Versailles Century: The Origin Story

A Micro-Memoir

Apr 05, 2025

A version of this post was first published in 3 parts on the old Versailles Century website. Since few of you will have seen it, I’ve edited and updated it for re-publication here.

The Spark

I remember exactly when and how my lifelong preoccupation with the 18th century began. It was not at first focused on France.

When I was 10 years old, my parents, who had emigrated from Germany to our small city in Ontario, took me to our local German-Canadian club on a Wednesday evening to watch the first instalment of what I later learned was a 1973 German television series called The Remarkable Life of Frederick, Baron von der Trenck.* In those pre-streaming, pre-DVD, even pre-VCR days, we sat on folding chairs in the club’s dance hall to watch the show on a large portable screen, as if it were a home movie.

The 6-part (5 in a re-edited later version) series follows Trenck’s soldierly and amorous adventures through the courts of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria, as he navigates the great conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century, the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. I was enthralled from start to finish, and would fidget impatiently through the featurettes that preceded each weekly instalment. Though I boyishly admired Trenck’s manly exploits, the character who really riveted me was Frederick II of Prussia, whom my parents, Berliners both, affectionately referred to as der Alte Fritz (Old Fred).

Hungry to know more about Frederick, I hurried to the school library the morning after we had seen the first instalment. To my disappointment, there was no book about Frederick in the small history section, which mainly featured works about 19th century settlers in Ontario. The Encyclopedia Britannica had an article about him, which baffled me with military terminology. My father, fortunately, had a great store of Frederician lore, for Frederick’s memory was still vivid and beloved to Berliners of the pre-WWII period when my father was a boy. Legends about Old Fred’s sayings and doings abounded, it seems. For a week, the tales my father recounted satisfied me, but then I insisted that he drive me to the large downtown branch of our municipal library so that I could find a book, any book, about the great Frederick. To my great excitement, the card catalogue indicated that there was a book about Frederick in the stacks. My hands actually trembled when I pulled it down off the shelf. It was a hardback copy of Nancy Mitford’s classic biography, clad in a metallic silver jacket featuring a black silhouette of Frederick on horseback, surmounted by the double-headed Prussian eagle. The book’s title was simply Frederick the Great.

* My translation. The original German title is Die merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte des Friedrich Freiherrn von der Trenck. To my knowledge, the series has never been issued with English subtitles.

The Rabbit Hole

Having devoured Frederick the Great, which gave me a burning desire to visit Potsdam, the site of Frederick’s beloved palace of Sans Souci, I became curious about the other people and places mentioned in the book. For instance, this man Voltaire. Who was he? And Madame de Pompadour? Cardinal de Fleury? None of these people appeared in our weekly viewings of The Remarkable Life of Friedrich von der Trenck.

It occurred to me that Miss Mitford might have written other books. Returning to the downtown library, I consulted the card catalogue to see if she’d written anything else. Sure enough, it listed Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King. Since history’s greatest courtesan was Frederick’s contemporary, I decided to borrow Madame de Pompadour first, and so it was that I discovered the teeming, scheming labyrinth of Versailles.

Miss Mitford was not a professional historian. I didn’t know it then, but she had mainly been known as a novelist and socialite, one sixth of the fabled Mitford sisters, before she took up writing biographies in middle age. What she lacked in historical training, she made up for with the keenness of her insights. Familiar with royalty and an aristocrat herself, she could explain the world of Versailles in a way that an academic historian never could. I noticed, for instance, that in The Sun King she was able to offer a first-hand comparison of the toilet facilities at Versailles and Buckingham Palace, an insight gained in an era when the latter was not open to the ticket-buying public.

And then there was the writing itself. I loved the sparkle and wit of her prose, even as a 10-year-old, and even if much of it went over my head.

The following paragraph is worth quoting in full, I feel, as an example of Mitford’s style. Through her eyes, the court of Versailles takes on a daunting air:

The Court was always referred to, by those who belonged to it, as ce pays-ci, this country, and indeed it had a climate, a language, a moral code and customs all its own. It was not unlike a public school and just as, at Eton, a boy cannot feel comfortable, and is, indeed, liable to sanctions, until he knows the names of the cricket eleven; various house colours; who may, or may not carry an umbrella; or on which side of the street he may or may not walk; so, at Versailles, there were hundreds of facts and apparently meaningless rules which it would be most unwise to ignore. People sometimes broke them on purpose, hoping thereby to gain a little more privilege for their families; a Princess of the Blood would arrive in the Chapel followed by a lady-in-waiting with her purse on a cushion, or a duchess be carried to the royal rooms in an armchair — thin end of the wedge for a sedan chair — but somebody always reported it, and a sharp message from the monarch would bring the culprit to heel. To break the rules from sheer ignorance would be thought barbarous.*

Observe the combination of vivid detail, emphasis on the personal, and the link to a modern (for the mid-20th century British reader) parallel. I was spellbound by her style then, and decades later I still take pleasure in re-reading her books.

Reading and re-reading Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, I came to understand that Versailles was not only a palace, the residence of the French kings between 1682 and 1789, but also an idea and an ideal whose glamour ensorcelled other sovereigns the length and breadth of Europe.

*Madame de Pompadour, page 66.

The Pursuit

Having grasped that Versailles, as the embodiment of elite French culture, was a key to understanding 18th century Europe, I soon realized that knowledge of the French language was indispensable. Not only was it the tongue of the most admired court in Europe in the 18th century, it was the lingua franca of the entire European elite from Madrid to Moscow.

Furthermore, French was the language of the ‘Republic of Letters’, that group of what we would now call public intellectuals who were the leaders of the Enlightenment. Many of the most eminent of them were native French speakers, like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. However, even if the non-francophones among them, such as Hume, a Scot, or Vico, a Neapolitan, wrote and published in their own language (or Latin), they used French to correspond with their foreign peers. They also used French when they met in person, as did Frederick and Voltaire when the latter took up the former’s invitation to live — temporarily, as it turned out — in Potsdam. Similarly, when Diderot went to St. Petersburg to meet his benefactress, Catherine the Great, they conversed in French.

Happily for me, French classes were easy to come by. At that time in Ontario, French was a compulsory school subject from the 5th grade to the 10th. I pursued it to the end of high school, and then majored in it at university. Eventually, I obtained an M.A. in French Studies. I was largely fortunate in my teachers, but unremitting labour was still required. Mastery of a foreign language is difficult to achieve when you don’t live in a community where it’s widely used — and my part of Ontario was and is resolutely anglophone. Achieving the said mastery was the great, obsessive pursuit of my youth. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever devoted quite as much time, energy, or effort to anything else. You can imagine that it was particularly gratifying when I finally got to Versailles decades later and the young woman helping me at the château’s ticket office said, “Since you speak French so well, you should take the French language tour at 10:30. It’s the most thorough one.”

Buy me a coffee?

To make an already long story much shorter, I realized eventually that there was a small but keen audience for content about Versailles in the English-speaking world. Reading about it in the original language is best, if you can manage it, not least because more information is available. It’s a fallacy to believe that everything has been translated, just as it is to believe that everything has been digitized. Recognizing that most Versailles enthusiasts know what they know about it from secondary sources, it occurred to me that I could find and read the primary sources in French and report back in English, thus carving out a niche in the Versailles-sphere.

I made my first translations in 2017, excerpts from The Remembrances of the Marquis de Valfons (please see the bibliography for details of this work), and published them on the VC website. It was in 2020 that I began to publish daily. Having concluded that my website was not getting enough traffic, I started to post ‘On This Day’ on the Versailles Century account on Instagram. By the beginning of 2024, the follower-ship swelled to 13,000, partly because of one viral post in December, 2023, that was shared dozens of times and garnered over 20,000 likes, which was about 19,000 more than any previous post.

Unfortunately, that viral success attracted a shadow ban and then I got locked out of the account. I had already been mulling over the idea of moving the blog to Substack, so the loss of the IG account was just the kick in the behind I needed. The first ‘On This Day’ post was uploaded to the Versailles Century substack and sent to a handful of early subscribers on 29 February, 2024. The rest, as they say, is history!

Postscript

I’ve created a new Versailles Century account on IG to replace the lost one. I don’t post anything text-heavy, just photos of royal sites in France and from my travels. You can find it here. There’s also a Versailles Century page on Facebook, which you can find here. Please do follow if you’re on either of these platforms. I’ll follow back if your handle is recognizable.