The satellite palaces known as the Grand and Petit Trianons are, like the Palace of Versailles itself, of such an abounding historical interest that it were futile to attempt more than a mere intimation of their comparative rank and aspect.
The rather sprawling, one-story, horseshoe-shaped villa built by Louis XIV for Madame de Maintenon, and known as the Grand Trianon, was an architectural conception of Mansart's.
It is worth remarking that the Grand Trianon, to-day, is in a more nearly perfect state than it has been for long past, for the restorations lately made have removed certain interpolations manifestly out of place.
It is due to M. de Nolhac, the Conservateur du Musée de Versailles, that this happy amelioration has been brought about and that Mansart's admirable work is again as it was in the days of Madame de Maintenon and those of the later Napoleon I.
In spite of all this the Trianon of to-day is not what it was in the eighteenth century. "Madame de Maintenon," said de Musset, "made of Versailles an oratory, but La Pompadour turned it into a boudoir." He also called the Trianon: "a tiny chateau of porcelain." It was, too, the boudoir of Madame de Montespan.
Louis XV, too, built, or furnished, discreet boudoirs of this order on every hand. More than one great gallery in which his elders had done big things he divided and subdivided into minute apartments and papered the walls, or painted them, all colours of the rainbow, or hung them with silks or velvets.
"Don't you think my little apartment shows good taste," he asked one day of the Comtesse de Séran at Versailles.
"Not at all," she replied, "I would much rather that the walls were hung in blue."
That particular apartment was in rose, but, since blue was the favourite colour of the monarch, the reply was but flattering. The next time that his friend, the Comtesse, appeared on the scene the apartment had all been done over in blue.
The monarch soon began to turn his attention to the gardens. Bowers, labyrinths and vases and statues were inexplicably mixed as in a maze. He began to have the "gout pastoral," his biographer has said, a vogue that Madame du Barry and Marie Antoinette came in time to push to its limits.