The plans for the English garden were drawn by Comte de Caraman, an officer who had already arranged such a garden in connection with his own residence, and this garden the Queen had visited. In 1775 the new royal architect, Mique, seconded by the painter, Hubert Robert, the sculptor, Deschamps, and the landscape gardener, Antoine Richard, joined in working out the plans of the Comte de Caraman, and created an English garden after the Queen's fancy. Unhappily, however, in order to create this new garden it became necessary to destroy a large part of the botanical garden which had before existed; but many of the fine exotic trees were employed in working out the new design, and these trees still remain the finest ornaments of the park.
The plan for the English garden was comprised as follows: In the more formal portions of the grounds near the château an artificial grotto and a "Belvedere," and, shadowed by overhanging trees, a little "Temple de l'Amour." Separated from these classical constructions by an artificial lake, bordered with rustic paths and intended to represent a bit of natural country, was erected a picturesque miniature hamlet of nine or ten rustic cottages in which the court ladies, under the lead of the Queen, might play at peasant life.
The grotto was a work of some elaboration, and it was said that no less than seven relief models of it were made before the Queen expressed herself as satisfied with the design. It is an arrangement of artificial rocks covered with moss, through which flows the outlet stream of the little lake. It was at one time proposed, after the then fashion in English gardening, to build on the top of the grotto a picturesquely contrived ruin, but this project was abandoned.
Near the grotto stands the Belvedere—a coquettish little octagonal pavilion set on a stone platform. Four windows and four doors are set alternately in its eight surfaces, and a balustrade surrounds the domed roof. The interior was ornamented in delicately frescoed stucco.
The Temple of Love consists of twelve Corinthian columns supporting a cupola. The pavement is of white blue-veined marble. In the centre is a carved pedestal on which stands a statue of Cupid drawing his bow, modelled by Bouchardon.
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The most picturesque feature of the garden was, however, the village or hamlet, and it is here the life of the Trianon centered in the time of the Queen.
The houses with which the hamlet was comprised were situated on the farther shore of a small artificial lake; and were divided into two groups separated by a running stream. The first group was made up of the "Queen's House" and its connected "Billiard Hall," and the "Mill": the second originally comprised five buildings;—a "Gardener's Lodge," a "Poultry House," a tower, called "Marlborough's Tower" with a "Dairy" attached to it, and, at some distance from these, a "Farm House" with its dependencies.
We have preferred in the description to adhere to the names by which these buildings were originally called rather than to adopt the more fanciful nomenclature given to them later by an imaginative German, Dr. Meyer, who visited France in 1796 and who invented the story that the Queen, playing at rural life, had entrusted the King with the rôle of the farmer, while she became the farmer's wife and the Count d'Artois the huntsman, the Comte de Provence the miller, and the Cardinal de Rohan the curé of this tiny community. In accordance with this unfounded tale the Queen's house has been nicknamed the "Maison du Seigneur," the poultry house the "Presbytère" and so forth,—and these nicknames have clung to them ever since.