The Fouquet Team of Gardeners: French Gardens

In a strange, conflicting, uncomfortable way Louis XIV had a streak of his father in him as well as a large slice of the great Cardinal; throughout his life he was for ever retiring to quiet little retreats and turning them into elaborate palaces. The beginning of this singular process was at Versailles. The original building had a frontage of 165 feet on to a Tuscan type garden consisting of a terrace and a parterre, the whole amounting to a few acres. It stood in unprepossessing country of marsh and forest. The Fouquet team was turned on to it in 1661 and by 1668 the garden area was 250 acres, the garden facade of the chateau was 1,325 feet, and it had come to symbolize the wealth and power of the greatest monarch on earth. The amazing creation we call Versailles is not limited to the inflated palace alone; it is not a star but a constellation. A town was created for the palace, and no fewer than four `retreats', the Trianon, the little Trianon, Clagny and Marly, of which the last 1 Saint-Simon at Versailles. is said to have cost as much as Versailles itself, were related to the central magnificence by the avenues of a vast park. This astonishing manifestation was not conceived and planned as a unit; it grew and spread and evolved to feed the mania of its master. Change was constant. There seems to have been no desire for completion and repose, only for improvement and alteration and enlargement. Two things remained more or less fixed during this prolonged upheaval Louis insisted that the little chateau of his father's which lay at the heart of it all should, despite all changes, remain recognizably there, and the garden as originally designed by Andre Le Notre in those first few years of development from 1661-1667, although always changing in detail, remained true to its main plan. It was this garden that came first. In it Louis strove to erase from the minds of his courtiers the memory of the admired Fouquet by a series of magnificent fetes.