Les Marches disparues - the lost Escalier des Ambassadeurs at Versailles

A model reconstruction of the staircase.

The palace of Versailles, inarguably the most famous royal residence in the world, conspicuously lacks one of the most important architectural features of most palaces, "great homes", or pre-modern ceremonial public buildings: a grand staircase. The lavish ascent in such buildings that leads one from the ground floor to the impressive public spaces - salons, dining rooms, ballrooms, etc. - on the piano nobile, what are often termed the "state rooms". It's a very odd deficit, but this glaring absence wasn't always the case. As Louis XIV began the transformations of his father's hunting lodge, a project that would continue all the way up until the Revolution - and even after - a monumental staircase had certainly always been integral to the plan. Conceived by Louis Le Vau in 1668, the Grand Escalier or Escalier des Ambassadeurs was built to the designs of architect François d'Orbay and painter Charles Le Brun from 1672 to 1679. 

Entered through a vestibule on the north side of the cour royale, the impressive space - taking up the full height of the building and top-lit by a rare-at-the-time large glass skylight - was decorated with red, green, white, and gray French marble, gilt bronze, and trompe-l'œil frescoes. Up the first flight of stairs, in a niche on the landing, was a fountain featuring an antique sculptural group, a gift from the Pope. Above this was a bust of Louis XIV, sculpted in 1665-66 by Jean Varin (Warin), the white marble dazzling in the midst of the rich polychrome decoration. (The bust was replaced in 1703 by another of the king, a work by Antoine Coysevox created 1678-1681.) The two flights of stairs arising from the landing led to two adjacent state rooms; from one side one entered the Salon de Diane, and from the other, the Salon de Venus.

The vestibule.

The view looking back toward the vestibule and, beyond, to the cour royale.

(The engraving must have been made after 1703, when Varin's bust of the King has been replaced with that of Coysevox.)

The fountain group on the landing.

The ceiling. The blank space in the center signifies the location of the large skylight.

The arrangement of the polychrome marble floors in the main space, as well as the vestibule and the flanking loggias.

This remarkable ensemble lasted exactly seventy-three years. Over time, there proved less and less use for the vast and showy space, and more and more it was used for other purposes. In the later years of Louis XIV's reign, concerts were sometimes held here. During that of Louis XV - who didn't at all enjoy the very public display that his great-grandfather had - it was fitted up as a theater for the marquise de Pompadour. And then, only a few year later, in 1752, it was completely destroyed to make space for new rooms for the King's daughters, Mesdames. Eighty-five years after that, in 1837, when Louis-Philippe undertook his transformation - most of it lamentable - of Versailles' noble fabric, he had inserted another staircase - little more than serviceable - into a fraction of the space that originally accommodated the Escalier des Ambassadeurs. 

Varin's bust of Louis XIV, 1665-66.

Coysevox' bust of the King, 1678-81.

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Though this glamorous ascent only existed for less than three-quarters of a century, the memory of it proved quite influential in the following centuries. The particular arrangement of the staircase and its polychrome marble décor inspired many variations on the original. One of the best known was ordered by King Ludwig II of Bavaria for Schloss Herrenchiemsee, his truncated replica of Versailles on the island of Herreninsel. The coloration of the decoration is much brighter than that of its inspiration, as the space was primarily designed to be viewed at night; the eccentric King mostly slept during the day, and he constantly pestered his architects and decorators to make the colors in all his fantasy castles brighter, more saturated, the better to be seen by candlelight.

In 1892 a fire ravaged the historic Palais d'Egmont, home of the duc d'Arenberg, in Brussels. When the destroyed right wing was rebuilt from 1906 to 1910, a grand staircase inspired by the one formerly at Versailles was added. Only a few years later, at the end of World War I, the building was sold to the city of Brussels, and is still used for international meetings and other high-profile diplomatic events.

And then there was the Palais Rose on the Avenue Foch in Paris, built between 1896 and 1902, the conjuring of the flamboyant and exacting comte Boni de Castellane, bankrolled by his wife, American railroad heiress Anna Gould. The exterior directly inspired by the Grand Trianon at Versailles - pink marble pilasters and all - the centerpiece of its interior was certainly the lavish homage to the Escalier des Ambassadeurs. But only four years after the shockingly expensive building's inauguration, alarmed at how her husband was rapidly burning through her family's money, Anna Gould divorced him. She went on to marry his cousin, the duc de Sagan, two years later, while Castellane eventually went on to deal in antiques. The Palais Rose, never entirely finished, was used by various people for various purposes over the years. When Anna Gould died in 1961, her heirs put the building up for sale. After various unsuccessful schemes were put forward to save the building, the furnishings and precious materials were removed and sold off, and the remaining structure was demolished in 1969.

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The legendary staircase showed up in other places, as well. Réception du Grand Condé par Louis XIV - Versailles, 1674, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1878.

Gérôme set his grand "history painting" in the vanished space. While his composition gives the impression of a general accuracy...

... on closer inspection it becomes very apparent that he took many liberties with the well-documented décor...

... changing the colors of the marble, etc.; what is generously referred to as "artistic license".

(The clothes and hairstyles are also heavily influenced by a nineteenth-century sensibility. This looks more like a scene in the theater than anything else.)

The marquise de Montespan at the château de Clagny, by Henri Gascar

The château de Clagny was a lavish French palace that once stood in the town of Versailles, just northeast of the royal château. It was built between 1674 and 1680 to the designs of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, premier architecte du roi, for Louis XIV's beautiful and mercurial maîtresse-en-titre, the marquise de Montespan. Its construction reportedly employed 1,200 workers and cost more than two million livres. The royal gardener André Le Nôtre created the gardens, which looked west toward the much larger palace of Versailles, of which Clagny was a sort of smaller version. In 1685, as their affair gradually ended, Louis XIV gave the magnificent estate to Madame de Montespan. At her death in 1707, Clagny was inherited by their oldest son, the duc du Maine - the King had had the children born during their affair legitimized - who, in turn, passed it on to his son, the prince de Dombes. The latter leaving no issue, the château reverted to the French crown in 1766. And although it was among the most important of the private residences designed by the great architect and and even greater landscape designer, after suffering years of neglect the château was demolished in 1769.

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Plan of Versailles - ville, château, and parc - in 1700, showing the location of Clagny at bottom right.

Detail of above.

Plan of château and gardens of Clagny in the seventeenth century.

Allegorical portrait of Montespan at Clagny; the putto holds a medallion of the King.

Plan of château and gardens of Clagny in 1730.

The château de Clagny in the eighteenth century.

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And before we bid the lady farewell, an unrelated but very characteristic image: La Toilette de Montespan, French School, circa 1670s.

Louis III de Bourbon-Condé, duc de Bourbon, duc de Montmorency, duc d'Enghien, 6th prince de Condé, comte de Sancerre, comte de Charolais, seigneur de Chantilly, Prince du sang - unknown artist, circa 1690

Louis de Bourbon (10 November 1668, Paris - 4 March 1710, Versailles), French "Prince of the Blood" and member of the reigning House of Bourbon at the court of Louis XIV. His parents were Henri Jules de Bourbon, duc d'Enghien, and Anne Henriette of Bavaria; he was thus the grandson of le Grand Condé. One of ten children, he was his parents' only surviving son and styled as the duc de Bourbon from birth. He succeeded his father as prince de Condé, only a year before his own death.

In 1685 at the age of seventeen, he was married to Louise Françoise de Bourbon - known at court as mademoiselle de Nantes - the eldest legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and the king's mistress, Madame de Montespan. Many at court were shocked by the proposed union of a full-blooded prince du sang and a royal bastard and, indeed, by the king's ongoing programme of engineering prestigious marriages for his extra-marital offspring. But the head of the House of Condé, le Grand Condé, agreed to the shockingly unequal match in the hope of gaining favor with the bride's father.

Made a chevalier du Saint-Esprit in 1686, a colonel of the Bourbon-Infanterie Regiment later that same year, a maréchal de camp in 1690, and a lieutenant general in 1692, Monsieur le Duc, as he was called at court, and his wife had nine children, all of whom lived well into adulthood. This was rather unusual for the time, and all the more so since their father was never anything like a fine specimen of health or good breeding. Macrocephalic, while not quite a dwarf, he was extremely short, and had a complexion with a markedly yellowish-orange cast to it. Of his parent's ten children, only he and four of his sisters had survived past the age of five, and his sisters were so petite that they were referred to at court as poupées du sang "dolls of the Blood" or, less kindly, as "the little black beetles" because, in addition to their lack of stature, some of them were dark of complexion and/or bent.

Their father, also quite short and considered "repulsive" in appearance had been, in addition, mentally unstable throughout most of his life. Violent, he had frequently beaten his good-natured, sympathetic wife and terrorized his children. It is said that his son and heir also suffered from mental illness toward the end of his life. He died at the age of forty-one, only eleven months after his father, following an attack of apoplexy.

Louis XIII in his boyhood - portraits by Frans Pourbus the Younger

The young king at the age of ten, circa 1611.

Louis XIII (27 September 1601, Fontainebleau — 14 May 1643, Paris), monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France from 1610 to 1643.  Shortly before his ninth birthday, Louis became king of France and Navarre after his father Henry IV was assassinated. His mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent during his minority, but mismanagement of the kingdom and the ceaseless political intriguing of his mother and her Italian favourites led the young king - not yet sixteen - to seize power in 1617. He thereafter relied heavily on his chief ministers, first Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes - with whom he developed an intense emotional attachment - and then the famous Cardinal Richelieu, to govern France. King and cardinal established the Académie française and ended the revolt of the French nobility. But the reign of "Louis the Just" was also marked by the struggles against the Huguenots and with Habsburg Spain.

In 1615 he had married Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, in what was plainly a political alliance. A full twenty-three years and four stillbirths later, the couple welcomed their first son and heir and, two years after that, another son; it was considered something of a miracle. The King was a severe life-long stutterer, a bisexual - at least - and, though a nearly indefatigable hunter and hawker, he seems to have been rather a delicate flower. He was a fairly constant victim of ailments minor or less so, all of them certainly exacerbated by the medical practices of the day. It appears that inflammation of the intestines and pulmonary tuberculosis finally did him in at the age of forty-one. He is best remembered today for two things: building the modest hunting lodge at Versailles that was transformed by his elder son, and for that son: Louis XIV.

Circa 1616.

Circa 1608.

Circa 1611.

(This looks to be a copy or badly restored; the painting of the face looks very different than the others.)

Circa 1616.

Circa 1620.

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Frans Pourbus the Younger (circa 1569, Antwerp – buried on 19 February 1622, Paris), Flemish painter best known for his portraits, he was the son of Frans Pourbus the Elder and grandson of Pieter Pourbus. Completing his apprenticeship in Antwerp in 1591, Pourbus went on to work for many of the most important people of his day, including the Brussels-based Spanish Regents of the Netherlands, the Duke of Mantua, and Marie de' Medici, Queen of France. In 1609, he moved to Paris at the instigation of the French queen. There he perfected his style: his portraits are static but with an often brilliant coloration, and are most notable for their meticulously detailed depiction of elaborate costumes and jewelry. He remained in his position as the Queen's court painter until his death at the age of fifty-three.