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“My companions were utterly bored, and called down curses on France. Their minds, strained by the rude passions of politics, by the national arrogance, and the stiffness of scriptural morality, needed repose. They wanted a smiling and flowery country, meadows soft and still, fine shadows, largely and harmoniously grouped on the slopes of the hills..The sunburnt peasants, dull of countenance, sitting near a pool of mud, were disagreeable to them. For repose, they dreamed of pretty cottages set in fresh turf, fringed with rosy honeysuckle. Nothing could be more reasonable. A man obliged to hold himself upright and unbending finds a sitting posture the most beautiful..
“You go to Versailles, and you cry out against the taste of the seventeenth century. Those formal and monumental waters, the firs turned in the lathe, the rectangular staircases heaped one above another, the trees drawn up like grenadiers on parade, recall to you the geometry class and the platoon school. Nothing can be better. But cease for an instant to judge according to your habits and wants of the day. You live alone, or at home, on a third floor in Paris, and spend four hours weekly in the saloons of some thirty different people. Louis XIV. lived eight hours a day, every day the whole year long, in public, and this public included all the lords of France. He held his drawing-room in the open air; the drawing-room is the park at Versailles. Why ask of it the charms of a valley? These squared hedges of hornbeam are necessary that the embroidered coats may not be caught. This levelled and shaven turf is necessary that high-heeled shoes may not be wetted. The duchesses will form a circle about these circular sheets of water. Nothing can be better chosen than these immense and symmetrical staircases for showing off the gold and silver laced robes of three hundred ladies. These large alleys, which seem empty to you, were majestic when fifty lords in brocade and lace displayed here their cordons bleus and their graceful bows. No garden is better constructed for showing one’s self in grand costume and in great company, for making a bow, for chatting and concocting intrigues of gallantry and business. You wish perhaps to rest, to be alone, to dream; you must go elsewhere; you have come to the wrong gate: but it would be the height of absurdity to blame a drawing-room for being a drawing-room.
“You understand then that our modern taste will be as transitory as the ancient; that is to say, that it is precisely as reasonable and as foolish. We have the right to admire wild, uncultivated spots, as once men had the right of getting tired in them. Nothing uglier to the seventeenth century than a true mountain. It recalled a thousand ideas of misfortune.
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“The men who had come out from the civil wars and semi-barbarism thought of famines, of long journeys on horseback through rain and snow, of the wretched black bread mingled with straw, of the foul hostelries, infested with vermin. They were tired of barbarism as we of civilization. To-day the streets are so clean, the police so abundant, the houses drawn out in such regular lines, manners are so peaceful, events so small and so clearly foreseen, that we love grandeur and the unforeseen. The landscape changes as literature does: then literature furnished long sugary romances and elegant dissertations; now-a-days it offers spasmodic poetry and a physiological drama. Landscape is an unwritten literature; the former like the latter is a sort of flattery addressed to our passions, or a nourishment proffered to our needs.