Royal Palaces and Parks of France

by M. F. Mansfield

Stretching out behind the palace are the famous gardens, the parterres, the tapis vert, the fountains and the grand canal, with the park of the Trianons off to the right.

Good fortune came to Louis XIV when he found André Le Notre, for it was he and no other who traced the general lines of the garden of the Versailles which was to be. He laid a generous hand upon the park and forest which had surrounded the manor of Louis XIII, and extended the garden to the furthermost limits of his ingenuity. Modifications were rapid, and from 1664 the parterres and the greensward took on entirely new forms and effects. The Parterre des Reservoirs became the Parterre du Nord, and an alley of four rows of lindens enclosed the park on all sides. The Parterre à Fleurs, or the Jardin du Roy, between the chateau and the Orangerie, was laid out anew.

By the following year the park began to take on the homogeneity which it had hitherto lacked. The great Rondeau, as it was called, and which became later the Bassin du Dragon, was excavated, and the Jardin Bas, or the Nouveau Parterre, with an oval depression, was also planned.

At one end of the park was the celebrated Menagerie du Roy, where the rare and exotic animals collected by the monarch had "a palace more magnificent than the home of any other dumb animals in the world." This was the first period of formal garden construction at Versailles, and it was also the period when the first great impetus was given to sculptural decoration.

In 1679, following a journey in Italy, Le Notre took up again the work on the gardens at Versailles, devoting himself to the region south of the palace which hitherto had been ignored. This was Le Notre's most prolific period.

The creations at Versailles can be divided into two distinct epochs, that before 1670 and that coming after. After Le Notre's generous design, the king and queen were seemingly never satisfied with the endless plotting and planting which was carried on beneath the windows of the palace, and in many instances changed the colour schemes and even the outlines of Le Notre's original conceptions.

The Versailles of to-day is no longer the Versailles of Louis XIII, so far as the actual disposition of details goes. Then there was very little green grass and much sand and gravel, a scheme of decoration which entered largely into the seventeenth century garden. This refers principally to the general effect, for Le Notre made much use of the enclosing battery of lindens, chestnuts and elms of a majestic and patriarchal grandeur which have since been cut and replaced by smaller species of trees, or not replaced at all.

No sooner were the ornamental gardens planned at Versailles than the Potager du Roy, or fruit and vegetable garden, was created. This same garden exists to-day with almost its former outlines. Here a soil sufficiently humid, and yet sufficiently well drained, contributed not a little towards the success of this most celebrated of all kitchen gardens the world has known.

The work of installing a further system of artificial drainage was immediately begun, and the Eaux des Suisses was created, to take the place of a former stagnant pool near by. Undoubtedly it was a stupendous work, like all the projects launched with regard to Versailles, but, like the others, it was brought to a speedy and successful conclusion. The details of the history of this royal vegetable garden are fully set forth in a work published in 1690 by the son of the designer, the Abbé Michel de la Quintinye, in two bulky volumes. "It was meet that a royal vegetable garden should have been designed by a 'Gentleman Gardener,'" said the faithful biographer in his foreword, and as such the man and the work are to be considered here.

The work was accomplished by the combined efforts of a gracious talent and the expenditure of much money, put at La Quintinye's disposition by his royal master, who had but to put his hand deep into the coffers of the royal treasury to draw it forth filled with gold. Critics have said that La Quintinye's ability stopped with the preparation of the soil, and with the design of the garden, rather than with the actual cultivation, but at all events it was he who made the garden possible.