If you want to know megalomania, visit Versailles. If you want to see how ego can become diseased, bloated and insane, stand in the cobbled courtyard of the greatest palace in Europe, and look all round you. And if you want to know why Pope Alexander VIII ordered a Te Deum after the Battle of the Boyne, wander along Versaille's Grand Canal beyond the Fountain of Latona, and sense the power-hungry madness which caused it to come about.
History is often kind to bad men after they have been transformed in the larger memory by popular amnesia and patriotic hero-worship. In reality, "great" men were seldom morally great in life, achieving their majestic place in the history books by extortion, ruthlessness, tyranny, vainglory and greed. Only the false words of laureates can weave glory out of such moral dross, and moral dross is what created Versailles.
Egomania and ambition
To be sure, it is quite breathtaking, rather as the Taj Mahal is breathtaking; but both are monuments to insensate egomania and ruthless ambition. And for all the beauty of each, there remains these larger questions: how many people died of hunger and cold because of the taxes extorted to pay for such folies de grandeur, such vaulting lunacy? But steady: by such rules might we also question most of the great medieval cathedrals of Europe.
The creator of Versailles, Louis XIV, is one of the most terrible men in history: had he been born in the 20th century, he would have been an Emperor Bokassa, a Ceaucescu, a Mao. Vulgar, brutal, violent, he was enraged by the chateau at Vaux that had been built by his royal courtier Nicolas Fouquet. No matter that Fouquet had razed an entire village to build his palace, levelled hills and planted a forest in lands he had siezed for the purpose; what enraged Louis was the sheer beauty of Vaux.
Within a week of an imprudently perfect fireworks display at Vaux, Fouquet was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, a living death of nakedness and hunger in the terrible stone cells of Haute-Savoie fortress of Pignerol. Louis then siezed the treasures of Vaux, its paintings, its tapestries, its bronzes, and also its makers; these artists and designers, thus enslaved, set about making Versailles the greatest palace in the world.
It remains that today; yet of its vile origins, something vile remains. For even without knowing of the fate of poor Fouquet - though perhaps we should not feel too sorry for him - we can sense a madness in all this impeccable stone, the endless gardens and the great waterways shimmering vastly almost as far as the eye can see. You need to read little history to know that the the gilded sun-god Apollo rising from the waters in the great fountain at the end of the grande allΘe is no other than the demented madman, Louis XIV, himself.
Of course, Louis must have had enormous energy and vision to have caused these prodigies to have been created; but lucky the time which is spared men such as him. For not content with with the egomania of Versailles, he was simultaneously unleashing his engineers to create an empire of canalways across France from which he could crush the upstart Netherlands, and even subjugate Rome.
Common cause
If you wonder why the Vatican and England could find common cause to celebrate the defeat of Louis's ally James II on the Boyne, Versailles will explain it all, just as the palaces of Saddam, with their torture chambers and their gold-leaf colonnades, explain why the greater part of the Arab world sided against him 10 years ago.
France was once the ungovernable power of Europe, an 18th-century prototype of 20th-century Germany, its despotic kings determined to extend their rule far beyond their boundaries. Hitler would have left the equivalent of Versailles had he been successful in his quests. Albert Speer's genius would have been allowed to create that vast architectural heart for the Reich which he enthusiastically drew in his sketchbook - the largest railway station in the world, connecting Paris with St Petersburg, and Oslo with Naples; stadiums, boulevards, concert halls, lakes and parks: megalopolis.
Louis XIV invented megalopolis, and when we visited it the other day, thousands of tourists were srambling over its acres, shooed, chivvied and ankle-snapped by scores of terrier-like guides. We saw the gardens, as large as a dozen stud-farms, as hundreds of Japanese visitors videoed eache other videoing each other, and groups wearing colour-coded baseball hats charged around like obedient platoons of infantry.
Sense of evil
Versailles was conceived in original sin, and of that sin it stinks still. We could not bring ourselves to join the huge queues snaking over the cobbled couryards, and so we did not see the Hall of Mirrors, nor the royal chapel, nor Louis's library, nor the Salon of Venus, nor the Sun King's throne room. Instead, having sensed the evil ego infusing each stone and statue, lawn and lake of megalopolis, we fled.
And just as Louis's palace once spoke of the spirit of his age, today it speaks of the spirit of ours. For today, all day, the most beautiful and the foulest buildings in Europe seethe with thousands of tourists, minds barely registering what they are seeing, footsteps feverishly scurrying where the Sun King's royal soles once so royally fell.
A terrible and condign punishment has been done to Versailles. It deserves it; and so, by God, does the soul of its creator, in those fires which are his eternal home.