Whatever may have been the motive, however, he decided to erect upon this desolate, waterless and uninhabited site a vast palace to be surrounded by a park.
The cost of accomplishing this project was fearful, not in money alone (although this was more than one thousand million francs), but in human life. In 1681 twenty-two thousand soldiers and six thousand horses were employed on the work, and so unhealthy was the site that the workmen died by thousands. Writing in 1767, Madame de Sévigné says: "The King is in haste that Versailles should be finished; but it would seem that God is unwilling. It is almost impossible to continue the work owing to the fearful mortality among the workmen. The corpses are fetched away by cartfuls during the night,—night being chosen that they who still live may not be terrified into revolt by the sight." But no difficulty, nor the pestilence, nor the ruin of the treasury was allowed to interfere with the King's pleasure. The palace rose; the stately gardens, peopled with statues, spread about it; and a royal city sprang up where before had been only a desolate forest; and, after 1682, Versailles became the permanent headquarters of the Court.
In the immense park, some three-quarters of a mile northwest from the terraces of the palace, Louis XIV. built a little palace to gratify Madame de Maintenon, which, from the fact that it stood on the site of the parish of Trianon, which was demolished to make a site for it, and because its façade was ornamented with porcelain plaques of blue and white faience ware, was called the "Trianon de Porcelaine"; but in 1687 Louis, who had as Saint-Simon said, "a rage for building," demolished this frail structure and replaced it with another, designed by Mansart, which we now know as the "Grand Trianon." This building was the King's delight for a few years, but after 1700 he wearied of the plaything, and turned all his attention to his new château at Marly.
| PLATE XXVIII | "GROTTO" AND "BELVEDERE," PETIT TRIANON |
During the Regency the Trianon was almost abandoned; but when, under Louis XV., the Court returned to Versailles, the building became a favorite refuge for the King; and he later gave it to his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, for her own. She, being at her wits' end to devise some new scheme to distract the daily increasing melancholy of the King, hit upon the expedient of establishing in the grounds which were attached to the Grand Trianon, a real practical dairy and farm; and for that purpose imported from Holland a herd of fine cows, and collected a number of rare varieties of hens and pigeons, which Louis amused himself for some time in breeding. But in 1754 the royal caprice again changed, and Louis abolished the farm, and made the land into a botanical garden. Here he established conservatories for raising fruits out of their natural seasons, and collected a great number of exotic trees and shrubs of every variety and species. Taking great delight in this garden, which was some distance from the Grand Trianon, he conceived the notion of building in the midst of it a still smaller château, modelled upon the Grand Trianon as that itself had been a miniature of Versailles. This château, the Little Trianon, was erected in 1766 by the royal architect, Gabriel, and was given by the King to the mistress who had succeeded Madame du Pompadour in his favor, Madame Du Barry. It was while staying at the Petit Trianon that Louis was attacked by the small-pox, of which he died.
