What's in a Wall?

It was strictly an assignment for an assistant curator. Workmen tearing down a tile factory in a Paris suburb had come upon some interesting old masonry embedded in the factory wall. Georges Poisson, assistant curator of the Ile de France Museum at Sceaux, traveled over to Choisy-le-Roi for a look. What he saw made his eyes pop. There, preserved under later coatings of the brick & mortar, stood the ornate facade of Choisy-le-Roi's "Petit Chateau"--the hideaway King Louis XV built for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

Modern Frenchmen had forgotten all about the Petit Chateau but in Louis XV's day it set their ancestors' tongues wagging from one end of France to the other. Frenchmen could only guess at what went on in the privacy of the little chateau. The royal architects discouraged prying eyes by setting its nine rooms--two boudoirs, dining room, a few guest rooms--in a small garden surrounded by a high wall. Even the servants were kept out of sight. The banquet room was equipped with an ingenious table volante, which could be lowered into the cellar, raised up again laden with delicacies. Louis or La Pompadour needed only to scribble a note and punch a bell.

Even so, a few snippets of gossip got out. The court heard that Louis sometimes fainted at dinner, after stuffing himself to the gills. Sample menu: four soups, three terrines of foie gras, countless hors d'oeuvres, 16 meat courses, partridge, chicken, song birds, pheasant, turkey, squab, 14 desserts, creams and cakes. And Paris had ample evidence that, in her later years, Pompadour turned from mistress to madam, filled the chateau with a succession of pretty girls to drive away His Majesty's boredom.

After Louis died in 1774, his hideaway fell on hard times. Louis XVI never used it, and during the French Revolution the royal residences at Choisy-le-Roi were wrecked. For a time, a locksmith occupied the site of the Petit Chateau; later a tile factory was built on the grounds. No one dreamed that so much as two stones of the old building, with its rich trim and fine, high windows, were left standing.

By last week, Curator Poisson's workmen had carefully uncovered 150 ft. of yellow stone facade, including the entire center section and part of the left wing. With 3,000,000 francs voted by the Seine provincial council, Poisson was at work numbering each stone before dismantling the facade and rebuilding it as a historic monument in the park at Sceaux. Still missing: Louis' table volante. Reported Curator Poisson sadly: "I even crept down into the sewers on all fours, but we found nothing."

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