The Story of Versailles

by Francis Loring Payne

THE GRAND TRIANON

This palace decorated with pilasters of pink marble was not the first building chosen by the Grand Monarch to occupy the site at the end of the north arm of the canal of Versailles. Ambitious to extend his domain, the King had purchased and razed a shabby little village named Trianon, and on its somewhat dreary site erected for Madame de Montespan a villa so unpretentious as to arouse the comment of courtiers accustomed to the ruler's profligacy at Versailles. The vases of faïence that shone among the figures of gilded lead, the walk ornamented with Dutch tiles, the cornices of blue and white stucco, in the Chinese fashion, gave the little house the name, the Porcelain Trianon. Poets called it the Palace of Flora because of the wondrous gardens where rare flowers perfumed the pleasaunce in summer. Built in 1670, probably on designs of Francois Le Vau, the Porcelain Trianon was demolished toward the end of the year 1686.

There remains to-day nothing to remind us of the Villa of Flowers but the gardens and a fountain for horses near the canal, where a terrace planted with beautiful trees overlooks it. Here Louis XIV often came in a gondola on summer evenings, when the Marble Trianon had replaced the Trianon of Porcelain. The latter's demolition was inspired, no doubt, by the urging of the new favorite, Madame de Maintenon, who found distasteful this reminder of another's supremacy in the King's affections.

Moreover, this site continued to please the King for he recognized its convenience to the palace, and its accessibility by barge or carriage. He determined to build in the midst of these enchanting woods and blooms a dwelling less formal than the one at Versailles, smaller even than the one at Marly, but more habitable than the porcelain _maisonette_--a retreat, in short, where, without wearisome ceremony, he could retire with certain favored ones of his Court and while the summer hours away.

The accounts of the King's treasurer show that the building of the edifice and the gardens proceeded rapidly during the year 1687. By the end of November the royal master found his new residence "well advanced and very beautiful." Soon after the New Year he heard the opera "Roland" performed here, and was pleased to dine for the first time within the new walls. He gave orders on recurring visits for the embellishment of the summer palace. The Trianon of marble and porphyry, "the most graceful production of Mansard," was finally completed in the autumn of 1688. But the work of decoration went on under the hands of a horde of artists almost until the end of the monarch's reign.

Says an English author of a century ago: "In the midst of all the austerities imposed upon him by the ambition of Madame de Maintenon, the King went to Trianon to inhale the breath of the flowers which he had planted there, of the rarest and most odoriferous kind. On the infrequent occasions when the Court was permitted to accompany him thither to share in his evening collation, it was a beautiful spectacle to see so many charming women wandering in the midst of the flowers on the terrace rising from the banks of the canal. The air was so rich with the mingled perfume of violets, orange flowers, jessamines, tuberoses, hyacinths and narcissuses that the King and his visitors were sometimes obliged to fly from the overpowering sweets. The flowers in the parterres were arranged in a thousand different figures, which were constantly changed, so that one might have supposed it to be the work of some fairy, who, passing over the gardens, threw upon them each time a new robe aglow with color."

In the salons and copses where Louis the Great basked in the somewhat chary smiles of his latest (and last) favorite, his grandson, the fifteenth of his name, was to install the fascinating Madame de Pompadour. The very apartments once dedicated to the use of Madame de Maintenon, and later to Queen Marie Leczinska, became the living-rooms of the reigning mistress of the heart of Louis XV.

The Revolution spared the Grand Trianon. But under pretext of restoring it and rendering it, according to their tastes, more habitable, Napoleon First and Louis Philippe spared it less. The last king of France commanded in 1836 the architectural changes necessary to convert the Trianon into the royal residence, in place of the chateau of Versailles. He stayed here for the last time in the winter of 1848, before departing for Dreux. But, despite changes and mutilations, the facade and the interior of the rose-colored palace retain the stamp of the Great King who sponsored the Gallery of Mirrors, the Antechamber of the Bull's Eye, and the Chapel at Versailles.