ヴェルサイユでの大コンデの謁見

The scene is 1674. Louis XIV waits at the top of the great staircase at Versailles while the Grand Conde, his cousin and finest general, climbs slowly toward him after a hard victory over the Dutch at Seneffe. Conde had gout and could barely manage the steps, and the king is said to have called down that a man loaded with laurels could not be expected to move quickly. What makes the courtesy sharp is the past behind it. Twenty years earlier Conde had led an armed revolt against this same king and even fought for Spain against France. Gerome painted the scene in 1878, and to do it he had to rebuild a staircase that no longer existed, since the Escalier des Ambassadeurs had been torn down in the 1750s. Every marble step here is reconstruction.