Estate

Oranges were unknown in Gaul for a thousand years. Stories of the fruit’s sweetness and thread-like delicacy were first spoken from the lips of farmers coming back to Paris and the lowlands after the crusades, ordinary plowmen-turned-soldiers returning to their farms, scrawny from hunger, their faces dusty with powdered blood. They described the miraculous reviving power of a beautiful, perfectly dimpled, sun-bright fruit, plucked from city boughs on the streets of Jerusalem.

After the more liberal trading of the Valois dynasty (the 15th century), oranges were bartered across Iberia and presented as balmy gifts to the French court. The Sun King—Louis XIV himself—grew particularly enamored. This sugared flesh, he wrote to his minister of trade, this pungently burned, acidic scent, it is medicine to me. He liked devouring one in twenty seconds, whole, in lieu of a post-supper flambé, firm in his newfound belief that the hide and seeds aided good digestion. When stocks ran low, he ordered his naval officers to scour the Mediterranean coasts for trees he might uproot, buds he might steal. He required the kitchen staff to build pyramids on tables for breakfast. He pressed juice from a pestle and called it sang de dieu. Even the dyed color of the sun famously emblazoned on Louis’s personal standards changed from a Vulcan red to a warmer, genteel orange lumière. Then suddenly, halfway through his reign, Louis began planning an orange grove that might serve to anchor his father’s neglected, half-finished estate in the countryside, roughly fifteen miles from Paris, beside the village parish of Versailles. My new grove, he told Queen Maria, shall be a prayer to posterity. He envisioned the place as a national sanctuary, open to ordinary Gallic folk, Frenchmen who shared his sentimental streak.

The first wobbly saplings he tended himself, standing nude in the royal baths and gardening in tubs of soap-gray water, using barber’s shears to clip withering or brown leaves, which fell to the foam and floated between his knees. When the country estate was nearing completion Louis personally transferred his saplings to the country, handing them to Mansart, his garden architect (calling them mon heritage). Château de Versailles grew up around the orange trees, in a manner of speaking.

Louis often swore he smelled them upon waking, the back rim of his tongue slavering. When seated on the throne and dressed for official business, he often gazed into his empty hands and felt an imaginary heft “like a young breast.” He invented an outdoor game with several of his mistresses, seeing who could toss an orange highest into a cracked blue sky, the color contrast producing an almost religious ecstasy, which led to the second half of this game, devouring oranges by the segment during sexual play. Indeed, ripening oranges created a rather exuberant frisson in his majesty. On nature walks in his young grove he enjoyed nothing more than to hike his breeches and mount the first strong bough he could find, squeezing it between his thighs and inhaling the sweetness layering the air. His beloved oranges would perfume the years Louis suspected he had left upon this earth—such was the point. The trees would write his signature upon the land, and persist in growing long after he passed away.

He was half-right. Even as late as 1920, eight of the Sun King’s original, personally planted trees still enjoyed robust health. Eight that had been pampered as saplings in those royal tubs, eight sunk into the loose French soil by Mansart who knew a thing or two about longevity in fruit planting. Eight to signify an eternally youthful, ever-replenishing balance of the robust Gallic monarchy. Eight that grew to deep yield and flowering shade by the time Louis XIV, at the curtain of his 72-year reign, laid his aged body upon tissue-thin sheets of Giza cotton and breathed his last. Eight trees: seven more than the number of his grandchildren who survived the Terror.