The Box from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
The Bureau’s Paris desk has held a box since March. It came from a feather-dealer of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who does not sign his letters but stamps them, in red wax, with a small plume; he asks to be called the Plumassier and nothing else, and asks nothing in return except that we print what he sends. There are four papers in the box. The first is a household ledger kept in two hands and headed Livre des Plumes, which records an evening at the Château de Versailles in the year 1789 given by the Duchess of Frivolité — an evening that began in a dispute over the quality of bedding and ended with the room in ruins. The second is a guest list of forty-one names. The third is an upholsterer’s account for the restuffing of casings, itemised and receipted. The fourth is a set of engraved plates, which the correspondent describes as taken from life.
The ledger is the paper he values. It has the company rising from a long supper; it has Count François de Fluffington asserting that his pillows were unmatched in France, and Marquis Pierre du Pouf answering that his own were the epitome of luxury; it has the throw that opened the business, the striking of the Marquis, and a general engagement in which the whole room took part. It closes on a line the correspondent has underscored twice: that word of the evening reached Paris inside a week and became the talk of the capital.
The Bureau prints the file in summary below and sets it against the record, which is its practice. It observes at the outset only that of the four papers, the one the correspondent treats as incidental — the upholsterer’s bill — is the only one that does any work at all.
Three Names That Cannot Be Held
The three principals can be disposed of without leaving the desk. A title under the ancien régime was not a decoration but a piece of ground: it hung on a fief de dignité, a named and mapped holding, and a man was comte or marquis of a place. The nobility of France in 1789 has been counted at about a hundred and forty thousand souls in nine thousand families, and at the outside three hundred thousand in a country of twenty-eight million; the fiefs are finite, and they have been listed. There is no duchy of Frivolité, frivolité being a kind of lace and not a piece of Île-de-France. There is no fief of Fluffington, which is an English place-name in an English shape — the -ing-ton of Kensington and Paddington — and could not have become a French one. As for the particle, it settles nothing: it was taken up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by numbers of people with no claim to it at all, Balzac and Nerval among them, and something like nine in ten French names that carry one today are not noble.
The third name is the one worth the ink, because there really was a pouf, and it really was stuffed. The pouf was a hairstyle: a tower a foot or two high, built by the hairdresser Léonard Autié over a thin wire frame and a triangular cloth pillow called a toque, padded out with pomaded false hair, curled on heated clay and dressed in powder, feathers, pearls and ribbon. Marie Antoinette wore one to her husband’s coronation in June 1775 and the fashion held for a decade, as far as Queen Charlotte and the Duchess of Devonshire. The first of them, the pouf sentimental of April 1774, went to the Opéra on the head of the Duchesse de Chartres carrying fourteen yards of gauze wound round a tower, a set of figurines, a parrot and a quantity of cherries. It was a pillow. It was worn on the head, it was made by a hairdresser, and it was not a marquisate.
The Room the Palace Does Not Have
The ledger puts the evening in the great ballroom of the Château de Versailles. Asked which room he meant by that, the correspondent replied that he meant the great ballroom, and the Bureau has not advanced the correspondence past that point. The palace runs to something like two thousand three hundred rooms, about a thousand of them museum today, and the Bureau will not pretend the word is unavailable to him: the Salon d’Hercule is described as a ballroom in the north wing, and he is welcome to it. It was a chapel. Rebuilt from 1712 to carry two Veroneses that Venice had given Louis XIV in 1664, it is the last room created under that reign, and its ceiling — a hundred and forty-two figures, three years of work by François Lemoyne, who was made Premier peintre du Roi for it in 1736 and stabbed himself nine times in the chest and throat the year after — is not a thing a room acquires in order to be danced in.
There is a Ballroom at Versailles, and the Bureau raises it before the correspondent can. It is out of doors. The Bosquet de la Salle de Bal was created by André Le Nôtre between 1680 and 1683, and it had at its centre a marble island used as a stage for dancing, an art at which Louis XIV excelled; the water runs down it over gritstone and shells, which is why the grove carries a second name. It is a hall of greenery lit by gilt lead torchères, opened in 1683 by the Grand Dauphin with a dance, and in 1707 the island was taken out again. That is the one place at Versailles built for the purpose and called by the name, and it has neither a ceiling to hold anything up nor walls to keep anything in. Whatever was thrown there went into the hedges and stayed.
The Bureau will make the correspondent a present of the Hall of Mirrors, since it is plainly the room he must mean and since granting it is what makes the next movement possible. It is measurable: seventy-three metres long, ten and a half deep, twelve and a third high, built between 1678 and 1684, lit by seventeen windows and answered by seventeen mirrors made up of more than three hundred and fifty separate glasses. It has done this sort of duty before — the Yew Tree Ball of 25 February 1745, at which Louis XV met Madame de Pompadour, and the wedding of the future Louis XVI to Marie Antoinette in 1770. It is also the room whose solid silver furniture Louis XIV had melted down and struck into coin in 1689 to pay for a war, a fact the Bureau files under the general heading of what Versailles did with its contents when it wanted something else.
The Arithmetic of the Down
Now the material, and the Bureau proposes to do the sum twice, because the first way of doing it is unfair to the correspondent and he is entitled to the benefit of that. First, a distinction the ledger’s second hand observes and the engraver does not. Down is not feathers. A feather has a shaft and interlocking barbules and lies flat; down is the layer beneath, with a vestigial shaft and barbs that do not hook, and it is down, not feathers, that fills a good pillow. Down is bought by loft rather than by weight, in a unit called fill power — the cubic inches an ounce of it will occupy. The best goose down runs to about nine hundred, or five hundred and twenty cubic centimetres to the gramme. Eiderdown, which is better still, reaches twelve hundred, and eiderdown is what the ledger claims for the house.
The first way is to fill the room. The Hall of Mirrors encloses about nine thousand four hundred cubic metres. At eiderdown’s loft that is thirteen and a half tonnes of down, and at the loft of the best goose down rather more than eighteen. The Bureau does not press the figure. Down in flight owns more room than down in a sack and nobody can say by how much; the number is printed to show the order of the thing and for no other purpose.
The second way is fairer, and it uses the correspondent’s own paper. The upholsterer’s account lists two hundred and fourteen casings restuffed. Give each of them six hundred grammes, which is the least fill recorded for a whole eiderdown quilt and is therefore handsome for a pillow, and the evening consumed a hundred and twenty-eight kilogrammes of down. Eider is taken from the nest a little at a time, after the ducklings have gone, and it runs fifty to sixty nests to the kilogramme. The evening therefore stands at somewhere between six thousand four hundred and seven thousand seven hundred nests, on the coasts of the north, over a disagreement about bedding. In the same year the price of bread rose by eighty-eight per cent and real wages fell by a quarter. The Bureau prints the two figures side by side and draws nothing from having done so.
The Three Dates
The ledger carries no date beyond the year, and the Bureau asked for one. The correspondent has now supplied three. The first was the fourth of June. On the morning of the fourth of June 1789 the Dauphin Louis Joseph died at Meudon of tuberculosis, seven and a half years old, after five years of an illness first taken for smallpox and forty days before the Bastille; he was buried at Saint-Denis on the thirteenth in a plain ceremony, and his father had left his bedside the previous afternoon to receive delegates at Versailles. Invited to consider whether the court was likely to have been throwing bedding about that week, the correspondent revised to the twentieth.
On the morning of the twentieth the deputies of the Third Estate found the door of the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs locked and under guard. On the suggestion of one of their number, a physician named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, they crossed to the royal tennis court built in 1686 beside the palace, and five hundred and seventy-six of the five hundred and seventy-seven present swore never to separate until the kingdom had a constitution. The one who would not was Joseph Martin-Dauch, who held that he could execute nothing the king had not decided. Shown this, the correspondent revised again, and has settled on the night of the thirteenth to the fourteenth of July.
The Bureau has one further observation, and it concerns the fourth plate, which shows the company with their arms flung up and a feather in every hand. The arrangement is not the correspondent’s engraver’s. It is David’s, from the Tennis Court Oath: begun in 1790 on a canvas four metres by six and a half, paid for out of the treasury and by subscription against engravings, and abandoned by 1793 once too many of the men in it had been declared enemies of the Revolution. The subscribers took their engravings back. The canvas hangs at Versailles, unfinished. The plate is therefore drawn from life after a picture that did not exist on the night it records and was never completed.
The Year the Ledger Is Dated
The fixed points of 1789, with the correspondent's three answers marked.
The Réveillon riots. A wallpaper works and its owner’s house are destroyed in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; twenty-five dead.
The Estates-General opens at Versailles, the first since 1614. Of 1,208 deputies seated: 299 clergy, 278 nobles, 609 commons.
The Dauphin dies at Meudon, aged seven and a half. The correspondent’s first date.
He is buried at Saint-Denis in a simple ceremony.
The Third Estate votes 491 to 89 to take the title of National Assembly.
The hall is locked; 576 of the 577 deputies present swear the oath in the royal tennis court. The correspondent’s second date.
The Bastille is taken: seven prisoners inside, 250 barrels of powder, 93 attackers killed. The correspondent’s third and final date.
The Great Fear begins, and runs to 6 August. Manor houses are entered across the kingdom and the papers carrying seigneurial dues are burned.
The Assembly sits through the night and abolishes the feudal regime entire — tithes, venal office, hunting and game rights with it.
A crowd walks thirteen miles to Versailles in the rain and escorts the royal family to Paris. The court does not come back.
The Fourteenth of July, By Inventory
The correspondent’s final date and his final claim can be taken together, because there is an inventory for the one and a precedent for the other. Behind the walls of the Bastille, twenty-four metres high and three thick at the base, stood eighty-two invalides and thirty-two Swiss grenadiers of the Salis-Samade regiment, thirty cannon, and two hundred and fifty barrels of powder carried over from the Invalides. Five thousand two hundred and seventy-nine prisoners had passed through the place in the course of its career and it commonly held between twenty and fifty at a time. On the fourteenth of July it held seven: four forgers taken on warrants from the Grand Châtelet; an Irishman named Whyte, held as a lunatic and suspected of spying; Tavernier, who had attempted Louis XV thirty years before; and the Comte de Solages, an aristocrat held on a charge of murder. The Marquis de Sade had been moved out ten days earlier for shouting to passers-by that the prisoners were being massacred. Ninety-three of the attackers were killed and fifteen more died of their wounds; the governor, Bernard-René de Launay, was dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville and stabbed to death in the street. Whatever the fourteenth of July was, it was not the sequel to a supper party.
As to becoming the talk of Paris: a fine house was indeed pulled apart that year, and in the correspondent’s own quarter. From the twenty-sixth to the twenty-ninth of April a rumour ran through the faubourg that Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, who employed some three hundred hands making luxury wallpaper and had a name locally for charity to the poor, had said in a speech that wages might come down. Troops were put on his works; the works were destroyed the next day, and his house with them, along with those of a saltpetre manufacturer who had said something similar. Twenty-five people died. That is what a room in ruins looked like in Paris that spring, and nobody who wrote it down thought it charming.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that Versailles was real, that down was a luxury good gathered a nestful at a time, that noblemen quarrelled over furnishings, and that a rumour did cross France that summer at the speed the ledger claims for this one. That rumour ran from the twenty-second of July to the sixth of August, held that the aristocracy was starving the country on purpose, and sent peasants through hundreds of manor houses after the papers that carried their dues, which they burned. It can certify that the Assembly answered by sitting through the night of the fourth of August and abolishing the feudal regime whole — personal serfdom, manorial courts, tithes, venal office, fiscal exemption, and the exclusive right to hunt and to take game with them. The dovecote had been a noble monopoly too, the droit de colombier, and the second article of that night put an end to it and ordered the pigeons shut up at times the communities were to fix. That is what the Assembly found to say about birds on the night it abolished the feudal order: shut them in.
What the country had to say it had already written down. The cahiers de doléances were drawn up parish by parish between January and April at the king’s own order, and they complain of government waste, indirect taxes, church dues, corruption and the hunting rights of the nobility; eighty-nine per cent of the nobility’s own returns offered to give up their financial privileges. The Bureau has read them looking for feathers and found pigeons. Then, on the fifth and sixth of October, a crowd of six to ten thousand walked thirteen miles out in driving rain over the price of bread, found an unguarded gate at dawn and went looking for the Queen’s bedchamber, and went back the same afternoon with the King, the Queen and a hundred deputies. The court never returned. Nothing in the box survives that fortnight.
We wrote once more and asked the Plumassier for one weighable thing: a casing, a length of ticking, a bill of lading, an entry in his own stock book against any of his three dates. The reply came inside the week. The down was swept up, sacked and sold back to him at a discount, and it has been in other people’s hats for two hundred years; he offers this as the reason no feather-dealer’s stock can ever be traced, and adds that we would understand it better if we were in the trade.
The Bureau keeps the box.
