfected the perfection of Hippocrates, and carried the science as far as human reason could reach.

Through the seeming variety of designs of urban life, Court, fast set, magistracy, and bourgeois, runs, however, the unvarying pattern of comfort sacrificed to ostentation.  "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy: is the general rule of life, and an unflinching acceptance of it strained even the handsomest incomes...

In the earlier part of the reign soup was not served in plated but in a two-handled porringer, from which each guest drank in turn; and even when tureen and soup plates can into existence, everyone dipped into the tureen with his own soup spoon...  [In 1695] the Duc de Montausier, who was held to carry cleanliness to the point of absurdity, invented the soup ladle.

...we notice that old wine seems to have been unknown to the 17th century, and that most of the wine drunk at Parisian tables came from the environs of Paris.  Champagne had begun the century as a still red wine, and had somehow changed itself into the modern beverage by 1695.  Cider was well known, but was thought by right-minded men to be God's judgement on the Normans for their rascality.  Liqueurs, but apparently not coffee, were served after dessert...

[On the theater] Some of the conventions of costume would have struck us as highly ridiculous; the title role of Polyeucte, for instance, had to be played in white gloves, and a hat twice the size of that of any other performer; the correct way to play Augustus [Caesar] in Cinna was in the manner of a soldier of fortune, and wearing a gigantic wig, spangled with laurel leaves and hanging down to the hips, the whole surmounted by an enormous hat covered in red plumes.

...before 1686 the only theory entertained about children was that they were a nuisance, so much locked-up capital on which no dividend in the shape of family aggrandizement could be expected for the first twelve or fourteen years of the child's life.  Consequently, education, such as it was, aimed only at turning the child into an adult with the last possible delay...

An excellent read, very enjoyable.