Hall of Mirrors
This scandal has everything: mercury poisoning, stabbings, roofies, gun fights, bribes, duels, hair care, glassmaking…
In our public memory of French history, there are a lot of it-boys to be known. Jean-Paul Sartre (emo it-boy), Napoleon (famous short king), Louis XIV (purveyor of fancy furniture and amazing nicknames), Claude Monet (hay bale fan), and of course, both Dylan and Cole Sprouse (honorarily French after performing in the 2010 Disney sitcom masterpiece that is Season 2, Episode 28 of The Suite Life on Deck: “Breakup in Paris”). But I think there should be one more added to this list: Jean-Baptiste Colbert. With little to no expertise nor research, I can definitively say that this little known financial advisor to Louis XIV was supremely iconic and almost entirely responsible for the creation of Versailles’ iconic Hall of Mirrors.
I think we all collectively know something or other about the Hall of Mirrors, but what if I told you there was a very (partially) dark, sick and twisted (whimsical and wacky) history underpinning these mirrors. One that literally, no one, ever, in the history of a singular poll I put up on my Close Friends story has heard of. This scandal has everything: mercury poisoning, stabbings, roofies, gun fights, bribes, duels, hair care, glassmaking, and an old world secret service with data mining capabilities that would make the CIA jealous. But to understand the storied history behind what is essentially a corridor chock full of mirrors, we have to meet the head of hair behind it all: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, financial advisor to the stars.
All you need to know about Jean-Baptiste Colbert can be said in exactly three sentences. He was a bit of a wacky loner from a Jesuit College. He wanted to do tax reform. And he wanted to make his big break in the Billboard Hot 100 Political Advisors to Louis XIV. Colbert was a strong pragmatist in a Parisian court that, to put it very lightly, had gone batshit crazy for mirrors. Versailles was hooked on mirrors and the Great Mirror Addiction of the 1660s was haemorrhaging francs from France’s economy. In the Great Mirror Addiction Colbert found not only his dream economic reform to save France from collapse but also his way into being best buds with the mirror addicted King (who famously covered his mistress’ bedroom from floor to ceiling in mirrors). Play the Succession theme, cause it’s time for Colbert to go crazy.
One thing you should know about Venice in the 1600s: they did not mess about with their mirrors. While mirrors are commonplace today, from around the 1300s the small island of Murano in Venice held up the Venetian economy as the only place that knew how to make the mirrors, fuelling the lucrative Great Mirror Addiction. Apart from mirrors and rivers, Venice excelled in espionage and did almost anything to protect the secrets behind its mirrormaking technology. The Venetian Secret Service was such a sophisticated espionage network that I quite literally could not find a single name of any agents involved in this scandal. In fact, the identities of Venice’s Council of Ten, the controlling body of the secret service, are still highly disputed and unless an archeologist finds some old Venetian business cards, we will never know how many agents of the secret service there really were. But back to mirrors. The Venetian Secret Service did have some nice anti-mirror-whistleblower incentives, like letting all the lowly mirrormakers into high society gathos. But more often Venice protected its mirrors in less than nice ways, like stabbing any potential dissenters and leaving them dead in a river claiming they were eaten by salamanders (bonkers). Because of the Venetian Secret Service’s efficiency and lack of qualms with murder, mirrormaking was a solely Venetian gig. That is until full-time French menace and part-time haircare influencer Jean-Baptiste Colbert came into the picture.
The whole two year period between Colbert’s initial idea to get Venice’s mirrormakers to defect, and the death of a good chunk of them by poisoning is marked by abject tomfoolery. I think it would be impossible to recap every part of the Venetian Secret Service’s fights to get their mirror makers back so I will give you, dear reader, two of the most unserious highlights. Highlight one: Venice planted several Italian and French courtiers near the St Gobain glass making factory who convinced La Motta over six months that his apprentices and rivals were getting paid more than him, then supplied him with a gun, leading to a gunfight between La Motta and his apprentices in the factory, which broke every mirror they had created and nearly killed La Motta. Highlight two, and by far the silliest one: many mirrormakers contracted mercury poisoning in the St Gobain workshop and went insane. Several reports were released of mirrormakers spending hours staring confusingly at their own reflections and speaking gibberish. Somehow no one figured out that mercury had anything to do with their madness, and the Parisian court feared that looking in your reflection for too long causes insanity. Cue the hundreds of baroque paintings of mirror madness and general public fears of turning into an actual Narcissus.
Everyone remembers where they were in early 1667. In Paris and Venice alike, news began to ripple around that out of nowhere two mirrormakers died from “maybe natural causes we think maybe.” As far as the assassinating part goes, every source I’ve looked at is pretty divided on whether the mirrormakers were actually assassinated. As I said to my friend after losing a decent chunk of blood, “causation doesn’t always imply correlation.” It is widely agreed that there definitely was foul play afoot, but even if the victims just ate some bad ambergris, the rest of the mirrormakers scrambled back to Venice in fear. The worst part is that Venice’s last ditch assassinations were in vain; Colbert won, figured out how to make mirrors, and saved France a metric fuck-ton of money. But what makes this ending so unsatisfying is that Colbert never got to see the product of his scheming. He died in 1683, less than a year before the Hall of Mirrors was unveiled and became one of the most famous rooms in French history.
Why does no one know about this? I think our public remembrance of the renaissance, baroque, and rococo period is so eclipsed by all that art and stuff that we forget the darker parts. Colbert, apart from committing hair crimes, also committed heinous atrocities and instituted slavery into France’s colonial system. The Venetian Secret Service was iconic but they also blackmailed, threatened, and killed artists in the name of state control. All in all, what we can learn from the great 1667 mirror making scandal is maybe you should probably not kidnap artists or have gun fights in rooms full of highly valuable glass.
In a pretty grim world, looking back at these silly, forgotten histories reminds us of our own insignificance. Human history is so encompassing and dense that everything we do, no matter how important we think it is, is just a spec of sand in the end. Smuggle state secrets, contract mercury poisoning, start a gunfight, make art, get killed – but whatever you do, do not ever, ever trust a guy with a shag mullet.