Les lits de Louis XIII à Versailles. Entre sobriété et majesté : manifeste d’un dessein royal

Louis XIII’s beds at Versailles are not the best-known ones in the history of the palace. No pictures of them survive but other archival and printed sources allow us to analyse them and to study their usages and symbolic values. The Versailles conceived by Louis XIII was a personal haven where the bed symbolised dynastic continuity, bringing together the royal status of its owner and his quest for a sober retirement. Louis XIII had a modest pavilion built at Versailles in 1623, a ‘countryside dwelling’ which was enlarged and reorganised at the beginning of the 1630s, offering the King two successive bedrooms. The first one, without any antechamber, accommodated a bed upholstered in green damask with fringes in green silk and gold, set off by the simplicity of the room’s decoration and the sparseness of its furniture. The second bedroom had an antechamber and was larger and more luminous. It housed a more precious bed of green Italian velvet with silver lame. Through their occupation during the King’s presence at Versailles, these two bedrooms accompany the transformation of the palace in the geography of power from the 1630s. The beds can be seen as a revealing synthesis of the status of Louis XIII’s residence at Versailles, private and royal at one and the same time.