Museum Secrets (2011–…): Season 3, Episode 20 - Inside the Château de Versailles - full transcript
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Paris.
A city of perfection and passion.
And on its border, a palace filled
with secrets dark and strange.
The encrypted letters of
the ill-fated Marie Antoinette,
the deadly skills of the musketeers,
and the invention of an
assassination machine.
Secrets hidden in plain sight,
inside the Chateau of Versailles.
(mysterious music) (electricity sizzling)
(pages whooshing)
(bright music)
Every year on the outskirts of Paris,
10 million visitors flock to a museum
that was once a royal palace, Versailles.
In these rooms, kings ruled
France and much of Europe
by convincing their subjects
they were appointed by God.
- It's a theater, Versailles.
It's a place for a permanent show,
by the king of its unique person and power.
- [Narrator] From the
arrival of the Sun King,
Louis XIV in 1682,
until the beginning of the
French Revolution in 1789,
(people shouting) (guillotine thudding)
Versailles was the epicenter of the nation.
Here the monarchs
of France commissioned exquisite treasures,
made beautiful babies,
and started bloody wars.
(soldiers shouting)
This solemn gallery is
known as the Hall of Battles.
Many French regiments are represented here
including some that still exist today.
(soldiers shouting)
But this uniform was only
worn for a few decades.
It has the white cross of the musketeer.
- [Announcer] "The Three Musketeers."
- [Narrator] In the movies, the musketeers
are happy-go-lucky
warriors off on an adventure.
Porthos, Athos, Aramis,
and the young D'Artagnan
thrust and parry their way to victory.
The cry of, "One for all and all for one."
(dramatic music)
But what was it really
like to be a musketeer?
That is our museum secret.
(picture whooshing) (bright music)
The story begins at the 17th
century Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte
where Louis XIV attended lavish parties,
accompanied by his musketeers.
These modern swordsmen are experts
in the musketeers' history
and fighting technique
and today they've agreed
to train a new recruit.
- Thank you very much,
I'm Rob, nice to meet you.
- Michel. - Hi.
- [Narrator] Robert Miles is an actor
who's going to play D'Artagnan
in "The Three Musketeers."
- So what are we gonna be doing today then?
- Ah, sounds good to me, okay.
To be here as a British actor fighting
these French former world
champion stage combat fighters,
you don't get opportunities
like that very often,
to be honest, and I'm really hoping
that I can make the most of it.
- One, you see?
Two, three.
- [Narrator] Rob also
hopes to learn something
about the musketeers as people.
(men grunting)
It turns out that the fictional D'Artagnan
was based on a real nobleman from Gascony,
a region famed for
producing fiery warriors.
- What about the attitude
of D'Artagnan as a person?
Did he like fighting?
Did he do it because he had to?
- I am D'Artagnan.
- You are D'Artagnan, okay.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Okay, right. - Okay, let's fight.
- So he wants to fight.
- Yes. - Okay.
- Very quick to anger.
- Very quick to anger, okay.
That's good stuff to know.
All right, and is that because
of where he comes from?
Is that a Gascon trait?
- [Michel] Gascon, Gascon.
- That's very, okay, I see.
(swords clanking)
- [Narrator] In reality, as in the movies,
musketeers trained to be deadly swordsmen.
(swords clanking) (man groaning)
(men laughing)
- Got me there, absolutely.
Made a mistake and it cost me my life.
- [Narrator] Hollywood's musketeers spar
with the Cardinal's men,
and their exploits are
often played for laughs.
The real musketeers had
a more serious mission.
The crosses on their uniforms
symbolized their holy calling.
They were the king's bodyguards
which made them God's bodyguards.
Every musketeer swore to
protect his God-king with his life.
When the king attended social functions,
like the ones at this chateau,
he faced potential threats from assassins.
At any second his musketeers
might be put to the test.
- I'm sure you could be a musketeer.
- [Musketeer] Really?
- This is my father's sword.
(swords clanking) (dramatic music)
- It's a bit rusty, don't you think?
- Still sharp enough to run you through.
(swords clanking)
- [Narrator] Rob is starting to think
that the life of a musketeer
would have been great fun
just like in the movies.
(shouting in foreign language)
But what he doesn't know is that
when Louis XIV declared
war, everything changed.
To understand what happened,
Rob visits Versailles' Hall of Battles
to meet historian, Elva Travion.
- Their mission first, was
to protect the king's life.
But they also had the
mission to fight in battles.
On the flag you can see a bomb falling
and the motto was,
"Where they fall, the
death is running with them."
- I see, okay, right.
So wherever they go,
death follows with them.
- Yes. - Right wow, biblical.
(both laughing)
- [Narrator] As the king's
men, they were expected
to be the bravest and the
ones to lead the charge.
- They were often called
enfants perdue, lost children.
- Lost children, really? - Yes.
They were called so because
there was a very high rate
of losses during the fight.
(men yelling)
(people chattering)
- [Narrator] In the movies, the story ends
with D'Artagnan receiving
his commission and a musket.
In real life, D'Artagnan got a musket ball
through the throat and
died on the battlefield.
So many musketeers were
lost defending their God-king,
that Louis XIV retired
the name of the company.
- Coming into this, obviously
with only an understanding
of D'Artagnan from pop culture,
has really shown me how I
can maybe do it differently
and perhaps change the performance
that I was intending to
give prior to coming here.
- [Narrator] A darker, grittier D'Artagnan
may be just what is needed to
revive the musketeer franchise
for a new generation.
Up next, the mysterious
death of a king's mistress.
(dramatic music)
(gentle music)
At the palace of Versailles,
the kings of France chose their wives
to enhance political alliances,
and produce heirs to the throne.
But for love and for sexual pleasure,
kings looked elsewhere
to the ladies-in-waiting of their court.
Some of the most famous mistresses
in French history graced Versailles.
Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry,
and Louis XIV's Madame de Montespan.
- She was enormously clever
and the greatest beauty of her generation.
She was extremely
passionate, extremely glamorous.
She gambled like a drunken soldier
and made love like a Parisian whore.
She was really quite an
extraordinary character.
And it wasn't considered at all scandalous
to be the lover of the king.
- [Narrator] The inevitable
illegitimate children
such liaisons produced were welcomed
as proof of a king's virility.
(dramatic music)
But there was a time when it was scandalous
to be a mistress.
(cannon booming) (men screaming)
In the turbulent 15th century,
much of France was occupied by the English.
The French king Charles VII was forced
to flee with his court from
Paris to the Loire Valley.
(dramatic music)
Although Charles had a wife and children,
he was transfixed by the arrival
of a new lady-in-waiting,
named Agnes Sorel.
(sweet gentle music)
Charles took Agnes to his bed.
(woman moaning)
But after six years as the king's mistress,
the young woman dropped
dead of unknown causes.
How did Agnes Sorel die?
And did she leave a mark on history?
Those are our museum secrets.
(dramatic music)
In France today,
there is no history
detective more accomplished
than forensic paleopathologist
Philippe Charlier.
- My job is doing forensic autopsies.
So I have to take all the samples
to analyze them in order to say
what is the cause of death,
what is the circumstances
of death, the manner of death.
I'm like a doctor but a too-late doctor.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Recently, Charlier
went to the town of Loches
to investigate the death of Agnes Sorel.
Some suspected that her
final resting place was here
in this medieval church.
Beside the alter there is a sarcophagus
with the wings of an angel
and an inscription that reads,
"The woman of beauty."
- So we wanted to exhume the body
or what remained of the body,
and to first confirm the
identity of this individual
then try if possible
to find the cause of death for this woman.
- [Narrator] The burial urn
contained a human skull.
Analysis of the teeth revealed
it was that of a young woman.
And facial reconstruction
matched the likeness
of Agnes Sorel.
(mysterious music)
Her coffin is next door to the castle
where she spent the last years of her life.
Here she bore King Charles three children
and also made her mark
on the history of fashion.
- [Narrator] Agnes brought
a style formerly reserved
for prostitutes to the king's court.
But she wasn't just eye candy.
She took a keen interest in politics.
Agnes learned that the war
with the English was going badly
because her beloved
king had run out of money
to pay his troops.
She used her considerable charm
to convince rich nobles to back the king.
- [Narrator] With these resources,
Charles defeated the English
and secured his borders.
To show Agnes his appreciation,
the king did something no
French king had done before.
He made her his official mistress.
- The official mistress was
effectively a job at court.
She would have her own apartment,
she would have her own servants,
she would receive visits in her own right
as a significant member of the court.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] Church elders were horrified
that a mere mistress should
be given such high status.
Undeterred, Charles went one step further.
He showed his love for Agnes
by making their children legitimate.
This infuriated Charles' eldest son
who feared the children would
one day threaten his claim to the throne.
Her enemies had reasons to want her dead.
But to discover proof
that she was murdered,
Dr. Philippe Charlier needed
to determine her cause of death
by examining the physical evidence.
- [Philippe] We found a lot
of eggs and a lot of parasites
inside the remains of the body.
- [Narrator] Charlier also detected
small amounts of mercury.
- Why mercury?
We know that mercury was used
during this period,
Middle Ages, Renaissance,
for the cure of internal parasites.
- [Narrator] The mercury could be explained
as medication.
But when Charlier did
the same test on her hair,
the mercury levels spiked.
- This testified really
of a very large amount
of mercury in the two or
three days before death.
- [Narrator] Perhaps someone
added mercury to her medication
or forced her to ingest it.
Either way, Agnes received a lethal dose.
- So it was maybe an
accident, it's possible.
But maybe it was also crime in order
to destroy the most important
influence she had on the king.
- [Narrator] But if someone took her life
to end her influence, they failed.
From that time on,
being the king's mistress
was no longer scandalous.
- It was really a career and
a very serious one at that.
And one for which many, many women were
very happy to compete.
The first official mistress was Agnes Sorel
and after that it was used for every woman
who occupied the position of
the favored lover of the king.
- [Narrator] After her death,
Agnes Sorel was long mourned by her king.
We suspect that on her
coffin are traces of his tears.
(dramatic music)
Next on Museum Secrets,
the queen loses her head.
(guillotine thuds)
(dramatic music)
For modern visitors to its gilded halls,
Versailles can feel like a setting
for lifestyles of the rich and famous.
And that's because it was.
Those who lived here were
the celebrities of their day
and the dazzle reminded
everyone who was boss, the king.
- The king is a holy person,
has been chosen by God
to be the king of France.
- [Narrator] So in 1789, King
Louis XVI was unprepared
for the revolution when his
subjects stormed the Bastille,
declared all men equal,
and four years later
sent him to the guillotine.
(guillotine thudding)
But though his death changed history,
his wife is better known.
Marie Antoinette,
portrayed as a spoiled,
childish libertine who said,
"Let them eat cake,"
when told that starving
French peasants had no bread.
- It's a sort of tragic
glamor of doomed celebrity,
about Marie Antoinette.
- [Narrator] But was she
just a shallow celebrity?
The victim of circumstances
she didn't understand?
The truth is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
The story begins in Versailles,
three months after
the fall of the Bastille.
- 5th of October, rumors reach Versailles,
the furious starving mob was preparing
to march on the palace.
The royal family was
held very much to blame
for the famine that was
afflicting the country.
- [Narrator] In the middle of the night,
a violent faction stormed the palace
looking for Marie Antoinette.
- The queen like a magnet
has really concentrated
all the hatred in France.
- [Narrator] They attacked
and killed her bodyguards.
Marie Antoinette did not
intend to be the next victim.
She took a secret passageway.
- So the queen went
through these small doors,
leading to the king's apartment
and she reached at the end this main door
and unfortunately the door
was locked from the other side.
There was a valet of the king not very far
who heard and who unlocked it.
- [Narrator] Marie
Antoinette had saved herself
but her ordeal had just begun.
- At dawn this whole area was full
of furious, shouting people demanding
to see the royal family.
- [Narrator] The king promised
to look into the shortage of bread.
Then rioters shouted for
a word from the queen.
(people shouting)
- The million dollar question
about Marie Antoinette,
the one that every school boy knows,
did she say, "Let them eat cake"?
Well she certainly spent a
great deal too much money
on dresses and jewels,
but she really didn't say
anything quite so callous.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] In fact, she said nothing.
She stared down the mob
until a few began to chant,
"Long live the queen."
But others shouted "bitch" and "whore".
By nightfall, the royals
were ordered to Paris.
(people yelling)
- It was a hideous journey.
The royal family looked out
of the windows of their coach
to see the heads of the
two bodyguards stuck
on bleeding pikes being waved
at the windows of their carriage.
- [Narrator] They spent the next four years
under house arrest until
the revolutionaries decided
France couldn't move
forward while the king was alive.
They solved the problem.
(guillotine thudding)
But for some, the king's
execution wasn't enough.
(somber music)
- Marie Antoinette was brought here
to the Conciergerie in August, 1793.
- [Narrator] Prisoners of
the revolution were kept here
while awaiting trial.
- The trail of Marie Antoinette
was an absolute shame
and disgrace, absolute.
No respect of the rules, no
chances left to the defense.
- [Narrator] Her celebrity
had made her a target.
- Most of the accusations
by witnesses were entirely specious.
She was accused of spying,
of contempt for the people,
of orgiastic behavior, of drunkenness,
even though she was
a well-known teetotaler.
Perhaps the worst of them was
that she had committed incest
with her then seven-year-old son.
- [Narrator] And so it appears
the revolutionaries
convicted an innocent victim.
Or maybe not.
In the French National Archives
are several revealing letters
written by Marie Antoinette
while she was under arrest.
- One of Marie Antoinette's
most important correspondents
was her old friend and some say lover,
the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen.
- [Narrator] These letters
were written in a secret code.
- A code word would
be chosen for each letter
after which different
letters would correspond,
line by line alternately,
to produce a new set of phrases.
- [Narrator] The code
could only be deciphered
with a key word.
- What's moving, I suppose,
about the key word
here is that it is courage.
It seems a fairly desperate cri de coeur.
- [Narrator] You might
think these were love letters.
But they're not.
They're about politics.
- Marie Antoinette was intensely aware
of France's political situation.
She spent a great deal of
time at her correspondence
with her potential allies.
- [Narrator] She pleaded with von Fersen
and other foreign leaders
to help restore the monarchy
by invading France.
- This is high treason.
She betrayed her country.
(people shouting)
The hate was too strong.
She had to die.
- Marie Antoinette remained
remarkably calm and composed.
As she walked up the steps to the scaffold,
she had accidentally stand
on the executioner's foot
for which she apologized very graciously
saying that she hadn't done it on purpose.
- It's a tragic fate.
From so high to so low.
- [Narrator] Marie Antoinette
understood the political storm
that was about to engulf her.
But she could not stop it.
(guillotine thudding)
As for Versailles, no royal celebrity
would ever live here again.
But the dazzling show goes on
in a palace now owned by the people.
(somber music)
Coming up, the secrets
of an inventive assassin.
(dramatic music)
After the French Revolution of 1789,
no royal would inhabit
the halls of Versailles.
But post-revolutionary
history hangs on its walls.
A soldier named Napoleon
rose to rule France
and all of Europe.
(men shouting) (horses neighing)
His formidable army numbered 600,000.
But after a failed attempt
to conquer Russia,
and a final defeat by
the British at Waterloo,
France fell into turmoil.
This is the period portrayed
in the many versions
of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
In July of 1830, an insurrection broke out.
But the new revolutionaries,
called the Republicans, could not prevail.
Instead, a nobleman named
Louis Philippe was crowned king.
Historian Monroe Price is
an expert on this chaotic era.
- Violence against Louis
Philippe and his regime
began very soon after the July Revolution.
And this was basically
because of the Republicans
who were furious that a
republic had not been a result
of the July Revolution
and that the revolution had been stolen
from them by Louis Philippe.
- [Narrator] In a gallery of
Versailles closed to the public
this painting depicts an
event that happened five years
after Louis Philippe's coronation,
when a royal procession
went horribly wrong.
- [Narrator] The trouble's
cause is hard to see,
but if one looks closely
at a second floor window,
there is a puff of smoke.
What happened here is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
Our story begins in the slums of Paris.
In the 1830s, it was home
to impoverished war veterans
including a man named Giuseppe Fieschi.
- He was a extraordinary man in fact.
He'd been a soldier in Napoleon's army
and had actually survived
the retreat from Moscow.
So he was certainly a tough man
and had some brains,
intelligence, and practical skill.
- [Narrator] Fieschi fell in
with republican conspirators
who wanted to assassinate
King Louis Philippe.
They had learned
that an upcoming royal
procession would travel down one
of the central boulevards of Paris.
In return for a fortune,
Fieschi agreed to shoot the king
and swore to safeguard
the conspirators' identities.
To begin his preparations,
Fieschi visited the Boulevard du Temple
and rented an upstairs room.
From here the king's procession would be
within musket range.
But there was a problem.
Muskets take many seconds to reload.
Fieschi would need to kill
the king with the first shot
or there would be no time for a getaway.
He wasn't sure it could be done.
(musket booming)
On a gun range near Paris,
Monroe will explore what
was going on in Fieschi's mind.
- Fieschi prepared for his attempt
on King Louis Philippe's
life with great care.
He knew that he was facing a moving target.
The king was going to be on horseback.
He was going to be surrounded
by several of his sons and his staff.
So it was quite a difficult target to hit.
- [Narrator] Targets
representing Louis Philippe
and his retinue have
been placed at a distance
from a marksman equal to the distance
from Fieschi's window to the street below.
(musket booming)
- As you see, it's unlikely
with just that one shot,
he'd have hit Louis Philippe.
- [Narrator] Fieschi knew it.
But as a war veteran,
he also knew firsthand the
deadly power of massed muskets.
(muskets booming)
Fieschi wondered how could
that firepower be employed
by a lone assassin?
Necessity was the mother of invention.
- This machine we see
here is the so-called,
has come to be known
as the infernal machine
named after its inventor,
and its first and so far only
operator, Giuseppe Fieschi.
It is 25 musket barrels
arranged on a wooden frame.
- [Narrator] The night
before the king's procession,
things did not go as Fieschi had planned.
- [Monroe] He and his collaborator, Morey,
charged all the musket barrels
with bullets and buckshot.
- [Narrator] What Fieschi didn't know was
that Morey tampered
with some of the barrels.
The conspirators didn't trust Fieschi
to keep their plot secret.
The next morning, the
king's procession approached
along with a boisterous crowd.
(people shouting)
- He would have heard
certainly a great deal of noise,
he'd have heard drums beating,
he'd have heard military music.
And he must have been extremely tense.
There was no way of knowing
whether the machine would in fact work.
Fieschi set off his
machine by putting a match
to the powder train at
about the 13th musket barrel.
- [Narrator] Many barrels fired true.
But some exploded in Fieschi's face.
(man screaming)
In the street, the barrage wreaked havoc.
(people shouting)
- The scene was almost indescribable
and very shocking and terrible.
18 people around the king were killed.
22 people injured.
- [Narrator] But the
assassination attempt failed.
- He missed the king by a whisker,
almost literally a whisker.
- [Narrator] Fieschi
himself was not so lucky.
He'd been hit by shrapnel
from an exploding barrel.
- It made a gash in his
forehead that was so deep,
that when he was arrested,
his brain could be seen
beating through the gore.
- [Narrator] The king's
surgeons saved his life
so he could face justice.
He never knew that one of his own group
of conspirators was responsible
for the exploding barrels,
so he kept his side of the bargain
and refused to incriminate the others.
- Fieschi had pleaded
guilty so it was perfectly clear
that he would go to the guillotine.
- [Narrator] Louis Philippe
commissioned this painting
to commemorate a moment of terror
and his near escape from death.
The king would keep his
throne as the last king of France.
(guillotine thudding)
While Fieschi would lose his head.
Coming up, the secret of a monk's elixir.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Versailles palace,
museum director Beatrix Saule
has agreed to reenact a ritual
from the days of Louis XIV.
Once a day, this baton was
paraded through the halls
to signal a momentous
event, the king's dinner.
(bright music)
By royal decree, his subjects were allowed
to watch him eat his usual enormous meal.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, 200 kilometers away
in this French monastery,
a humble monk led a much simpler life.
This monk shared just
one thing with Louis XIV,
they were both born in the year 1638.
The two men would never meet,
but their lives would
intersect in an intimate way.
How this happened is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
At Versailles, the courtiers catered
to every whim of Louis XIV.
The monk on the other hand, had to cater
to the whims of his Abbot
who ordered him to make wine
to pay for the monastery's upkeep.
Unfortunately, the monastery was located
in a northerly province.
The winters sometimes killed grapevines.
(speaking in foreign language)
To wine enthusiast, Alexandre Loire,
and vintner Richard Geoffroy,
the monk's vineyard is a small miracle.
- Here the background is really
the Clos Sacre, it's really
the original the vineyard.
- [Narrator] Not only was the climate cold,
the soil was chalky.
- It's very hard for the roots of the vines
just to progress in the chalk.
The greatest wines always
come from marginal situations.
Greatness always comes
on a constraint, never comfort.
- [Narrator] The constraints the monk had
to contend with were not only aboveground,
but below in the monastery's wine cellars.
- During winter, the yeasts
are slowing down their activity.
So people realized that
at springtime the wine
was fermenting again.
- [Narrator] Double fermentation causes
carbon dioxide bubbles.
- At that time, bubbles in
the wine were not considered
as a competitive advantage.
It was more a defect of the wine.
- [Narrator] And the carbon dioxide
also caused the bottles to explode.
With religious zeal, the monks strove
to minimize the bubbles
and maximize the taste
by combining green and
red grapes in a unique way.
- He has been the very first man
who decided to blend the
grapes prior to press them.
And he succeeded to create
what he called later the
best wine in the world.
- [Narrator] When Louis
XIV tried the monk's wine,
he loved it.
For the monk, life was good.
The wine was named for his home province
which happens to be called Champagne.
But for Louis XIV as the years passed,
life became excruciating.
His heavy diet had caused a swelling
of the extremities called gout.
The royal feet became a royal pain.
But no matter what his doctor's told him,
he wouldn't cut back on dinner.
Or on the glass of champagne
he had with every meal.
His senior physician claimed
champagne was good for him,
while others insisted it
was worsening his condition,
and even shortening his life.
At the time there was no
way to prove who was right.
At this modern wine
testing lab in Champagne,
Alexandre Loire hopes
to discover the answer.
- Is it possible to know
if the wine of Champagne
is good for health or not?
- In order to assess this,
I'm going to use this
device which is capable
of measuring the total
antioxidant capacity.
- [Narrator] Health-giving antioxidants
are sometimes in the form of Vitamin C
which happens to be a
modern treatment for gout.
Dr. Hoda has found high
levels of antioxidants in red wine.
While in white wine, they're much lower.
As for champagne, you might think
that because it looks
a lot like white wine,
it too will be low in antioxidants.
Dr. Hoda is about to find out.
- [Narrator] In fact, champagne
has double the antioxidants
of white wine, which makes sense,
because just as it was in the monk's day,
today's version is a unique
blend of red grapes and green.
- [Narrator] So champagne
probably eased the king's gout
and it certainly didn't shorten his life.
Louis XIV lived to the ripe old age of 77.
He died in 1715.
Coincidentally, so did the
monk who made champagne.
Oh, and one more thing.
His name was Dom Perignon.
(gentle music)
Next on Museum Secrets,
the Sun King goes supernova.
(dramatic music)
(mysterious music)
King Louis XIV clad Versailles in stone.
But his palace is all about light.
- If we start with this room,
his official state bedroom,
it's built on an east, west access
so that the sun rises
when the monarch rises
and sets when he goes to bed.
- [Narrator] During the day,
sunlight from the gardens
filled Louis' great hall of mirrors.
Anyone who gazed upon him here,
would be blinded by reflected brilliance.
The message was, I am the Sun King.
I alone have the power
to bestow life or withhold it.
But while Louis was the
self-proclaimed source of light,
he also liked to be enlightened.
- He always was very anxious
that he hadn't been quite
as well educated as a king ought to be,
so he was always
trying to make up for this.
He wanted to read history books,
he wanted to know what
as happening in philosophy,
in the sciences.
He would bring the best
people to him to do that.
- [Narrator] In 1666, Louis created
the French Academy of Sciences.
To allow his academy
to explore the heavens,
he built a world-class
observatory in Paris.
In the 17th century,
its telescopes revealed
the craters of the moon,
and the gap in the rings of Saturn.
And in 1858, a French
astronomer built a telescope here
that was more powerful
than any made before.
- There was a kind of revolution.
Leon Foucault who
walked in this observatory,
invented the modern reflecting telescope.
- [Narrator] This telescope
revealed a mystery
that led to a discovery about
the origin of life on earth.
It's a museum secret
that Louis XIV would find hard to believe.
(gentle music)
Our investigation begins
at a modern observatory in Toronto, Canada.
Astronomer Ray Jayawardhana is the kind
of cutting edge thinker
that Louis would have invited
to join his academy.
- Astronomy is quite difference
from the other sciences
in that most of what we know
comes from just decoding light.
- [Narrator] The decoding
started with Isaac Newton.
- Isaac Newton used a
prism to spread sunlight
into the colors of the rainbow.
- [Narrator] He called the
colors in sunlight a spectrum.
Soon after, prisms would reveal the spectra
of earthly sources of light.
- It was long known that
different elements burn
with different colors.
And when scientists looked through a prism,
they realized that each
element had a distinct spectrum.
For instance, when we look
at helium gas through a prism,
we can see its distinct spectrum.
- [Narrator] The same
is true for other elements.
Astronomers wondered, if
earthly elements can be identified
by their spectrum,
perhaps a prism can reveal
the elements burning in a star.
(dramatic music)
And that brings us back
to the Paris observatory
to the first astronomers
to use the powerful Foucault telescope.
- Charles Wolf and George
Rayet were two astronomers
working in this observatory around 1860.
They don't want to only
look at the star itself,
but they want to have the spectrum,
so they have to use this
device which is a prism.
And they put that in front
of the eyepiece like that
and then they could see
the spectrum of the star.
- [Narrator] Through a prism,
most stars look much like this.
But when Wolf and Rayet
scan the constellation Cygnus,
they found three stars
that displayed bright spots
of yellow and blue.
- And they could see very bright emissions
at certain places on the spectrums.
This is very special.
These are the only stars
which have this characteristic.
- [Narrator] They were
named Wolf-Rayet stars.
But Wolf and Rayet never discovered
which elements give
them their unique spectrum.
- So this remained a
mystery for many, many years.
- [Narrator] In the 20th century,
more powerful telescopes
allowed astronomers
to see Wolf-Rayet stars in a close-up view.
- And here's an image taken
with Hubble Space Telescope,
one of the Wolf-Rayet
stars that we know of.
As you can see, the actual
star is right at the center
but surrounding it is
all of this other material.
- [Narrator] With modern instruments,
the spectra of the swirling material
reveal a primordial brew.
- [Ray] In those outer layers are elements
like carbon and oxygen and nitrogen
that were cooked up inside those stars.
These layers are being expelled into space.
- [Narrator] These
stars are the early stages
of something much bigger.
- Astronomers believe that Wolf-Rayet stars
will go on to explode fully,
completely as supernovi.
Supernova are spectacular
explosions that really seed
our galaxy with the elements
that are essential for life.
The oxygen we breathe,
the iron in our blood,
and calcium in our bones
comes from these stars.
And if not for those
elements, we wouldn't be here.
So Wolf-Rayet stars are
vital for life as we know it.
- [Narrator] Life that includes you and me,
and the Sun King Louis XIV.
Louis believed that he
had the power to bestow life
but in reality, Wolf-Rayet
stars are the real Sun Kings.
(mysterious music)
In a museum where
royalty and revolution meet,
for every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Secrets of unbalanced minds, (guns popping)
and of courageous hearts,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Chateau of Versailles.
(dramatic music)
(eerie music)
(logo whooshing)
- [Narrator] Paris.
A city of perfection and passion.
And on its border, a palace filled
with secrets dark and strange.
The encrypted letters of
the ill-fated Marie Antoinette,
the deadly skills of the musketeers,
and the invention of an
assassination machine.
Secrets hidden in plain sight,
inside the Chateau of Versailles.
(mysterious music) (electricity sizzling)
(pages whooshing)
(bright music)
Every year on the outskirts of Paris,
10 million visitors flock to a museum
that was once a royal palace, Versailles.
In these rooms, kings ruled
France and much of Europe
by convincing their subjects
they were appointed by God.
- It's a theater, Versailles.
It's a place for a permanent show,
by the king of its unique person and power.
- [Narrator] From the
arrival of the Sun King,
Louis XIV in 1682,
until the beginning of the
French Revolution in 1789,
(people shouting) (guillotine thudding)
Versailles was the epicenter of the nation.
Here the monarchs
of France commissioned exquisite treasures,
made beautiful babies,
and started bloody wars.
(soldiers shouting)
This solemn gallery is
known as the Hall of Battles.
Many French regiments are represented here
including some that still exist today.
(soldiers shouting)
But this uniform was only
worn for a few decades.
It has the white cross of the musketeer.
- [Announcer] "The Three Musketeers."
- [Narrator] In the movies, the musketeers
are happy-go-lucky
warriors off on an adventure.
Porthos, Athos, Aramis,
and the young D'Artagnan
thrust and parry their way to victory.
The cry of, "One for all and all for one."
(dramatic music)
But what was it really
like to be a musketeer?
That is our museum secret.
(picture whooshing) (bright music)
The story begins at the 17th
century Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte
where Louis XIV attended lavish parties,
accompanied by his musketeers.
These modern swordsmen are experts
in the musketeers' history
and fighting technique
and today they've agreed
to train a new recruit.
- Thank you very much,
I'm Rob, nice to meet you.
- Michel. - Hi.
- [Narrator] Robert Miles is an actor
who's going to play D'Artagnan
in "The Three Musketeers."
- So what are we gonna be doing today then?
- Ah, sounds good to me, okay.
To be here as a British actor fighting
these French former world
champion stage combat fighters,
you don't get opportunities
like that very often,
to be honest, and I'm really hoping
that I can make the most of it.
- One, you see?
Two, three.
- [Narrator] Rob also
hopes to learn something
about the musketeers as people.
(men grunting)
It turns out that the fictional D'Artagnan
was based on a real nobleman from Gascony,
a region famed for
producing fiery warriors.
- What about the attitude
of D'Artagnan as a person?
Did he like fighting?
Did he do it because he had to?
- I am D'Artagnan.
- You are D'Artagnan, okay.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Okay, right. - Okay, let's fight.
- So he wants to fight.
- Yes. - Okay.
- Very quick to anger.
- Very quick to anger, okay.
That's good stuff to know.
All right, and is that because
of where he comes from?
Is that a Gascon trait?
- [Michel] Gascon, Gascon.
- That's very, okay, I see.
(swords clanking)
- [Narrator] In reality, as in the movies,
musketeers trained to be deadly swordsmen.
(swords clanking) (man groaning)
(men laughing)
- Got me there, absolutely.
Made a mistake and it cost me my life.
- [Narrator] Hollywood's musketeers spar
with the Cardinal's men,
and their exploits are
often played for laughs.
The real musketeers had
a more serious mission.
The crosses on their uniforms
symbolized their holy calling.
They were the king's bodyguards
which made them God's bodyguards.
Every musketeer swore to
protect his God-king with his life.
When the king attended social functions,
like the ones at this chateau,
he faced potential threats from assassins.
At any second his musketeers
might be put to the test.
- I'm sure you could be a musketeer.
- [Musketeer] Really?
- This is my father's sword.
(swords clanking) (dramatic music)
- It's a bit rusty, don't you think?
- Still sharp enough to run you through.
(swords clanking)
- [Narrator] Rob is starting to think
that the life of a musketeer
would have been great fun
just like in the movies.
(shouting in foreign language)
But what he doesn't know is that
when Louis XIV declared
war, everything changed.
To understand what happened,
Rob visits Versailles' Hall of Battles
to meet historian, Elva Travion.
- Their mission first, was
to protect the king's life.
But they also had the
mission to fight in battles.
On the flag you can see a bomb falling
and the motto was,
"Where they fall, the
death is running with them."
- I see, okay, right.
So wherever they go,
death follows with them.
- Yes. - Right wow, biblical.
(both laughing)
- [Narrator] As the king's
men, they were expected
to be the bravest and the
ones to lead the charge.
- They were often called
enfants perdue, lost children.
- Lost children, really? - Yes.
They were called so because
there was a very high rate
of losses during the fight.
(men yelling)
(people chattering)
- [Narrator] In the movies, the story ends
with D'Artagnan receiving
his commission and a musket.
In real life, D'Artagnan got a musket ball
through the throat and
died on the battlefield.
So many musketeers were
lost defending their God-king,
that Louis XIV retired
the name of the company.
- Coming into this, obviously
with only an understanding
of D'Artagnan from pop culture,
has really shown me how I
can maybe do it differently
and perhaps change the performance
that I was intending to
give prior to coming here.
- [Narrator] A darker, grittier D'Artagnan
may be just what is needed to
revive the musketeer franchise
for a new generation.
Up next, the mysterious
death of a king's mistress.
(dramatic music)
(gentle music)
At the palace of Versailles,
the kings of France chose their wives
to enhance political alliances,
and produce heirs to the throne.
But for love and for sexual pleasure,
kings looked elsewhere
to the ladies-in-waiting of their court.
Some of the most famous mistresses
in French history graced Versailles.
Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry,
and Louis XIV's Madame de Montespan.
- She was enormously clever
and the greatest beauty of her generation.
She was extremely
passionate, extremely glamorous.
She gambled like a drunken soldier
and made love like a Parisian whore.
She was really quite an
extraordinary character.
And it wasn't considered at all scandalous
to be the lover of the king.
- [Narrator] The inevitable
illegitimate children
such liaisons produced were welcomed
as proof of a king's virility.
(dramatic music)
But there was a time when it was scandalous
to be a mistress.
(cannon booming) (men screaming)
In the turbulent 15th century,
much of France was occupied by the English.
The French king Charles VII was forced
to flee with his court from
Paris to the Loire Valley.
(dramatic music)
Although Charles had a wife and children,
he was transfixed by the arrival
of a new lady-in-waiting,
named Agnes Sorel.
(sweet gentle music)
Charles took Agnes to his bed.
(woman moaning)
But after six years as the king's mistress,
the young woman dropped
dead of unknown causes.
How did Agnes Sorel die?
And did she leave a mark on history?
Those are our museum secrets.
(dramatic music)
In France today,
there is no history
detective more accomplished
than forensic paleopathologist
Philippe Charlier.
- My job is doing forensic autopsies.
So I have to take all the samples
to analyze them in order to say
what is the cause of death,
what is the circumstances
of death, the manner of death.
I'm like a doctor but a too-late doctor.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Recently, Charlier
went to the town of Loches
to investigate the death of Agnes Sorel.
Some suspected that her
final resting place was here
in this medieval church.
Beside the alter there is a sarcophagus
with the wings of an angel
and an inscription that reads,
"The woman of beauty."
- So we wanted to exhume the body
or what remained of the body,
and to first confirm the
identity of this individual
then try if possible
to find the cause of death for this woman.
- [Narrator] The burial urn
contained a human skull.
Analysis of the teeth revealed
it was that of a young woman.
And facial reconstruction
matched the likeness
of Agnes Sorel.
(mysterious music)
Her coffin is next door to the castle
where she spent the last years of her life.
Here she bore King Charles three children
and also made her mark
on the history of fashion.
- [Narrator] Agnes brought
a style formerly reserved
for prostitutes to the king's court.
But she wasn't just eye candy.
She took a keen interest in politics.
Agnes learned that the war
with the English was going badly
because her beloved
king had run out of money
to pay his troops.
She used her considerable charm
to convince rich nobles to back the king.
- [Narrator] With these resources,
Charles defeated the English
and secured his borders.
To show Agnes his appreciation,
the king did something no
French king had done before.
He made her his official mistress.
- The official mistress was
effectively a job at court.
She would have her own apartment,
she would have her own servants,
she would receive visits in her own right
as a significant member of the court.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] Church elders were horrified
that a mere mistress should
be given such high status.
Undeterred, Charles went one step further.
He showed his love for Agnes
by making their children legitimate.
This infuriated Charles' eldest son
who feared the children would
one day threaten his claim to the throne.
Her enemies had reasons to want her dead.
But to discover proof
that she was murdered,
Dr. Philippe Charlier needed
to determine her cause of death
by examining the physical evidence.
- [Philippe] We found a lot
of eggs and a lot of parasites
inside the remains of the body.
- [Narrator] Charlier also detected
small amounts of mercury.
- Why mercury?
We know that mercury was used
during this period,
Middle Ages, Renaissance,
for the cure of internal parasites.
- [Narrator] The mercury could be explained
as medication.
But when Charlier did
the same test on her hair,
the mercury levels spiked.
- This testified really
of a very large amount
of mercury in the two or
three days before death.
- [Narrator] Perhaps someone
added mercury to her medication
or forced her to ingest it.
Either way, Agnes received a lethal dose.
- So it was maybe an
accident, it's possible.
But maybe it was also crime in order
to destroy the most important
influence she had on the king.
- [Narrator] But if someone took her life
to end her influence, they failed.
From that time on,
being the king's mistress
was no longer scandalous.
- It was really a career and
a very serious one at that.
And one for which many, many women were
very happy to compete.
The first official mistress was Agnes Sorel
and after that it was used for every woman
who occupied the position of
the favored lover of the king.
- [Narrator] After her death,
Agnes Sorel was long mourned by her king.
We suspect that on her
coffin are traces of his tears.
(dramatic music)
Next on Museum Secrets,
the queen loses her head.
(guillotine thuds)
(dramatic music)
For modern visitors to its gilded halls,
Versailles can feel like a setting
for lifestyles of the rich and famous.
And that's because it was.
Those who lived here were
the celebrities of their day
and the dazzle reminded
everyone who was boss, the king.
- The king is a holy person,
has been chosen by God
to be the king of France.
- [Narrator] So in 1789, King
Louis XVI was unprepared
for the revolution when his
subjects stormed the Bastille,
declared all men equal,
and four years later
sent him to the guillotine.
(guillotine thudding)
But though his death changed history,
his wife is better known.
Marie Antoinette,
portrayed as a spoiled,
childish libertine who said,
"Let them eat cake,"
when told that starving
French peasants had no bread.
- It's a sort of tragic
glamor of doomed celebrity,
about Marie Antoinette.
- [Narrator] But was she
just a shallow celebrity?
The victim of circumstances
she didn't understand?
The truth is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
The story begins in Versailles,
three months after
the fall of the Bastille.
- 5th of October, rumors reach Versailles,
the furious starving mob was preparing
to march on the palace.
The royal family was
held very much to blame
for the famine that was
afflicting the country.
- [Narrator] In the middle of the night,
a violent faction stormed the palace
looking for Marie Antoinette.
- The queen like a magnet
has really concentrated
all the hatred in France.
- [Narrator] They attacked
and killed her bodyguards.
Marie Antoinette did not
intend to be the next victim.
She took a secret passageway.
- So the queen went
through these small doors,
leading to the king's apartment
and she reached at the end this main door
and unfortunately the door
was locked from the other side.
There was a valet of the king not very far
who heard and who unlocked it.
- [Narrator] Marie
Antoinette had saved herself
but her ordeal had just begun.
- At dawn this whole area was full
of furious, shouting people demanding
to see the royal family.
- [Narrator] The king promised
to look into the shortage of bread.
Then rioters shouted for
a word from the queen.
(people shouting)
- The million dollar question
about Marie Antoinette,
the one that every school boy knows,
did she say, "Let them eat cake"?
Well she certainly spent a
great deal too much money
on dresses and jewels,
but she really didn't say
anything quite so callous.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] In fact, she said nothing.
She stared down the mob
until a few began to chant,
"Long live the queen."
But others shouted "bitch" and "whore".
By nightfall, the royals
were ordered to Paris.
(people yelling)
- It was a hideous journey.
The royal family looked out
of the windows of their coach
to see the heads of the
two bodyguards stuck
on bleeding pikes being waved
at the windows of their carriage.
- [Narrator] They spent the next four years
under house arrest until
the revolutionaries decided
France couldn't move
forward while the king was alive.
They solved the problem.
(guillotine thudding)
But for some, the king's
execution wasn't enough.
(somber music)
- Marie Antoinette was brought here
to the Conciergerie in August, 1793.
- [Narrator] Prisoners of
the revolution were kept here
while awaiting trial.
- The trail of Marie Antoinette
was an absolute shame
and disgrace, absolute.
No respect of the rules, no
chances left to the defense.
- [Narrator] Her celebrity
had made her a target.
- Most of the accusations
by witnesses were entirely specious.
She was accused of spying,
of contempt for the people,
of orgiastic behavior, of drunkenness,
even though she was
a well-known teetotaler.
Perhaps the worst of them was
that she had committed incest
with her then seven-year-old son.
- [Narrator] And so it appears
the revolutionaries
convicted an innocent victim.
Or maybe not.
In the French National Archives
are several revealing letters
written by Marie Antoinette
while she was under arrest.
- One of Marie Antoinette's
most important correspondents
was her old friend and some say lover,
the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen.
- [Narrator] These letters
were written in a secret code.
- A code word would
be chosen for each letter
after which different
letters would correspond,
line by line alternately,
to produce a new set of phrases.
- [Narrator] The code
could only be deciphered
with a key word.
- What's moving, I suppose,
about the key word
here is that it is courage.
It seems a fairly desperate cri de coeur.
- [Narrator] You might
think these were love letters.
But they're not.
They're about politics.
- Marie Antoinette was intensely aware
of France's political situation.
She spent a great deal of
time at her correspondence
with her potential allies.
- [Narrator] She pleaded with von Fersen
and other foreign leaders
to help restore the monarchy
by invading France.
- This is high treason.
She betrayed her country.
(people shouting)
The hate was too strong.
She had to die.
- Marie Antoinette remained
remarkably calm and composed.
As she walked up the steps to the scaffold,
she had accidentally stand
on the executioner's foot
for which she apologized very graciously
saying that she hadn't done it on purpose.
- It's a tragic fate.
From so high to so low.
- [Narrator] Marie Antoinette
understood the political storm
that was about to engulf her.
But she could not stop it.
(guillotine thudding)
As for Versailles, no royal celebrity
would ever live here again.
But the dazzling show goes on
in a palace now owned by the people.
(somber music)
Coming up, the secrets
of an inventive assassin.
(dramatic music)
After the French Revolution of 1789,
no royal would inhabit
the halls of Versailles.
But post-revolutionary
history hangs on its walls.
A soldier named Napoleon
rose to rule France
and all of Europe.
(men shouting) (horses neighing)
His formidable army numbered 600,000.
But after a failed attempt
to conquer Russia,
and a final defeat by
the British at Waterloo,
France fell into turmoil.
This is the period portrayed
in the many versions
of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
In July of 1830, an insurrection broke out.
But the new revolutionaries,
called the Republicans, could not prevail.
Instead, a nobleman named
Louis Philippe was crowned king.
Historian Monroe Price is
an expert on this chaotic era.
- Violence against Louis
Philippe and his regime
began very soon after the July Revolution.
And this was basically
because of the Republicans
who were furious that a
republic had not been a result
of the July Revolution
and that the revolution had been stolen
from them by Louis Philippe.
- [Narrator] In a gallery of
Versailles closed to the public
this painting depicts an
event that happened five years
after Louis Philippe's coronation,
when a royal procession
went horribly wrong.
- [Narrator] The trouble's
cause is hard to see,
but if one looks closely
at a second floor window,
there is a puff of smoke.
What happened here is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
Our story begins in the slums of Paris.
In the 1830s, it was home
to impoverished war veterans
including a man named Giuseppe Fieschi.
- He was a extraordinary man in fact.
He'd been a soldier in Napoleon's army
and had actually survived
the retreat from Moscow.
So he was certainly a tough man
and had some brains,
intelligence, and practical skill.
- [Narrator] Fieschi fell in
with republican conspirators
who wanted to assassinate
King Louis Philippe.
They had learned
that an upcoming royal
procession would travel down one
of the central boulevards of Paris.
In return for a fortune,
Fieschi agreed to shoot the king
and swore to safeguard
the conspirators' identities.
To begin his preparations,
Fieschi visited the Boulevard du Temple
and rented an upstairs room.
From here the king's procession would be
within musket range.
But there was a problem.
Muskets take many seconds to reload.
Fieschi would need to kill
the king with the first shot
or there would be no time for a getaway.
He wasn't sure it could be done.
(musket booming)
On a gun range near Paris,
Monroe will explore what
was going on in Fieschi's mind.
- Fieschi prepared for his attempt
on King Louis Philippe's
life with great care.
He knew that he was facing a moving target.
The king was going to be on horseback.
He was going to be surrounded
by several of his sons and his staff.
So it was quite a difficult target to hit.
- [Narrator] Targets
representing Louis Philippe
and his retinue have
been placed at a distance
from a marksman equal to the distance
from Fieschi's window to the street below.
(musket booming)
- As you see, it's unlikely
with just that one shot,
he'd have hit Louis Philippe.
- [Narrator] Fieschi knew it.
But as a war veteran,
he also knew firsthand the
deadly power of massed muskets.
(muskets booming)
Fieschi wondered how could
that firepower be employed
by a lone assassin?
Necessity was the mother of invention.
- This machine we see
here is the so-called,
has come to be known
as the infernal machine
named after its inventor,
and its first and so far only
operator, Giuseppe Fieschi.
It is 25 musket barrels
arranged on a wooden frame.
- [Narrator] The night
before the king's procession,
things did not go as Fieschi had planned.
- [Monroe] He and his collaborator, Morey,
charged all the musket barrels
with bullets and buckshot.
- [Narrator] What Fieschi didn't know was
that Morey tampered
with some of the barrels.
The conspirators didn't trust Fieschi
to keep their plot secret.
The next morning, the
king's procession approached
along with a boisterous crowd.
(people shouting)
- He would have heard
certainly a great deal of noise,
he'd have heard drums beating,
he'd have heard military music.
And he must have been extremely tense.
There was no way of knowing
whether the machine would in fact work.
Fieschi set off his
machine by putting a match
to the powder train at
about the 13th musket barrel.
- [Narrator] Many barrels fired true.
But some exploded in Fieschi's face.
(man screaming)
In the street, the barrage wreaked havoc.
(people shouting)
- The scene was almost indescribable
and very shocking and terrible.
18 people around the king were killed.
22 people injured.
- [Narrator] But the
assassination attempt failed.
- He missed the king by a whisker,
almost literally a whisker.
- [Narrator] Fieschi
himself was not so lucky.
He'd been hit by shrapnel
from an exploding barrel.
- It made a gash in his
forehead that was so deep,
that when he was arrested,
his brain could be seen
beating through the gore.
- [Narrator] The king's
surgeons saved his life
so he could face justice.
He never knew that one of his own group
of conspirators was responsible
for the exploding barrels,
so he kept his side of the bargain
and refused to incriminate the others.
- Fieschi had pleaded
guilty so it was perfectly clear
that he would go to the guillotine.
- [Narrator] Louis Philippe
commissioned this painting
to commemorate a moment of terror
and his near escape from death.
The king would keep his
throne as the last king of France.
(guillotine thudding)
While Fieschi would lose his head.
Coming up, the secret of a monk's elixir.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Versailles palace,
museum director Beatrix Saule
has agreed to reenact a ritual
from the days of Louis XIV.
Once a day, this baton was
paraded through the halls
to signal a momentous
event, the king's dinner.
(bright music)
By royal decree, his subjects were allowed
to watch him eat his usual enormous meal.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, 200 kilometers away
in this French monastery,
a humble monk led a much simpler life.
This monk shared just
one thing with Louis XIV,
they were both born in the year 1638.
The two men would never meet,
but their lives would
intersect in an intimate way.
How this happened is a museum secret.
(dramatic music)
At Versailles, the courtiers catered
to every whim of Louis XIV.
The monk on the other hand, had to cater
to the whims of his Abbot
who ordered him to make wine
to pay for the monastery's upkeep.
Unfortunately, the monastery was located
in a northerly province.
The winters sometimes killed grapevines.
(speaking in foreign language)
To wine enthusiast, Alexandre Loire,
and vintner Richard Geoffroy,
the monk's vineyard is a small miracle.
- Here the background is really
the Clos Sacre, it's really
the original the vineyard.
- [Narrator] Not only was the climate cold,
the soil was chalky.
- It's very hard for the roots of the vines
just to progress in the chalk.
The greatest wines always
come from marginal situations.
Greatness always comes
on a constraint, never comfort.
- [Narrator] The constraints the monk had
to contend with were not only aboveground,
but below in the monastery's wine cellars.
- During winter, the yeasts
are slowing down their activity.
So people realized that
at springtime the wine
was fermenting again.
- [Narrator] Double fermentation causes
carbon dioxide bubbles.
- At that time, bubbles in
the wine were not considered
as a competitive advantage.
It was more a defect of the wine.
- [Narrator] And the carbon dioxide
also caused the bottles to explode.
With religious zeal, the monks strove
to minimize the bubbles
and maximize the taste
by combining green and
red grapes in a unique way.
- He has been the very first man
who decided to blend the
grapes prior to press them.
And he succeeded to create
what he called later the
best wine in the world.
- [Narrator] When Louis
XIV tried the monk's wine,
he loved it.
For the monk, life was good.
The wine was named for his home province
which happens to be called Champagne.
But for Louis XIV as the years passed,
life became excruciating.
His heavy diet had caused a swelling
of the extremities called gout.
The royal feet became a royal pain.
But no matter what his doctor's told him,
he wouldn't cut back on dinner.
Or on the glass of champagne
he had with every meal.
His senior physician claimed
champagne was good for him,
while others insisted it
was worsening his condition,
and even shortening his life.
At the time there was no
way to prove who was right.
At this modern wine
testing lab in Champagne,
Alexandre Loire hopes
to discover the answer.
- Is it possible to know
if the wine of Champagne
is good for health or not?
- In order to assess this,
I'm going to use this
device which is capable
of measuring the total
antioxidant capacity.
- [Narrator] Health-giving antioxidants
are sometimes in the form of Vitamin C
which happens to be a
modern treatment for gout.
Dr. Hoda has found high
levels of antioxidants in red wine.
While in white wine, they're much lower.
As for champagne, you might think
that because it looks
a lot like white wine,
it too will be low in antioxidants.
Dr. Hoda is about to find out.
- [Narrator] In fact, champagne
has double the antioxidants
of white wine, which makes sense,
because just as it was in the monk's day,
today's version is a unique
blend of red grapes and green.
- [Narrator] So champagne
probably eased the king's gout
and it certainly didn't shorten his life.
Louis XIV lived to the ripe old age of 77.
He died in 1715.
Coincidentally, so did the
monk who made champagne.
Oh, and one more thing.
His name was Dom Perignon.
(gentle music)
Next on Museum Secrets,
the Sun King goes supernova.
(dramatic music)
(mysterious music)
King Louis XIV clad Versailles in stone.
But his palace is all about light.
- If we start with this room,
his official state bedroom,
it's built on an east, west access
so that the sun rises
when the monarch rises
and sets when he goes to bed.
- [Narrator] During the day,
sunlight from the gardens
filled Louis' great hall of mirrors.
Anyone who gazed upon him here,
would be blinded by reflected brilliance.
The message was, I am the Sun King.
I alone have the power
to bestow life or withhold it.
But while Louis was the
self-proclaimed source of light,
he also liked to be enlightened.
- He always was very anxious
that he hadn't been quite
as well educated as a king ought to be,
so he was always
trying to make up for this.
He wanted to read history books,
he wanted to know what
as happening in philosophy,
in the sciences.
He would bring the best
people to him to do that.
- [Narrator] In 1666, Louis created
the French Academy of Sciences.
To allow his academy
to explore the heavens,
he built a world-class
observatory in Paris.
In the 17th century,
its telescopes revealed
the craters of the moon,
and the gap in the rings of Saturn.
And in 1858, a French
astronomer built a telescope here
that was more powerful
than any made before.
- There was a kind of revolution.
Leon Foucault who
walked in this observatory,
invented the modern reflecting telescope.
- [Narrator] This telescope
revealed a mystery
that led to a discovery about
the origin of life on earth.
It's a museum secret
that Louis XIV would find hard to believe.
(gentle music)
Our investigation begins
at a modern observatory in Toronto, Canada.
Astronomer Ray Jayawardhana is the kind
of cutting edge thinker
that Louis would have invited
to join his academy.
- Astronomy is quite difference
from the other sciences
in that most of what we know
comes from just decoding light.
- [Narrator] The decoding
started with Isaac Newton.
- Isaac Newton used a
prism to spread sunlight
into the colors of the rainbow.
- [Narrator] He called the
colors in sunlight a spectrum.
Soon after, prisms would reveal the spectra
of earthly sources of light.
- It was long known that
different elements burn
with different colors.
And when scientists looked through a prism,
they realized that each
element had a distinct spectrum.
For instance, when we look
at helium gas through a prism,
we can see its distinct spectrum.
- [Narrator] The same
is true for other elements.
Astronomers wondered, if
earthly elements can be identified
by their spectrum,
perhaps a prism can reveal
the elements burning in a star.
(dramatic music)
And that brings us back
to the Paris observatory
to the first astronomers
to use the powerful Foucault telescope.
- Charles Wolf and George
Rayet were two astronomers
working in this observatory around 1860.
They don't want to only
look at the star itself,
but they want to have the spectrum,
so they have to use this
device which is a prism.
And they put that in front
of the eyepiece like that
and then they could see
the spectrum of the star.
- [Narrator] Through a prism,
most stars look much like this.
But when Wolf and Rayet
scan the constellation Cygnus,
they found three stars
that displayed bright spots
of yellow and blue.
- And they could see very bright emissions
at certain places on the spectrums.
This is very special.
These are the only stars
which have this characteristic.
- [Narrator] They were
named Wolf-Rayet stars.
But Wolf and Rayet never discovered
which elements give
them their unique spectrum.
- So this remained a
mystery for many, many years.
- [Narrator] In the 20th century,
more powerful telescopes
allowed astronomers
to see Wolf-Rayet stars in a close-up view.
- And here's an image taken
with Hubble Space Telescope,
one of the Wolf-Rayet
stars that we know of.
As you can see, the actual
star is right at the center
but surrounding it is
all of this other material.
- [Narrator] With modern instruments,
the spectra of the swirling material
reveal a primordial brew.
- [Ray] In those outer layers are elements
like carbon and oxygen and nitrogen
that were cooked up inside those stars.
These layers are being expelled into space.
- [Narrator] These
stars are the early stages
of something much bigger.
- Astronomers believe that Wolf-Rayet stars
will go on to explode fully,
completely as supernovi.
Supernova are spectacular
explosions that really seed
our galaxy with the elements
that are essential for life.
The oxygen we breathe,
the iron in our blood,
and calcium in our bones
comes from these stars.
And if not for those
elements, we wouldn't be here.
So Wolf-Rayet stars are
vital for life as we know it.
- [Narrator] Life that includes you and me,
and the Sun King Louis XIV.
Louis believed that he
had the power to bestow life
but in reality, Wolf-Rayet
stars are the real Sun Kings.
(mysterious music)
In a museum where
royalty and revolution meet,
for every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Secrets of unbalanced minds, (guns popping)
and of courageous hearts,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Chateau of Versailles.
(dramatic music)
(eerie music)
(logo whooshing)