OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS 67 



made as expensive as possible. The whole scene seems to reek of the tyranny of the 

 times and the lavishness of the Court of Louis XIV, from the details inside the building 

 to the outside of the old barracks of a palace itself. The gardens themselves seem to me to 

 be adapted to nothing whatever except the purpose for which they were created. They 

 lack repose, sympathy, and almost everything else except splendor and magnificence, 

 and when you wander for a few hours about these interminable straight avenues, and 

 see nothing but straight avenues with a fountain at the intersection and in all directions 

 the same old straight avenues, with the splendid monotony that architects claim for 

 them, you really wonder if something else less expensive were not possible. And then, 

 perhaps, you wander in the Petit Trianon and the Hameau, and think what a relief it 

 is to get in the English Garden, which is more or less like Central Park, and think how 

 poor little Marie Antoinette must have enjoyed the escape from the palace to the Grand 

 Trianon, and from the Grand Trianon to the Petit Trianon and her little dairy-farm 

 with its water-wheel and three-hundred-pound miller, where she sold butter and cheese 

 and eggs to the Court ladies, and where she could take two inches off her heels and a little 

 of the gorgeousness and ceremony off her state gowns, and go into her cottage and play 

 at playing, as she did, according to history. 



But it is only fair to the great Lenotre to say that there are at least two occasions 

 when Versailles seems to be worth its cost — when the fountains are playing and for half 

 an hour before sunset. The gardens are quite incomplete without the fountains, which 

 seem to vitalize the whole composition and show what was the conception that arose 

 in the imagination of its creator. And the sun seeming about to sink into the lake, as you 

 can see it from the upper terrace, adds an atmosphere and mystery to the setting of vast 

 green walls and statuary and water that makes the whole scene one of the most poetic 

 I have ever seen anywhere. The sun is, at least, as indispensable a part of the scheme 

 as the fountains; and perhaps Lenotre intended, in a spirit of superb flattery of his master, 

 Louis XIV, whose emblem was the sun, to take the actual sun itself as the dominant 

 motive of his design. 



I think I was fortunate in discovering a place near Paris that is not known to very 

 many people; perhaps many of you here have never heard of Meudon. It is a place near 

 St. Cloud and Sevres where there used to be a palace, and there are now the remains of 

 magnificent gardens with an orangery and some very high terraces. The building itself 

 has been made into an observatory, and I don't think it is known to many people; but, 

 if you want a grand scheme full of air, with a thorough development of the means at hand, 

 I would recommend anybody who has the opportunity to go to Meudon. It certainly gains 

 a great deal from the fact that it was built in a very uneven country with magnificent views 

 over Paris. At present, it is in a very dilapidated state, but it is well worth going to see. 



There is also a very fine park at Compiegne, laid out on a very big and magnificent 

 scale, with immense gayety and color in bedding plants, which, again, seem to be put 

 in to please popular taste. Popular taste over there likes color. They don't care what it 

 is, or where it is, so long as they get lots of it. That is the conclusion I came to in noting 

 the gorgeous array of bedding plants. 



In all their park and garden work, as well as in their architecture, the French feeling, 

 the French taste, the French point of view, and French technique are manifest. They always 

 know what they want to do and how to do it. There is a splendid sureness about all their 

 work. They have an eye for line and for balance and symmetry which is not to be sur- 



