Richard Morris Hunt, Architect.
HOUSE OF H. W. POOR, TUXEDO PARK, N. Y.
T. Henry Randall, Architect.
“He [Hardouin Mansart] was ignorant of his business. De Coste, his brother-in-law, whom he made head architect, knew no more than he. They got their plans, designs and ideas from a designer of building named L’Assurance whom they kept, as much as they could, under lock and key. Mansart’s cunning [his name was probably assumed for what we would call in America an ‘ad.’] lay in coaxing the king by apparent trifles into long and costly enterprises, and by showing him incomplete plans, especially for the gardens, which instantly captured his mind, and caused him to make suggestions: then Mansart would exclaim that he never should have thought of what the king proposed, went into raptures, declared he was a scholar compared to him, and so made the king tumble whichever way he planned without suspecting it.”
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“He made immense sums out of his works and his contracts, and all else that concerned his buildings, of which he was absolute master, and with such authority that not a workman, contractor or person about the buildings would have dared speak or make the slightest fuss. As he had no taste, or the king either, he never executed anything fine, nor even convenient for the vast expenses he incurred.”
The episode about his bridge at Moulins that floated down the river to Nantes is excruciatingly funny as told by Saint-Simon, but I must not appropriate the space necessary for its relation.