THEOPHILE GAUTIER 273 



Gardens were then (under Louis XIV.) built as much as planted, 

 and the trees had to approximate to architectural forms. The 

 hedges were folded back at right angles like the leaves of a screen 

 of verdure. The yews were sharpened to a pyramid, or rounded to 

 a ball ; deft shears outlined arches in clumps of foliage, and what 

 we now know a the ' picturesque,' was sedulously avoided. 

 This taste, improperly called the French taste, reached us from 

 Italy, where the villas and vines of the popes and Roman princes 

 set the example of this mixture of terraces, fabrics, statues, vases, 

 green trees and spouting waters. 



We ourselves, in the day of Romanticism, had more or less 

 paraphrased the ingenious antithesis, which Victor Hugo, 1 in the 

 preface of Cromwell, made between a virgin forest of America 

 and the gardens of Versailles, and we have jested, like others, 

 about 'the little yews in onion-rows.' 2 



We were wrong; this garden was quite the garden of this 

 chateau, and there was a marvellous harmony in this collec- 

 tion of regular forms, in which the life of the period could 

 develop at ease its majestic and rather sluggish evolutions. The 

 result is an impression of grandeur, symmetry and beauty, which 

 no one can resist. Versailles ever remains unrivalled in the 

 world : it is the supreme formula of a complete art, and the 

 expression, at its highest power, of a civilisation arrived at its 

 complete expansion. 



When, under Louis XVI., the garden was replanted, taste 

 had changed. The Citizen Rousseau of Geneva had discovered 

 Nature ; English ideas invaded the Continent, fashion was with 

 4 the landscape gardeners,' that is to say, with hilly sites, clumps 



1 See p. 262. 



2 O dieux ! O bergers ! O rocailles ! 

 Vieux Satyres, Termes grognons, 



Vieux petits ifs en rang d'oignons, 

 O bassins, quinconces, charmilles, 



Boulingrins pleins de majeste, 

 Oil, les dimanches, tout 1'ete 



Baillent tant d'honnetes families. 



Alfred de Musset. 



