The 10th of June was given over to rehearsals and prayers. Solemn vespers. An interminable sermon from the Archbishop of Aix on the duties and privileges of kingship. The cathedral was half deserted; many people were preparing for the next day, Sunday, which promised to be an ordeal. Some of them slept hardly a wink on the night of the 10th, especially the canons, who must be dressed in their capes and lined up in the chancel by six a.m. The flood of "guests" arrives soon after: all must be ready by seven in the beleaguered cathedral, whose exterior has acquired a false wooden facade by whimsical order of the Duc de Duras, a classic appendix planted like a screen over the ancient stones, and, inside, a colonnade of gilded timbers which narrows the nave and transforms one of the most beaufiful Gothic interiors into an opera hall. In this colossal boxlike setting the ceremony is about to unfold for seven consecutive hours. It begins with a meeting that represents the first act of the coronation and constitutes its uniqueness: the encounter between the king and the Sacred Ampulla. Along with the Comte de Talleyrand, three nobles whose ancestors all managed to capture a rock -- La Rochefoucauld, Rochechouart, and La Roche-Aymon -- leave at dawn in quest of the miraculous vessel from the Abbey of Saint-Remi. A special ceremony is enacted there to the chant of Benedictine monks: the four gentlemen "in short mantles of gold cloth" swear upon a Bible that no harm shall befall the Sacred Ampulla and pledge their lives to safeguard it. They become its "hostages" until they return it to the Abbey. An echo of times past when hostile dynastic factions tried to steal the vessel en route in order to anoint their own leader. There go the four "hostages" riding through the streets of the city, whose citizens at least can enjoy that part of the spectacle, like a parade preceding a feudal tournament with banners flying, tiers of shields and halberds and damask stuffs, while "knights of the Sacred Ampulla" surround the "hostages," and the prior of Saint Remi, like an ancient, wrinkled gold tortoise, sits astride a white charger with silver trappings. In his hands is "a golden dove covered with white enamel, crimson beak and feet, and wings outspread, containing in its gullet a minute red-tinted glass vial about an inch and a half high stoppered with a wad of scarlet damask." It holds a speck of ointment, more or less rosy and solid, which an angel (or a dove, depending on the text) brought from heaven in A.D. 496 to Saint Remi, who had no magic oil with which to anoint Clovis. When the Sacred Ampulla reaches the cathedral, out to meet it waddles a rotound human doll wearing long silver robes over a scarlet spencer. The Bishop-Duke de Laon and the Bishop-Count de Beauvais escort the doll -- in procession, of course -- along the covered walkway: it is the king. A great burst of song and shouting meant to convey that though the king needs the church he also needs to feel needed by the people. An echo of the Palm Sunday rite when the celebrant knocks at the church door. This time it is Precentor of Rheims striking the ground with his staff and the grand chamberlain who responds: "What do you wish?" "We wish the king." "The king sleeps." The same response is repeated three times before the doors of the cathedral are thrown open and the prelates approach the canopied bed of state, bow "very low," then hoist the overstuffed doll to its feet and conduct it to the central nave. Priests of lesser ranks must also brace and all but carry the principal officiant, who is barely able to walk: venerable Monseigneur de La Roche-Aymon, Cardinal-Archbishop-Duke of Rheims, trembles and totters with every step. With each word he expires. It was generally assumed that he would never make it and that the office and the honor of exercising it would devolve upon his coadjutor, Alexandre de Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice's uncle. But as La Roche-Aymon managed to win the struggle -- with the aid of stimulants and coffee -- here his is shuffling up to meet the prior of Saint-Remi, who addresses him solemnly: "I entrust you, Monseigneur, with this precious treasure sent down from heaven to our great Saint-Remi for the consecration of Clovis and his successors upon the throne; but I entreated you, in the ancient custom, to pledge yourself to return it into my hands after the anointment of our King Louis XVI." Priests may confer absolute power on this Bourbon ruler because Clovis had bowed to the precedence of Remi. Final formality: the vows. The red-and-white doll is permitted to speak: the voice sounds strong, resonant, seemingly resolved to keep its oaths: "I swear to devote myself sincerely and with all my power to annihilating heretics condemned by the Church in all lands under my rule..." Then follows the vow "to maintain and uphold the Orders of the Holy Ghost and of St. Louis, and to wear forever the cross of the latter on a flame-colored silken ribbon." Standing among the clergy of Rheims, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand watches every motion of this historic sanction of aristocratic privilege which extends the hand of God, right down to the fingertips, into every corner of society and makes it a mortal sin to entertain the notion of change, be it only the color of a ribbon.
Festivities have tapered off. Each day brings a little praying; parades and crowds are thinning out. A final flourish on June 14: Louis XVI sets out with great pomp to "touch the scrofulous" at the Abbey of Saint-Remi. Astride Vainqueur [Conqueror], his favorite mount, he who is so clumsy on foot seems surprisingly young, agile, and relaxed. He was born to hunt and ride -- Only in the saddle does the King of France look like a youth of twenty. Behind him, grooms lead his two other best horses, Fier [Proud] and Monarque. Next come musketeers, pages, the Hundred Swiss Guards, the light-calvary guard; the pageant of history's most spectacular monarchy arrives at a contemporary Court of Miracles. More than a thousand victims of goiter and scrofula constitute a vast reservoir of charity for the Benedictines of Rheims, who care for them, lodge and maintain them for years in a dozen poor houses, awaiting the day when the king will come to inspect their good works -- an orderly regiment of well-trained, well-scrubbed souls -- and touch the forehead of each, saying: "The king touches thee, may God cure thee." Those afflicted with scrofula in the Rheims region are lucky; instead of castaways, they become charity's cast of characters. Scrofula is not a disease; it is the clinical result of poverty. You don't find scrofula among the rich. Victims develop "hard painless tumors which tend eventually to suppurate ... The disorder is also known as struma a gruenda 'to pile up in a lump,' because the swellings usually comprise several lumps collected or packed one atop the other... Scrofula comes from an inflammation of the lymphatic gland caused by bad food such as salted meats, unripened fruit, raw milk, tainted water... These inflammations commonly develop under the ears and lower jaw, in the armpits, the groin, and around the joints. Although these lumps are hard as scirrhi, they suppurate rather easily and never become cancerous." They were not considered incurable; remedies included "purges, baths, beef or chicken broth in combination with thirst-inducing plants like watercress... and soap pills, reputed to be highly effective," in addition to the magic virtues of French sovereigns who, since Philipi's reign, made a practice of dispensing cures by infusion of the Holy Ghost. "It is an ancient human disorder to believe that one's ruler has exclusive power to cure certain victims of disease by touching them," the Chevalier de Jaucourt had dared to state in the Enclylopedie, which did not dampen the joy in Rheims that Wednesday when the king played thaumaturge, the monks cast themselves as Good Samaritans, the poor were visited and fed, and the bill was shared by the state, the Benedictine community, and the bourgeoisie of Rheims. Years of observation will follow, and any cured after June 14 will be proclaimed a miraculous case. Total cost of Louis XVI's coronation as entered in the bookkeeping records of Papillon de La Ferte a year later: 835,828 livres, 12 sols, 10 deniers.