The negotiations for the house were long and tedious. Our offer was an insult, a joke, a ridiculous affair to the man who had the selling of it! He laughed at us, and demanded twice the amount of our offer. We were firm, outwardly, and refused to meet him halfway, but secretly we spent hours and hours in the old house, sitting patiently on folding camp-stools, and planning the remaking of the house as happily as children playing make-believe.
I remember vividly the three of us, Miss Marbury, Sardou, and I, standing in the garden on a very rainy day. Sardou was bounding up and down, saying: "Buy it, buy it! If you don't buy it before twelve o'clock to-morrow I will buy it myself!" We were standing there soaking wet, perfectly oblivious to the downpour, wondering if we dared do such an audacious thing as to purchase property so far from our American anchorage.
A FINE OLD CONSOLE IN THE VILLA TRIANON
Well, we bought it, and at our own price, practically, and for eight years we have been restoring the house and gardens to their Seventeenth Century beauty. Sardou was our neighbor, and his wonderful château at Marly, overlooking the valley and terraces of St. Germain, was a never-failing surprise to us, so full was it of beauty and charm, so flavored with the personality of its owner. Sardou was of great help to us when we finally purchased our house. His fund of information never failed us, there seemed to be no question he could not answer. He was quite the most erudite man I have ever known. He had as much to say about the restoration of our house as we. He introduced us to Monsieur de Nolhac, the conservator of the Château de Versailles, who gave us the details of our villa as it had been a century and a half ago, and helped us remake the garden on the lines of the original one. He loaned us pictures and documents, and we felt we were living in a modern version of the Sleeping Beauty, with the sleeping villa for heroine.
Our house had always been called "Villa Trianon," and so we kept the name, but it should not be confused with the Grand Trianon or the Petit Trianon. Of course everyone knows about the Park at Versailles, but everyone forgets, so I shall review the history of the Park briefly, that you may appreciate our thrills when we really owned a bit of it.
Louis XIV selected Versailles as the site for the royal palace when it was a swampy, uninteresting little farm. Louis XIII had built a château there in 1627, but had done little to beautify the flat acres surrounding it. Louis the Magnificent lavished fortunes on the laying out of his new park. The Grand Trianon was built for Madame de Main tenon in 1685, and from this time on, for a full century, the Park of Versailles was the most famous royal residence in the world.
The Petit Trianon was built by Louis XV for Madame du Barry. Later, during the reign of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who was then Queen, tiring of court etiquette and scorning the stately rooms of Versailles, persuaded her husband to make over to her the Petit Trianon. Here she built a number of little rustic cottages, where she and the ladies of her court, dressed in calicoes, played at being milkmaids. They had a little cottage called the "Laiterie," where the white cows with their gilded horns were brought in to be milked. Here, too, little plays were presented in a tiny theater where only the members of the court were admitted. The Queen and her brother, Comte de Provence, were always the chief actors.
Our villa adjoins the Park proper. In our deeds to the two acres there is a clause which reserves a right-of-way for the King! The deed is worded like the old lease that dates back to 1750, and so one day we may have to give a King a right-of-way through our garden, if France becomes a monarchy again. Anyone who knows French people at all knows how dearly they cherish the dream of a monarchy.