This "circular bed" was also a poetic invention. A document, discovered by M. de Ségur in the archives of Beauvais, shows us that Cérutti was commissioned to "furnish" the Temple of Friendship. As his archaeological knowledge was insufficient, he addressed himself to the author of the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis. We possess the reply of Abbé Barthélémy. The latter seems quite embarrassed: he states that the ancients prayed standing, on their knees or seated on the ground, and that there were no seats in the temples; he thinks that one might take as a model either the curule chair of the Senators, or the throne on which the gods were represented as seated, or even a bench, a sofa.... "Besides," he ended, "I believe, like M. Cérutti, that as friendship is a goddess of all times, we may furnish her as we will." Quatrains, sensibilities and puerilities, all these do not prevent the temple of Betz from being one, of the most perfect works of the Greco-Roman Renaissance of the last years of the eighteenth century. [27] In the gardens of the Little Trianon, Mique produced nothing more exquisite than this work of Le Roy. And how adorable they are, these little monuments, supreme witnesses of classic tradition, suddenly revivified by the discoveries of the antiquaries, by the Voyages of the Count de Caylus, by the first excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii! With what surety of taste, with what subtlety of imagination, have the lines and the forms of ancient art been accommodated to the adornment of the northern landscape! It is the last flower of our architecture.
It is necessary to hearken to and meditate upon the instruction, the eternal instruction given us by this temple so gracefully placed before the verdant meadows of a valley of the Ile-de-France. The caprice of a sentimental princess dedicated it to friendship. Let us dedicate it in our grateful thought to the strong and charming god whose decrees were respected and whose power was venerated for three centuries by poets and artists without an ingratitude, without a blasphemy. This sanctuary was doubtless the homage of a disappearing piety: already those who built it celebrated in the neighboring groves the rites of a new cult; there they deified disorder, ruin and melancholy; there they abandoned themselves to childish and dangerous superstitions; already romanticism and exoticism mastered hearts and imaginations. The more reason for admiring and cherishing the last altars where men sacrificed to reason, order and beauty. Besides, behold: a century has elapsed; the false ruins are ruined; the false tombs are no more than rubbish; the Chinese kiosks have disappeared; yet, upon the hillside, the four Ionic columns still show the immortal grace of their spreading bases and their fine volutes.
Another stage, and the last, to the "Baths of the Princess." This rustic retreat had been constructed in the midst of the woods. The woods have been cut and now there remains no more than a single clump of trees in the midst of a meadow, overshadowing the basin of a spring. Here were formerly placed remnants of sculpture in the antique fashion,
Marbles broken and dispersed without arrangement.
The Graces sometimes came to rest themselves there.
Seated near these benches, we easily forget ourselves;
Voluptuousness follows the shadow and melancholy....
Melancholy was not the only visitor to this charming retreat. Let us rather listen to the Prince de Ligne describing the "baths" of an English garden. His prose will console us for the verses of Cérutti: "Women love to be deceived, perhaps that they may sometimes avenge themselves for it. Occupy yourselves with them in your gardens. Manage, stroll with, amuse this charming sex; let the walks be well beaten, that they may not dampen their pretty feet, and let irregular, narrow, shaded paths, odoriferous of roses, jasmines, orange blossoms, violets and honeysuckles, coax these ladies to the bath or to repose, where they find their fancy work, their knitting, their filet and especially their black writing desk where sand or something else is always lacking, but which contains the secrets unknown to lovers and husbands, and which, placed upon their knees, is useful to them in writing lies with a crow's plume."