The further front, beyond another bridge, looked upon square gardens “embroidered with flowers,” where peacocks strutted, and through which flowed the imprisoned Mable in a broad canal full of fish. Beyond this again was another vast half-moon space of garden and parterre, with statues, fountains, grottoes, an orangery, and a chapel; and all was surrounded by the great deer-park and the woods in ordered beauty, long alleys striking into them, lost in the shade.
The decoration, in and out, of this wonderful place shared the Cardinal’s thoughts with the keenest interests of his political life; and the collection of works of art, for Richelieu and the Palais-Cardinal, meant in itself a large correspondence. Besides all this, he had undertaken to create a town outside the gates of his new palace, its main street to be of hôtels on one dignified plan, after the model of the Place Royale, built for themselves by his chief officers and the nobles whom he meant to attend his Court at Richelieu. That Court was never held, but the town rose out of the earth, “as if by enchantment,” with all kinds of privileges and immunities granted by the King, and its symmetrical buildings have long survived their raison d’être, the château. There is indeed more life now in that seventeenth-century street than when La Fontaine wrote of its admired but monotonous rows of houses:
“La plupart sont inhabités;
Je ne vis personne en la rue;
Il m’en déplaît; j’aime aux cités
Un peu de bruit et de cohue.”
The Cardinal’s devoted friend, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, acted as surveyor of the works at Richelieu, and in a letter to him in June 1632, between the execution of Marillac and Monsieur’s invasion of Languedoc, we have evidence of the way in which every exterior and interior detail was thought out by an unresting brain. The painting of the rooms was now in full swing, being mostly designed by Simon Vouet, the King’s favourite painter, and carried out by him and other artists.
After giving orders as to the decoration of a large room above the entrance, the Cardinal proceeds:
“The vaulted cabinet at the side should be painted in grisaille on the stone vaulting, partly by the painter from Lyons, and partly by other painters, who will enrich the grisaille with gold. M. de Bordeaux, being on the spot, will make them agree together as to what each shall do. In this cabinet there must be a wainscot six feet high with a recess to hold rarities, and the said wainscot shall be painted in grisaille of one tint and gilded to match the vaulting. M. Vouet can very well design the paintings.”
Architectural details regarding the level of different rooms, their respective heights, their flat or vaulted ceilings, fill a good part of the letter. Everywhere there are six-foot wainscotings with shelves or recesses for “rarities”; for His Eminence’s collection of objets d’art was already famous in Europe.