OTHER WAYS TO UNLOAD FUNDS

ROYAL MISTRESSES' SPENDING HELPS CONTROL GROWTH

* They also stabilize the monarchy by distributing royal gifts to their clans and by deflecting popular hostility from the kings.

Successive favorites:

 Louise de la Vallière as Diana, 1667 / zoom; The Marquise de Montespan in the chateau given by the king, 1680 / zoom 

   

Louise de La Vallière was an exception to the ambitious, grasping royal mistresses, because she genuinely loved the king. For her story, please click here (scroll all the way down).

Françoise-Athenaïs* de Rochefort-Mortemart contributed to the éclat of the court for 15 years, until disgraced for associating with a witch: story here.

*The kind of antiquity-appearing name that sophisticated women chose to set themselves apart.

• "It's barely worthy of an opera girl," said the Marquise of a first chateau the king offered. 

     View and Perspective of Clagny Chateau, from the Garden and Swamp of Versailles, print by Antoine Aveline, no date / zoom.

• He had it torn down and built that shown above, which now only a street name recalls.

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Louis builds and demolishes works of art:  

• The grotto of Thetys, destroyed when the palace was enlarged (in 1684).

     Louis XIV in Front of the Grotto of Thetis, anonymous, 1670's / zoom

• The "Trianon* de porcelaine," decorated by earthenware ceramics (the French have heard of blue and white Chinese porcelaine, but learn to make it only later). Replaced, 1687.

*Name of the original hamlet.

Reconstitution / zoom  

Trianon Perspective Seen from the Entry by Adam Perelle, toward 1680 / zoom

Garden view, anonymous / zoom 

Replacement, 1687

Louis XV as child on visit to Grand Trianon by Jean-Baptiste Martin, 1724 / zoom

More ways of disposing of re-investible resources, strengthening power at the same time:

• Thousands of grown trees are uprooted and replanted in the Versailles park:

Zoom

• Ten thousand tulips are brought from Holland and planted at night, to surprise courtiers when they wake. 

Gone from the web.

• Priceless silks: Before Versailles, they were carried from chateau to chateau as the kings moved. But after king settles there, they are renewed twice a year.

Louis XIV visits the Gobelin tapestry establishment by Charles Le Brun 1673 / zoom;  curtain, chateau de Fontainebleau : zoom

When the marquise's pet bear destroys a the silks of a salon, Louis says nothing.

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The Hall of Mirrors replaces a terrace...

Zoom

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Versailles's association with the Sun King has encouraged modern Heads of State to stud Paris with monuments in their memory: 

Museum web site

Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.

But they don't cost 

two billion euros* for construction, 

not counting upkeep, decor and changes.  

*116 million "livres."

Yet Louis has other palaces.

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Next,

The monarchy's string of palaces near Paris