Plombières - some 18th-century visitors

Illustrious visitors to Plombières.  Banner on the façade of the splendid but currently derelict hôtel Baumont.
Photograph from Vosgesmatin.fr, 15.05.2024

Today the idea of a European spa town carries with it the image of a polished monied élite.  However Plombières in the earlier 18th century seems to have been quite a modest place with a wide range of visitors. The capacity of the baths was considerable and the costs of a cure, though real, fell within the grasp of most of the reasonably well-to-do. One imagines the little town filled with valetudinarians of all sorts - aristocratic travellers certainly, but also local gentry, lawyers, bourgeois ladies of Nancy, ecclesiastics and nuns, to say nothing of the charitable cases who populated the hospital. Soldiers were also conspicuous. In 1748 Louis XV had plans were drawn up for military hospital though nothing came of this so-called "projet de France". The Fermier des Bains François Géhin reports that nonetheless serving French soldiers were frequently sent to the baths and billeted on the bourgeois of the town; only the intercession of Mesdames finally put a stop to this inconvenience.

The Plombières of King Stanislas

[continued from previous post]

According to the 19th-century historian of  Plombières, Jean-Dominique Haumonté, the memory of King Stanislas, le roi bienfaisant, was always held in great esteem in the town, not just for the  improvements he himself made but also for the later revitalisation of the thermal station which he set in train (p.174-5).  The story goes that in 1798, when the Director Reubell came to take a cure, the mayor gave him to understand that Stanislas's portrait, which used to hang in the town hall, been destroyed;  Reubell observed that, although Stanislas had been a king, the portrait should nonetheless have been preserved "as souvenir of your benefactor" (p.300)

Portrait presented by Stanislas himself to his hospital in Plombières,

on display today in the salon of its modern successor.

https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/palissy/PM88000667

After the Revolution, his memory continued to be honoured. In 1860 the principal road, was renamed rue Stanislas and in 1882 the Hôtel des Dames, now transformed into a luxurious thermal establishment, became known as the "Bain Stanislas".

A spa town: Plombières in the earlier 18th century

Still in Lorraine,  welcome news was announced in December  that the French State has pledged 7 million euros towards a rescue package to save the spa of Plombières-les-Bains,  its patrimony and architecture. The baths at Plombières, which still represent the lifeblood of the little town, have been entirely closed down since the end of 2024  when the owners of the facilities, the AVEC Group, went into liquidation. 

The real heyday of  Plombières as a fashionable resort was was in Napoleonic times and, later, during the Second Empire, but its growth is already evident in Lorraine's years of economic revival and urban renewal under Duke Leopold and King Stanislas. 

Voltaire (almost) acquires a German castle

The Duke of Württemberg has had the kindness to offer me the château of Montbéliard; I could pass the winters there with all my entourage; but I am frightened I should find everywhere covered in snow.  What is this Montbéliard like, I should like to know...
Voltaire to the lawyer Dupont, 13th November 1764.

Here is another episode from Voltaire's travels in the east of France the astute "capitaliste"...

Today, the chief claim to fame of  Montbéliard, Franche Comté's second city, is as the site of the vast Peugeot car factory.  In Voltaire' time, however, it was the "Comté" of Montbéliard, a miniscule German Protestant enclave in French territory, by a quirk of dynastic history a possession since the late 14th century of the Dukes of Württemberg.   Then, as now, the medieval fortress on its rocky outcrop dominated the township. Voltaire's Duke of Württemberg was Charles-Eugene, nephew by marriage to Frederick the Great, and one of those splendid larger-than-life 18th-century princelings. He built the Rococo palaces of La Favorite and La Solitude was at sometime patron of Schiller.....  His extravagant lifestyle was rivalled only by the excessiveness of his spending; by the time of his death in 1793 his personal debts were said to total over 30 million livres..... 

Father Menoux - Jesuit man of letters

 Yes, Messieurs, we live in the century of light ("le siècle des Lumières") and good taste; minds are more enlightened, discernment has become finer; a happy harmony characterises all our good books...
Joseph Menoux, Jesuit and famous anti-philosophe, 11th March 1751

He is a man of great talent and nonetheless much wit, who is a good Philosopher,  yet also a good Christian.

Fréron, commenting on Menoux in the Année littéraire in 1758.

Frontispiece to Menoux's Discourse on History

[continued from previous post]

Father Menoux's more direct dealings with the world of letters once again show the delicacy of his situation, this time in his relationship with Stanislas and his courtiers, and in his role in the Academy of Nancy. Far from being simply a heavy-handed opponent of the philosophes, he laboured under great difficulties to find any effective strategy to counter the advocates of Enlightenment irreligion. He seems finally to have given way under the strain and retired, to die largely forgotten and unlamented in 1765.

Father Menoux - Jesuit preacher and missionary

The Jesuit priest Father Joseph Menoux is remembered today, if at all, chiefly as an adversary of Voltaire. He warrants barely a footnote in the great sea of Voltaire studies or, at best, a repetition of Voltaire's own dismissive caricatures.  I decided to try and discover a little more about Menoux's life. It  proved to be an interesting exercise, and one which supplies something of an alternative perspective on the world of the Enlightenment writers. 

Early life

Sadly, there is not a single anecdote or petty detail to enliven the perfunctory outline of Menoux's early life supplied by the biographical dictionaries.  We learn only that he was born in Besançon on 14th October 1695 - making him not quite a year younger than Voltaire  -, that he belonged to an "excellent famille de robe", and that he was always destined for an ecclesiastical career.  He began his studies with the Jesuits at the age of fourteen and remained in the order; we can assume that he attended the Jesuit college in Besançon, the imposing buildings of which still survive today.   He entered the Novitiate on 8th September 1711 and, having taught in a number of colleges, was singled out by his eloquence for a career as a preacher. 

The Jesuit college in Besançon  - now College Victor-Hugo
https://structurae.net/en/structures/college-victor-hugo 

The preacher

In 18th-century Catholic France a talented preacher could command a great deal of prestige.  Jesuits like Bourdaloue, and more recently, Charles Porée (d.1741), star of the Parisian house, attracted huge crowds.  They rubbed shoulders with the highest echelons of society, and attracted attention from the  Enlightenment world of culture and letters - to which the Jesuits themselves contributed through their Journal de Trévoux edited from the Maison professe in Paris.

On the road with Voltaire

Joseph Highmore, Painting showing a scene from Richardson's Pamela, 1744. 
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge  (Wikimedia)

Travel by road was hazardous in the 18th century, even for those who could afford the luxury of  a private coach and good horses.  The account which follows is taken from the memoirs of Voltaire's secretary Longchamp, who accompanied  Mme du Châtelet and Voltaire on an eventful journey from Paris to Cirey in the late 1740s.  Today the same journey by car (so Google Maps informs me) would take three-and-a-half  hours.

Voltaire in Lunéville

Voltaire reading his play Seminaris to King Stanislas, lithograph by the 19c Spanish artist, Vicente García de Paredes (1845-1903).
Private collection (Meisterdrucke)

There is a whole scholarly industry centred on Voltaire and, now, almost as much ink spilt on on Émilie du Châtelet and her scientific works.  What follows is merely intended to summarise Voltaire's various sojourns at the Court of Lorraine and ask what evidence remains to evoke his physical surroundings.  The chronology of events is taken mostly from the René Vaillot's book in the "Voltaire en son temps" series, Avec Madame du Châtelet, published in 1988.

The visit of May-June 1735  [Vaillot, p.17-20]

• The chronology of Voltaire's earliest trips to Lorraine has recently been revised.  In a letter to the président Hénault, traditionally dated to 1729, he describes how he and two friends made a round trip to Nancy in order to avail themselves of an issue of government shares [D366]. This letter, and hence the episode, has now been redated to1720 to fit with in financial records for Lorraine.  See André Courbet, "Voltaire en Lorraine: les séjours de 1720 et 1735", Cahiers Voltaire, No.13 (2014) p.51-67. https://c18.net/18img/cv13-specimen.pdf

• Nonetheless, Voltaire undoubtedly did accompany the duc de Richelieu to the spa at Plombières, and probably also to Nancy, on more than one occasion in the late 1720s.

• A more substantial sojourn took place in 1735. Voltaire had arrived in Paris from Cirey on 30th March,  but six weeks later, on 12th May, he fled the capital for Lorraine in the company of the duchesse de Richelieu. His motives are not altogether certain - possibly he had delivered to an ultimatum to Mme du Châtelet  to stay with Maupertius in Paris or retire to Cirey to study with him. The Duchess was on friendly terms with the dowager Duchess Elisabeth-Charlotte and  Voltaire had left a reputation in 1729 as a gen d'esprit and was greeted with joyous familiarity.  A court with reputation for its love of poetry, theatre, belles-lettres and the arts.  In his letters frequents familiarly the prince de Beauvau-Craon and his numerous children, and attends balls, concerts, comedies; the Court had a theatre and troupe of actors.  Physics was all the rage.  He saw the "salle de machine" where the the duke's machinist Philippe Vairinge,  "simple serrurier devenu philosophe" , built his own apparatus and gave lectures [D870, 15th May].  The duchesse de Richelieu even gave a lecture on the theories of Newton, at which the Jesuit  Dallemant, caused amusement to onlookers by engaging in disputation [D882, c.20th June] .Voltaire returned to Cirey on 25th June. 

Engraving of Voltaire by the Lunéville artist Jean-Joseph Bernard (1740-1803) , 

writing master to the pages and écrivain du roi from 1763.  Musée du château. 

See  L'Est Republicain, 27.08.2017

Rococo dreams

To enjoy for Christmas....

These gorgeous, beautifully re-imagined, rococo interiors are by Vicente García de Paredes, a Spanish artist who settled in Paris in 1884 where he specialised in 18th-century genre scenes.  His watercolours were very popular at the time and were widely reproduced, notably in Le Monde Illustré. They appear regularly at auction.

"Her Best Hand" - sold by Sotheby's in 2018

"The Raconteur" - sold by Christie's in 2015

The posthumous history of King Stanislas

Cenotaph of King Stanislas, Église Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours, Nancy

Death and autopsy

It had taken King Stanislas eighteen long days to die.  

Immediately following his death, he was laid out on his bed, with his face and hands uncovered, surrounded by candles.  Six canons from Lunéville sang prayers around the body. The doors to the apartment remained open and people were free to enter.

The following day, Monday 24th February, at six in the morning, the body was transported into the "chambre de la balustrade" (which room was this?  I'm not sure). Here it was exposed on a lit de parade, again surrounded by candles.  The clergy and Court officials were seated nearby with careful attention to rank: on the right was an armchair to accommodate the Cardinal de Choiseul-Beaupré, Stanislas's Grand Almoner, with stools for his confessor Father Louskina and the other palace chaplains; on the left were folding chairs for the First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and principal officers of the Royal Household.  Beyond the balustrade two altars had been set up, draped in black, where masses could be said. Six members of the regular clergy sang psalms continuously.