Touring the palace at Versailles today, it’s impossible not to wonder What It Was Like: the well-preserved main buildings and grounds do nothing so much as to evoke refined courtiers and glamorous ladies-in-waiting swanning around the gardens or lolling about the Hall of Mirrors waiting for an appearance from Louis XVI or, on the rare occasion she emerged from her aerie, his queen, Marie-Atoinette.
What visitors are not allowed to see are the servants’ quarters: the grimy back halls of Versailles where an entire shadow population of servants lived out their lives. Director Benoît Jacquot’s new film Les Adieux à la Reine finally lets us see what life was really like at at the grand palais.
Set on the eve of the French Revolution, Les Adieux à la Reine takes place behind the scenes, away from the gilded opulence of the royal salons and into the dark garrets and corridors that house everyone from footmen to stable boys to gondoliers (!), and the young courtiers and ladies-in-waiting just at the beginning of their careers – careers that are about to be cruelly cut short when the Bastille is stormed the very next day.
But on this day, life at Versailles carries on as normal, engaged in complex rituals of subservience, backstabbing and vicious competition among the entire hierarchy of court attendants vying for protection, patronage, strategic marriages and, ultimately, favour from the King or Queen. Seemingly unaware of the unrest in the capital, the Court at Versaille is just as grandiose and frivolous and oblivious as every cliché makes it out to be.
Through the Looking Glass
Young Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), an educated young woman called upon to read for the Queen, is just as wrapped up in clawing her way to the top as everyone else. When we meet her, she is groggily preparing to wait upon the Queen, trading barbs with rivals, begging perfume from an ally, forced to run all the way to the Petit Trianon and yet appear calm and collected upon her arrival. She is on the lowest rung of the ladder, a fact driven home when the Queen’s favorite, the duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) sweeps out of the Queen’s chambers and past Sidonie as though the poor girl doesn’t even exist.
But no matter: Sidonie is both ambitious and besotted with the queen herself. As is necessary for all young ladies of good standing at court, she is determined and pragmatic about finding a protector and, ultimately, a husband – despite being charmed by a handsome young gondolier, a drageur both literal and figurative. She is a girl who gets ahead of herself, as illustrated by her habit of marching through Versailles at such speed she literally pitches forward and falls – more than once. She’s clearly a girl with a future… if her world were not about to come crashing down.
Presenting herself before the Queen, a simple act of kindness on Marie-Antoinette’s part – calling for and herself applying a salve to ease the mosquito bites that tattoo Sidonie’s arms – seduces the girl so completely that desire mingles with devotion to produce a heady and permanent mix of blind loyalty to her queen.
It is this devotion, bordering on idolatry, which keeps Sidonie at Versailles and in service to Marie-Antoinette despite the mass exodus of servants, courtiers, noblemen and women, guards and anyone else who wishes to keep their head. Not that Sidonie’s devotion is entirely innocent – she attempts to gather and trade information to be used for her own protection and ambitions, both virtuous and selfish. Her determination and deft trade in secrets points to what would have been a successful and possibly illustrious career at Versailles, a painful irony since court life is about to come a permanent and violent end.
Let Them Eat Torte
Played by Diane Kruger, this Marie-Antoinette is mostly a mélange of popular historical clichés rather than fact. She is, at the film’s opening, the frivolous, impetuous Marie-Antoinette that everyone loves to hate, seducing her ladies-in-waiting, barely bothering to get out of her sumptuous bed, spending her days being read to by the likes of Sidonie or designing new gowns for herself and her particuliers, her favored inner-circle of friends that included the beautiful Duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) with whom, it was rumoured, Marie-Antoinette was engaged in a lesbian affair. Writer-director Benoit Jacquot bases his characters upon these rumours and titillates with suggested lesbian encounters and desire that has relatively little to do with the plot, suggesting that Marie-Antoinette was more concerned over her relationship with her lesbian lover than the death sentence she was increasingly certain was inevitable. To Kruger’s credit, she captures Marie-Antoinette’s growing panic and ensuing resolve beautifully, even if she seems to get serious about the situation a little too late, vowing to stay by her husband’s side while entreating the Duchesse de Polignac to save herself and flee France.
Art vs. Reality
In reality, Marie-Antoinette was, during this time, mourning her eldest child, the Dauphin, dead only a month before of tuberculosis. She had already turned her back on the duchesse de Polignac, whose continued extravagances and frivolities at court in defiance of the budget reforms adopted by the King wasn’t doing Marie-Antoinette’s reputation any favours. For her part, the duchesse de Polignac abandoned ship in May 1789, leaving not only France behind, but her children as well, abandoning Queen, country and kin two months before the storming of the Bastille and the removal of the royal family from Versailles.
But Les Adieux à la Reine is not so much about historical fact as it is about the people lost to history. The panic behind the scenes in the back stairs and rooms of Versailles – crowding into candlelit corridors stricken rats on a sinking ship when the first list of condemned is circulated – contrasts beautifully with the strange, dream-like tension playing out in the royal halls. While Sidonie moves between the two, increasingly desperate to steer events far beyond her control, the two worlds eventually merge to create a night-terror of fear, confusion and despair. Historical figures are often writ large against the backdrop of the events that cement their place in time; we never learn what happens to the little people, the common men and women with no control over the events of their time but who often suffer most.
May 2012, France Magazine