shirt. They jostled for the privilege of presenting the King with his chaise percee, (his 'chair with a hole in it'), then crowded around while the King performed his daily natural functions. There was throng in his chamber when he prayed with his chaplain, and when he ate. It followed as he walked through the palace, strolled through the gardens, went to the theater or rode to his hounds. Protocol determined who had a right to sit in the King's presence and whether on a chair with a back or only on a stool. So glorified was the monarch that even when his dinner was passing by, courtiers raised their hats and swept them on the ground in salute, declaring respectfully, 'La viande du roi' ('The King's dinner').
Louis loved to hunt. Every day in good weather, he rode with sword or spear in hand, following baying dogs through the forest in pursuit of boar or stag. Every evening, there was music and dancing and gambling at which fortunes were won and lost. Every Saturday night, there was a ball. Often, there were masquerades, elaborate three-day festivals when the entire court dressed up as Romans, Persians, Turks or Red Indians. The feasts at Versailles were gargantuan. Louis himself ate for two men. Wrote the Princess Palatine: 'I have often seen the King eat four different plates of soup of different kinds, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, two thick slices of ham, a dish of mutton in garlic-flavored sauce, a plateful of pastries, and then fruit and hard-boiled eggs. Both the King and 'Monsieur' [Louis' younger brother] are exceedingly fond of hard-boiled eggs.' The King's grandchildren later were taught the polite innovation of using a fork to eat with, but when they were invited to dine with the monarch, he would have none of it and forbade them using these tools, declaring, 'I have never in my life used anything to eat with but my knife and my fingers.'
The main feast at Versailles was a feast of love. The enormous palace with its numberless rooms to slip away to, its crisscrossing alleys of tress, its salutes to hide behind, made a gorgeous stage. In this, as in everything, the King played the leading role. Louis' wife, Maria Theresa, who had came to him as an infanta of Spain, was a simple, child-like creature with large blue eyes. She surrounded herself with half a dozen dwarfs and dreamed of Spain. As long as she lived, Louis upheld his marriage duties, finding his way into her bed eventually every night, dutifully making love to her twice a month. The court always knew these occasions by the fact that the Queen went to confession the following day and her face had a special glow. But the Queen was not enough for Louis. He was highly sexed, always inclined to go to bed with any woman who was handy and relentless in pursuit. 'Kings who have a desire, seldom sigh for long,' said the courtier Bussy-Rabutin, but there is no record that Louis was ever seriously rebuffed. On the contrary, the court was filled with beautiful woman, most of them married but still ambitious, who flaunted their availabiiity. The three successive Maitresses en Titre (the acknowledged royal mistresses), Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan and Mademoiselle de Fontanges, were but the tip of the iceberg, although with Madame de Montespan it was a grand passion which lasted twelve years and resulted in seven children. No one was disturbed about these arrangements except perhaps the Marquis de Montespan, who angered the King by making a jealous fuss and referring to his wife through all these years as 'the late Madame de Montespan.'
Whomever the King chose, the court honored. Duchesses rose when a new mistress entered the room. In 1673, when Louis went to war, he took with him the Queen, Louise de La Valliere and Madame de Montespan, then extremely pregnant. All three ladies lumbered along after the army in the same carriage. On campaign, Louis' military tent was made of Chinese silk and had six chambers, including three bedrooms. War, for the Sun King, was not all hell.
Even in France, the view of Louis as a gracious, majestic monarch was not universally held. There were those who found him inconsiderate: he would set off on long carriage rides of five or six hours, insisting that ladies ride with him even when they were pregnant, and then would absolutely refuse to halt so that they might relieve themselves. He seemed unconcerned about the common people: those who tried to speak to him of the poverty his wars were inflicting were excluded from his presence as persons of bad taste. He was stern and could be ruthless: after the Affaire des Poisons, in which numerous court personages who had recently died were alleged to have been poisoned and a plot against the life of the King was hinted, thirty-six of the accused were tortured and burned at the stake, while eighty-one men and women were chained up for life at the bottom of French dungeons, their jailors commanded that if they spoke, they were to be whipped. The story of the Man in the Iron Mask, whose identity was known only to the King, and who was held for life in solitary confinement, was whispered at court.
Outside France, a few in Europe regarded the Sun King's rays as wholly beneficial. To Protestant Europe, Louis was an aggressive, brutal Catholic tyrant.
The instrument of Louis' wars was the army of France. Created by Louvois, it numbered 150,000 in peacetime, 400,000 in wartime. The cavalry wore blue, the infantry pale red, and royal guards—the famed Maison du Roi—scarlet. Commanded by the great marshals of France, Conde, Turenne, Vendome, Tallard and Villars, the army of France was the envy—and menace—of Europe. Louis himself was not a warrior. Although as a young man he went to war, making a dashing figure on horseback in a gleaming breastplate, a velvet cape and a plumed three-cornered hat, the King did not actually participate in battles, but he became quite expert in the details of strategy and military administration. When Louvois died, the King assumed his role and became his own minister of war. It was he who discussed the grand strategy of campaigns with his marshal and saw to the raising of supplies, the recruiting, training and allocation and the collection of intelligence.
Thus the century unrolled, and the prestige of the Sun King and the power and glory of France mounted year by year. The splendor of Versailles aroused the admiration and envy of the world. The French army was the finest in Europe. The French language became the universal language of diplomacy, society and literature. Anything, everything, was possible, it seemed, if beneath the paper bearing the command there appeared the tall, shaky signature 'Louis.'
At the time of the Great Embassy, the gap between Russia and the West seemed far wider than anything measurable in terms of seagoing ships or superior military technology. From the West, Russia appeared dark and medieval—the glories of its architecture, its icons, its church music and its folk art were unknown, ignored or despised—whereas, to its own educated inhabitants at least, late-seventeenth-century Europe seemd a brilliant, modern community. New worlds were being explored not only across the oceans but also in science, music, art and literature. New instruments to meet practical needs were being invented. Today, many of these achievements have become the necessities and treasures of modern mart—die telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the barometer, the compass, die watch, the clock, champagne, wax candles, street lighting and the general use of tea and coffee all made their first appearance in these years. Fortunate men already had heard the music of Purcell, Lully, Couperin and Corelli; within a few years, they would listen also to the works of Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Handel, Bach and Scarlatti (the last three all born in the same year, 1685). At court and in the ballrooms of the nobility, ladies and gentlemen danced the gavotte and the minuet. France's trio of immortal playwrights, Moliere, Corneille and Racine, probed deep into the foibles of human nature, and their plays, first performed before their royal patron at Versailles, spread rapidly in performance and reading to every corner of Europe. England was giving to literature Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the poets
John Dryden and Andrew Marvell and, above all, John Milton. In painting, most of the mid-seventeenth- century giants—Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Frans Hals and Velasquez— had departed, but in France distinguished men and women still had their portraits painted by Mignard and Riguad, or in London by Sir Godfrey Kneller, a pupil of Rembrandt, who painted ten reigning sovereigns, including the youthful Peter the Great.
In their libraries and laboratories, the scientists of Europe, liberated from obeisance to religious doctrine, were plunging forward, deducing conclusions from observed facts, shrinking from no result because it might be unorthodox. Descartes, Boyle and Leeuwenhoek produced scientific papers on coordinate geometry, the relations between the volume, pressure and density of gases, and the astonishing world that could be seen through a 300- power microscope. The most original of these minds ranged over multiple fields of intellect; for example, Gottfried von Leibniz, who discovered the differential and integral calculus, also dreamed of drawing up social and governmental blueprints for an entirely new society; for years, he was to pursue Peter of Russia in hopes that the Tsar would allow him to use the Russian empire as an enormous laboratory of his ideas.
The greatest scientific mind of the age, spanning mathematics, physics, astronomy, optics, chemistry and botany, belonged to Isaac Newton. Born in 1642, Member of Parliament of Cambridge, knighted in 1705, he was fifty-five when Peter arrived in England. His greatest work, the majestic
With the same passion for discovery, other seventeenth-century Europeans were setting out on other oceans
