I’m Ana Debenedetti and I’m curator of paintings at the V&A, and we are standing in front of this big painting, and it depicts the estate of Juvisy.

This painting was probably commissioned around 1700 by the owner of the castle, who was also an important protagonist of Louis XIV’s reign, the chief of the secret police.

What is very remarkable is the garden design, which was designed by André Le Nôtre, who was the greatest garden designer of the 17th century. And what he did was quite ingenious, because he used the River Orge, that runs in front of the castle, canalised it to create these artificial lakes and cascades, which have a lot of complex pipes and drains, to get the water flowing on the top and going back down.

So, if you approach the park from the house you will start in the courtyard, which is facing the canalised River Orge, where you could probably have some kind of a jeu d’eau, which is ‘water-plays’. You can actually see some, kind of, gondolas, because Venice was very much in fashion at the moment as well. Then you pass in front of the church, and then you enter this little portion of the park, with the parterre en dentelle, the lace parterre. The design of the vegetation imitates the lace, and that was very fashionable at the time. And then you will have two routes to the main park: on one side, you could go directly to the cascade and go up to mirroir d’eau, which is this long, great, artificial lake; or you could continue straight on, along the canalised river, and have a look at the vegetable garden; and it’s so detailed that you can identify the different types of vegetables grown, like carrots and cabbage, and you can see, actually, some gardeners watering the plants.

On the left-hand side, you have something that looks like a labyrinth of vegetation, where you could go and maybe play with your friends, and hide behind bushes and find a little corner where nobody will disturb you. So you’ve got many ways to be entertained and to entertain your guests, in this design.

Charles Perrault was a 17th-century French author and leading member of the Académie Française. He’s best known for his fairy tales, published under an assumed name as Tales of Mother Goose in 1697. Although they were written to amuse his own children, Perrault’s retellings of traditional folk stories laid the foundations for a new literary genre. This extract from The Sleeping Beauty picks up the tale after the princess has already been asleep for a hundred years.
The throne has passed to another family, and the king’s son is fired up by tales of a beautiful princess, asleep in a castle hidden deep in the woods, waiting for her prince…

‘The prince had barely taken a step towards the wood when all the tall trees, brambles and thorns moved apart to let him pass. He walked along a long avenue towards the castle, surprised to see that none of his men had been able to follow him, because the trees had drawn back together again. He continued on his way, entering a large courtyard where everything he saw chilled his heart. There was a terrible silence, and all around him, the stretched-out bodies of men and animals who all seemed to be dead.
…
Entering the guardroom, he found the guards lined up on either side with their carbines resting on their shoulders and snoring hard. He went on through several rooms full of noblemen and ladies, some seated, some standing, but all asleep. At last he came to an entirely gilded bedchamber. Upon a bed, its curtains open on every side, was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen: a princess, aged 15 or 16, whose radiant splendour had an almost divine glow.

At that moment, the enchantment ended and the princess awoke, looking at him rather more tenderly than a first glance might seem to warrant.

"Is it you, my prince?" she said. "You have certainly taken your time!"
…
The whole palace had awoken with the princess. Everyone went about his business, and, since they were not all in love, they were starving. The prince helped the princess to get up. She was already fully dressed, and most magnificently, though the prince refrained from telling her that she was dressed like my grandmother, with her high collar.

They passed into a mirrored salon where they were served supper, accompanied by stringed and wind instruments, playing music that was old but excellent. After supper, without wasting any more time, the chaplain married them in the castle chapel, and the lady-in-waiting drew the curtains around them.’

Extract from ‘La belle au bois dormant’ (‘The Sleeping Beauty’), by Charles Perrault (1696)

I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter. What I’ve got in front of me, it’s about 14 inches high by the look of it. It’s German, it’s 17th-, early 18th-century and it’s a completely maverick, idiotic, crazy bit of glass. Because what you’ve got is a sort of stag, in full flight, above a beautiful bell-shaped glass; it’s a cartoon reindeer, really. The only colour that there is, is on the mouth of the animal and on its antlers, which are beautiful sort of blue. I’m going to lift up the stag element very, very, very carefully, all the way up. It’s surprisingly heavy. What on earth is this for?

This is a puzzle glass, it’s part of a strange cultural thing, where you would enjoy your great banquets, where you would fill something up and pass it round and say to people, you know, “how do you drink out of this?”, and of course it’s almost impossible to work out how to drink from this stag glass. I’m going to put this very, very gingerly back on. You can hear it going down over its sort of spine of glass. There you go. And then you would have to work out how to drink your wine. So what would you do? Well you would pick it up and you would try and drink it from the glass itself. That wouldn’t work. Then you would try and drink it from the mouth of the stag and that wouldn’t work. Then, if you were very clever, you’d find that way down here at the ball underneath, holding the glass together, there are, somewhere here, some very small apertures which if you put your fingers over them and made a vacuum, then suddenly you’d be able to put your lips to the stag’s mouth and finally get your wine. It’s extraordinary.

And I’m just thinking, as I put that in, you’ll have been out hunting. You’ll be in some great schloss somewhere or some castle, with great sort of hunting trophies on the wall, and all your talk will have been about the day out in the field or the forest, and there you have, you know, as part of the end of your day at court, this stag, so it kind of rounds off your day and it’s a great sort of comic, heraldic, beautiful 400 year-old joke - it’s gorgeous.

Hello, I'm John Arnold and I’m the Anglican President of the Anglican Lutheran Society.

Now this is a very interesting cup which was part of the merchandising for the bicentenary, the second centenary, of the Reformation, which fell in 1717 – and the Reformation it’s commemorating is Martin Luther’s protest, largely against the sale of indulgences in the Church, when he is said to have nailed 95 theses to the door of the university church in Wittenberg. And that’s shown in one of the medallions with which the cup is decorated.

It has a very handsome lid which fits very tightly, and it has a portrait of Luther. A splendid large coin called a thaler, from which he get our modern word ‘dollar’, is set in the base and it has an inscription in Latin saying that it’s commemorating the bicentenary of the Reformation. There’s actually another smaller medallion which has the date 1717 rather cleverly set out in the Latin letters which spell out the number. There were two other themes common at the time. One was an evangelical movement called pietism, and there’s a medallion which shows faithful Lutherans continuing his work in the church. The other is the European Enlightenment. The idea that after the darkness of the Middle Ages, the clear light of reason was shining upon sensible people. And Martin Luther, it would have been greatly to his surprise, was hailed as the daystar of the Reformation, and there are several medallions with that theme and the word ‘light’. There’s a particularly good one which shows Luther and an angel getting a candle out of a bushel so that the light can shine into all the world – of course that is based on one of the parables of Jesus.

Luther stands on the cusp between the late Middle Ages in which he was born and the early modern world. One of the keys to understanding Luther’s theses is that he was basing his arguments not on the tradition or authority of the Church but on the Bible, and on the Bible alone. And the main medallion, which is set in the base of the cup, and which emerges when you empty it, shows a rock emerging from the sea with the one word ‘biblia’ on it, ‘the Bible’, and that’s the rock on which the Reformation stood and on which it stands today.

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, was a Parisian nobleman. On his birth, in 1675, King Louis XIV himself, and his queen, Marie-Thérèse, stood as godparents. But he later incurred the king’s displeasure and retired from court. His memoirs, written in the 1740s, long after the events described, provide one of the most complete – and overtly critical – accounts of life at the court of Louis XIV.

‘As for the King, nobody approached his magnificence. His buildings, who could number them? At the same time, who did not deplore their pride, their caprice and their bad taste? He abandoned Saint-Germain, and built nothing useful or attractive in Paris, except the Pont Royal, and that only because of necessity; so that in spite of its unrivalled size, Paris is inferior to many cities across Europe. He delighted in tyrannising nature, taming it with art and treasures. He built on and on at Versailles, without any general design, tacking together the beautiful and the ugly, the vast and the cramped. The magnificence of the gardens is astonishing, but using them provokes disgust: they are in similar bad taste.

But to return to the year 1709. Not even the troops were being paid any more, despite the fact that no one could imagine what became of all the millions that came into the king’s coffers.

The Duchesse de Grammont proposed to her husband the idea of offering her silver to the King. This made a great hubbub at Court. Nobody dared not to offer his own silver, but everyone offered it with a great deal of regret. Within a week, all the great people turned to earthenware and exhausted the supplies of all the shops where it was sold, while people of modest sort continued to eat off their silver dishes.

The high cost of everything, and of bread in particular, continued to cause disturbances all over the realm. To amuse the people, the idle and the poor were employed to level a rather large hillock which was left upon the Boulevard, and it was ordered that as a salary, these workers should receive small quantities of bad bread. It happened that on the morning of Tuesday the 20th of August, there wasn’t enough bread to go around. One woman amongst others cried out at this, which excited the rest to do the same. One by one the shops closed. The disorder grew and spilled into the neighbouring streets; no one was hurt, but everywhere the cry was "Bread! Bread!" and everywhere bread was seized.’

Extract from ‘Memoires sur le règne de Louis XIV’ (‘Memoirs of the reign of Louis XIV’), by Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1740s)

I’m Clare Browne. I’m a curator in the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department. This hanging is such a monumental object in terms of what most of us can imagine in our own homes that it obviously speaks of palaces and of grandeur and of royalty, but there are aspects of it that are incredibly personal, intimate and really rather playful and that’s one of things that appeals to me so much about it.

This scene is dominated by this figure of Louis XIV who has dressed himself up as Jupiter, as one of the great gods, the god of the sky and so true to that he’s sitting on the back of an eagle, flying through the air with a thunderbolt in his hand and looking out over the world from his vantage point.

And so, all around him are very clever, almost punning jokes on the theme of air. We have birds, different sorts of birds, songbirds that would have been familiar from the French countryside, but we also have wild birds, we have hunting birds, and butterflies, some of them more realistic and some of them completely fantastical. We have a wide variety of instruments, musical instruments, these are all ways of making sounds through the passage of air, which is what this hanging is all about.

We believe that it was commissioned by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan. She supported a needlework school in a convent school outside Paris, that gave education and training to orphaned girls, and the work was done to a very high standard, and we believe that it’s likely that ours was made there.

Below the figure of Jupiter we have a peacock behind the face that we believe may be a representation of Madame de Montespan - and the peacock is sitting behind her as if playing up her beauty and calling attention to the goddess, effectively, that she is, beneath Jupiter who’s her god.

It’s a personal family story. This is one of a set of hangings - we only have one in the V&A. I suspect that the intimacy of choosing to depict herself and her children with him in this series, is a sign that it was something that was quite personal and precious to her.

I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter.

Okay, so you have to imagine being some enormously luxurious gentleman, about to start the day, and you have this brought in – it’s a toilet set, a shaving set. And look how extraordinary it is. We’ve got beautiful silver strap work going all the way around this deep, glorious, lustrous tortoiseshell. And here is the silver stopper, which when you push it, opens up with a beautiful, simple latch; it just opens perfectly. Inside is a purple velvet interior completely like it would have been 300 years ago. And then coming up out of this, this casket, are these extraordinary objects, which invite you to pull them up and have a look.

And the first one that comes up is a silver mirror with a beautiful cornelian at the top, so finely cut that it’s translucent. And then a double-sided comb, completely perfect. It doesn’t look like it’s been used; it looks like it’s just come from the makers. This is different people working together here: this is a silversmith, a casket-maker, someone who works with bone. This comb, I have to say, is so beautiful I don’t want to put it down. And then scissors. And then this is the blunt hone stone on which you would sharpen your razor. And what’s so extraordinary about this, you can see that it’s been worn away.

The next thing out is this cut-throat razor. And of course I am going to run my thumb down its blade and it is unbelievably sharp. You could use this now and it would be the best shave you’d ever have. That’s extraordinary.

And then there are five more things. Another razor, of a different shape, also tortoiseshell. They're all ridiculously sharp and they all seem to be the same. Did he have one razor for every day of the week? What happened? Or is it just, that you just fill your whole box with a lifetime's full of razors. I don't know. I'm closing it up again just to hear this wonderful snap.

First performed at Versailles in January 1685, Roland was a tragédie en musique – a French form of opera. It was written by the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully and the librettist Philippe Quinault. A moralising tale, the plot warns against neglecting gloire (glory) for the sake of love. This excerpt is performed by Les Talens Lyriques and conducted by Christophe Rousset. It brings together danced instrumental interludes, chorus and solo singing to create a spectacular finale to the third act.

‘Chaconne et Coeur. C’est Médor qu’une Reine si belle’ by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) and Philippe Quinault (1635–1688)
Performed by Les Talens Lyriques, directed by Christophe Rousset. From the album: ‘Lully – Roland’, Ambroisie, 2004

Duration 6.36

Louis Couperin’s harpsichord compositions were probably composed after 1650 but none were published in his lifetime. He wrote suites of four movements, each consisting of three dances with a prelude. This prelude was more free form, in which Couperin explored daring harmonies and arresting rhythms. Here the prelude to the Suite in C is performed by Bob van Asperen on the Vaudry harpsichord, recorded in 2006.

‘Prelude, Suite in C’, Louis Couperin (c.1626–1661)
Played by Bob van Asperen. From the album: ‘Passacaille de Mr Couperin’, Aeolus Music, 2008

Duration 3.34

Hello, I’m Elizabeth Hamilton and I’m a volunteer guide at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and here is a carved roundel for you to handle.

1660 to 1720 saw the rise of France as the major power in Europe. Louis XIV promoted his state through the arts, encouraging French workshops to make luxury goods for home and export. His palace at Versailles became a showcase for such goods and Paris became the centre of European fashion. New periodicals were key in promoting French style throughout Europe.

Room panelling was a popular feature in French interior design of the 17th and 18th centuries, and oak was the wood most commonly used. However oak is not traditionally used for detailed carving because of its long and sometime fibrous grain, walnut usually being preferred. This carved oak roundel made between 1700 and 1725 therefore exemplifies the extraordinary skill of French workshops at this time. You’re welcome to touch it. The large hole in the centre of this roundel suggests that it may once have been attached to panelling or to a door as a decorative feature. There are two other smaller holes for attachment.

The oak used for this roundel is pale in colour and unpainted, which allows for clear visual appreciation of the detailed carving. Central to the carved decorative design is an eight-petalled floral motif within a ring. Radiating outward alternately are four cornucopiae overflowing with flowers and four stylised shell- and scroll-like motifs.

The carving is precise and intricate and reflects the creative pattern designs of Jean Berain, who for 30 years was an official designer to the court of Louis XIV.