Ile de France

Andre Le Nôtre paces out palace domains
With calm precision, laying out avenues,
Long perspectives, and massive terraces,
Giant flights of steps, parterres with fountains
And cascades, canals and lakes reflecting
Marble statuary.A measured otherworld.

Desolate Versailles, denuded shell!
The Galerie des Glaces hoards distorted shadows,
All fairytale dazzle and distant echoes
Of pomp and revelry under crystal chandeliers.
Obsolete allegories run riot on ceilings;
Gone all those courtiers who gambled a heaven
And lost to the Devil on the turn of a card,
A stilted world chopped up and fed to the dogs.
The Sun King, lifting the chalice in unjust hands,
Transubstantiated his days into High Mass,
Not ,at first, tasting the poison in the wine.

High under the roofs, nesting like a pigeon,
Louis Quinze secretes a maze of little cabinets,
Linked by narrow galleries and winding stairs,
A bourgeois sanctuary, free of ceremony,
Where he can shed those awkward regal airs,
Hosting cosy suppers for a few select friends.
In the Cabinet de la Pendule, each New Year,
Boyishly thrilled, the king watches and waits
Till midnight, as the planets dance
Inside the crystal sphere atop the clock.

After the Revolution, Louis the Eighteenth,
Returned,a lone survivor, to Versailles,
A wistful old man revisiting old scenes ,
Tottering, supported on his servant’s arms
Upstairs to his old apartments;there he sat,
In an antique chair,alone with memories,
Seeing it all as it had been in his youth.

At Marly only garden vestiges remain,
Fine trees, and scattered statues, or the relict
Of some ornamental piece d’eau.
Here Louis Quatorze would find seclusion,
His carriage turning in through the gates
And descending the royal avenue;
There, ahead, the chateau appeared,
Majestic vision, to dazzle jaded eyes,
But only from afar-the splendid detail
Mere trompe l’oeil upon a flat facade.
At dinner, His Majesty would dispense
With etiquette, throwing bread pellets
Like a naughty boy, giving the ladies
Leave to return fire.

The Château d’Anet looms on a meander,
Made magnificent by Diane de Poitiers,
That thicknecked doublechinned troll
Whose mind beguiled a boy-king
As her fingers picked his pockets.
Inside, the radiant chapel is chaste
White stone, the dome a spiral hymn,
Its pattern mirrored in the marble floor,
As if one could almost grasp God’s riddle.

Men and women, high and low, harnessed
Themselves like oxen to the carts, hauling
Stone to Chartres, convoys trekking overland
Singing psalms, and, at night, the plain
Is constellated with their campfires.
The cathedral rose from a scaffold forest,
Till the rising sun, drunk withGod, crahed
In the stained-glass, opalescent gloom
Glows; as the eye adjusts clustered columns
Shoot up to the arch, then part and splay
Out into the vaults’ leviathan ribs,
Framing vertiginous galaxy of glass.
Rise and swim in translucent paradise,
Inexhaustible symphony composed
Of tiny everyday scenes.

At Fontainebleau, after dinner, Eugénie,
Radiant with girlish excitement, leads
The guests down to the lake, at nightfall,
The pleasure-boats drift, amid laughter
And romance; the ghost of Marie-Antoinette
Walks beside the Empress, as she expounds
The palace’s history, the stories ofthose
Who had called it home before.
Eagerly, she escorts friends on forest walks,
Tripping along, lovely head held high,
Chattering like a dreamy schoolgirl,
Trying to ignore the wolves closing in.
Already she shivers at a change in the air,
“Autumn already”, she murmurs, “so soon...”

On the last night of the fête, the courts
And terraces throng with revellers,
As the Emperor appears, a paladin,
To light the first firework with a brand;
Sudden tricolour flares blazon the sky,
Empty ecstasies of a doomed world.
A trumpet fanfare and the avenue fills
With horseback spectres, emerging
From nowhere, the Dragoons conducting
A torchlight procession. The crowds gasp
And thrill, so proud to be alive
In glorious times, France’s greatness
Restored. The next day, the restless court packs
And moves on.They will never return.

Poplar-bowered, Rousseau’s tomb rises
Like an antique altar, on the lake isle
At Ermenonville, erected by the marquis
To honour his beloved mentor.
He ordered these gardens as he ordered
His life; a rational idyll, a tableau vivant
Of happy peasants and efficient farms.
He preached the coming Revolution,
Served the people; but they imprisoned him
There, in his own home; from the window
He saw his beloved gardens laid waste
By vandals, and Rousseau’s tomb
Defiled by the state’s grave-robbers,
His sainted bones carted to the Pantheon,
To be praised by vicious hypocrites.

Montmorency in spring: primroses
Peep through snow, as Rousseau comes
Expressly to hear the first nightingale sing
In his forest cloister.Each day he rambles out
To write, excited as a truant schoolboy,
Clutching candles in glass funnels.