Vast, Grandiose, and Elaborate Gardens: French Gardens

The magnificence of the effect could not be denied. Even those few who, like Saint-Simon, kept their heads amid the adulation admitted that `not Asia, nor antiquity, could show anything more vast, grandiose, and elaborate than these gardens ...' But elaboration, extent, and grandiosity are not very comfortable attributes ... `to make the smallest use of them is disagreeable, and they are in equally bad taste. To reach any shade one is forced to cross a vast, scorching expanse and, after all, there is nothing to do in any direction but go up and down a little hill, after which the gardens end. The broken stones on the paths burn one's feet, yet without them one would sink into sand or the blackest mud. . . . Who could help being repelled and disgusted at the violences done to Nature? Numberless springs have been forced to flow into the gardens from every side making them lush, overgrown and boggy; they are perceptibly damp and unhealthy and their smell is even more so. The fountains and other effects are indeed incomparably fine, although they require a great deal of attention, but the net result is that one admires and flies.' Louis lived until 1715 and in the fifty-three years during which Versailles was the chief theatre of his life many changes took place, yet it is difficult to distinguish any progress or consistent development of taste. There was enlargement, but nothing else. No doubt to those who lived amongst them the bosquets of 1710 were as different from those of 1670 as the hats of 1960 are from those of 1940, but from such a distance of time and with incomplete records it is not easy to distinguish the direction of the winds of fashion. There is perhaps an odour of Madame de Maintenon in the later Versailles . . . rather more solemn grandeur, rather less frivolous variety, the ghostly presence of a prim, perfidious and hypocritical governess. A major alteration took place in 1678 which affected the later development of the garden. The most famous individual feature of the early years of Versailles, the Grotto of Thetis, was removed and not rebuilt. A grotto was the revived Renaissance form of the classical nymphaeum, originally a natural rocky cave, fern-grown, over which water dripped, or a deep alcove below the gnarled roots of a tree, moss-grown and dark, sacred to a nymph.