Death of a Style

EPITAPH FOR KINGS by Sanche de Gramont. 480 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

"It is by their way of sneezing or of wearing down their heels that a condemned people can be recognized," wrote the French playwright Jean Giraudoux. In his report on 18th century France in the shadow of the guillotine, Sanche de Gramont, Parisian journalist and historian (The Secret War, The Age of Magnificence), has done a heel measurement and sneeze count on his country's monarchy in its declining years. His conclusion confirms Giraudoux's epigram: The monarchy literally lost its head when it lost its style.

De Gramont regards style as a capacity for coping inventively with everything from the design of waistcoats ("the historical monuments of our age," a Louis XVI courtier called them) to the conduct of diplomacy. In his survey, the palace at Versailles and the royalty that lived there soon come to represent elegance proliferating unproductively upon itself. The palace and its people become a symbol of style divorced from reality, in which monarchy turned into a kind of theatrical corruption.

Cold as a Coot. In making visibility "the primary function of the King," says De Gramont, Louis XIV reduced the royal drama to pageantry--style's exquisite confession of meaninglessness. Even the King's defecation became a public act staged on a stool decorated with mother-of-pearl landscapes.

Later, his imitative successors managed to make even sensualism a fraud. Contrary to legend, Louis XV's notorious Deer Park, explains De Gramont, was devoted to rather small-scale lechery--"more of a tired businessman's retreat than a royal orgy-house." Worse, Madame de Pompadour was, by Louis' testimony, cold as a coot, though she plied herself with aphrodisiacs of hot chocolate laced with vanilla, truffles and celery soup. She spent most of her energies keeping official appointments and answering as many as 60 letters a day. Her rewards were the unglamorous ailments of the busy executive--insomnia, headaches, poor digestion--none of which responded to the usual bad medical advice of the times: run around the room and lift weights. Style could hardly look more inglorious.

Under Louis XV, the grand gesture --that splendid self-expression of all royal stylists--degenerated so far that one royal prince built a marble mausoleum for a pet monkey named McCarthy. Similar distortions of value took place in more important aspects of public life. Diplomacy, once the French national art, so deteriorated that it came to fit the job description given by Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro: "Spread spies, pension traitors, loosen seals, intercept letters."

"Nothing." What gave monarchy the coup de grace, De Gramont suggests, was a new power, a new style setter: public opinion. "My infallible Queen," Jacques Necker, one of Louis XVl's Finance Ministers, called it in a switch of fealty. Public opinion, influenced by Voltaire and a prestigious literary antiEstablishment, made regal style seem dated and absurd even to aristocrats.

As De Gramont sees it, the times were not so much ripe for revolution as overripe with monarchy. Louis XVI was so far out of touch with the changing political style that he did not even suspect a dangerous parallel when he saw one--the American Revolution. While Marie Antoinette gushed about "our good republicans, our good Americans," Louis, it is said, made a gift of a Sevres chamber pot with Benjamin Franklin's likeness on the base.

A stout plebeian figure, Louis liked chopping wood and making locks. He had almost no style at all. He did not even take a mistress. The only thing he shared with other French kings was a passion for hunting. Between 1775 and 1789, he ran down 1,274 stags. Apart from recording that, his journal struck a low for an age of compulsive memoir writing. Its most common jotting was "Nothing." That, in fact, was the sole entry in his diary on the day the Bastille was stormed.

On this nothing of a King fell due the bill for 800 years of divine rights. With his fat and graceless neck, the least stylish of monarchs bore final witness to the death of the royal life style. He paid to make possible "the passage from one world to another"--from all that a monarchy assumes to all that a republic promises.

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