6.2. WATERLESS VERSAILLES

FOR US, ABSENCE OF WATER WOULD HAVE MADE THAT CHOICE OF SITE IMPOSSIBLE

As well, a swamp brings malaria, dysentery and pleurisy: "It was forbidden to speak of the dead, that the heavy labor and, still more, the miasma killed." 

Building the Chateau of Versailles by Adam Frans van der Meulen, 1669 / zoom

The painting shows no water, which is brought in barrels. 

It was "the saddest and most graceless of places, without a view, without woods, without water, without land, because all was quicksand or swamp. One cannot come to the end of the monstrous defects of a palace that was so immense and so immensely expensive."

 -- The Duke of Saint-Simon, memorialist, Louis XIV and his Court,

 translation (slightly shortened) and underlining mine.

• After wells are dug and a small river diverted, Versailles uses more water than does all Paris, but there is still too little for fountains and the Grand Canal.

-- Water per Parisian, for all uses: one liter a day

(Pascal Payen Appenzeller, historian of Paris)

• Eventually there is enough for special occasions but even today the full waterworks are reserved for weekends during the tourist season, and special occasions.

     The Apollo Bassin in the Park of the Château de Versailles  by Adam Perelle, end 17th century / zoom

                                                                  Versailles, Perspective of the Famous Canal, 2010 / zoom

 Web site of the Museum of Primal Arts

The Opéra Garnier is not named after fallen Napoleon III, but his initials and those of the Empress are repeated in gold along the whole facade; the Pompidou Center; the François Mitterand Library; the Jacques Chirac Museum of Primal Arts.

-- Versailles is thought to have absorbed a third of all taxes for 30 years:

 Athenaïs by Lisa Harding, 2002.

But those edifices did not take up a third of the national budget. In a modern context Versailles would be an aberration. Place it in its own.

Versailles is the most spectacular example

of agricultural societies' destroying reinvestible revenues,

while strengthening the authority

that keeps the disruptive new interests under control.

*    *    *

Next,

6.3. 

Gargantuan works bring water to the site