my little apartment shows good taste," he asked one day
of the Comtesse de Seran at Versailles.

"Not at all," she replied, "I would much rather that the walls were hung
in blue."

That particular apartment was in rose, but, since blue was the favourite
colour of the monarch, the reply was but flattering. The next time that
his friend, the Comtesse, appeared on the scene the apartment had all
been done over in blue.

The monarch soon began to turn his attention to the gardens. Bowers,
labyrinths and vases and statues were inexplicably mixed as in a maze.
He began to have the "_gout pastoral_," his biographer has said, a vogue
that Madame du Barry and Marie Antoinette came in time to push to its
limits.

The king was too ready to admire all that was suggested, all that was
offered, and the ultimate effect was--well, it was the opposite of what
he hoped it to be, though doubtless he did not realize it.

In the garden of the Grand Trianon is a great basin with a cascade
flowing down over a sort of a high altar arrangement in red and white
marble called the Buffet de l'Architecture, and evolved by Mansart. This
architect certainly succeeded much better with his purely architectural
conceptions than he did with interpolated decorative elements intended
to relieve a formal landscape.

The Petit Trianon, the pride of Louis XV, was designed by the architect
Gabriel, and its reigning goddess was Marie Antoinette. Souvenirs of the
unhappy queen are many, but the caretakers are evidently bored with
their duties and hustle you through the apartments with scant ceremony
that they may doze again undisturbed in their corners.

[Illustration: _Petit Trianon_]

The garden of the Petit Trianon is a veritable _Jardin Anglais_, that
is, the decorative portion, where sweeps and curves, as meaningless as
those one sees on banknotes and no more decorative, are found in
place of the majestic lines of the formal garden when laid out after the
French manner.

[Illustration: _La Laiterie de la Reine PETIT TRIANON_]

The _Hameau_, where is the dairy where the queen played housewife and
shepherdess, is just to the rear of this bijou palace and looks stagy
and unreal enough to be the wings and back-drop of a pastoral play.

Near Versailles was the Chateau de Clagny, with a garden laid out by Le
Notre, quite the rival of many better known. Of it Madame de Sevigne
wrote: "It is the Palais d'Armide; you know the manner of Le Notre; here