The story of the Villa Trianon is a fairy-tale come true. It came true
because we believed in it--many fairy stories are ready and waiting to
come true if only people will believe in them long enough.
For many years Elizabeth Marbury and I had spent our summers in that
charming French town, Versailles, before we had any hope of realizing a
home of our own there. We loved the place, with its glamour of romance
and history, and we prowled around the old gardens and explored the old
houses, and dreamed dreams and saw visions.
One old house that particularly interested us was the villa that had
once been the home of the Duc de Nemours, son of Louis Philippe. It was
situated directly on the famous Park of Versailles which is, as everyone
knows, one of the most beautiful parks in all the world. The villa had
not been lived in since the occupancy of de Nemours. Before the villa
came to de Nemours it had been a part of the royal property that was
portioned out to Mesdames de France, the disagreeable daughters of Louis
XV. You will remember how disagreeable they were to Marie Antoinette,
and what a burden they made her life. I wish our house had belonged to
more romantic people; Madame du Barry or Madame de Pompadour would have
suited me better!
How many, many times we peeped through the high iron railing at this
enchanted domain, sleeping like the castle in the fairy tale. The garden
was overgrown with weeds and shrubbery, the house was shabby and sadly
in need of paint. We sighed and thought how happy would be our fortune
if we might some day penetrate the mysteries of the tangled garden and
the abandoned villa. Little did we dream that this would one day be our
home.
We first went to Versailles as casual summer visitors and our stay was
brief. We loved it so much that the next summer we went again, this time
for the season, and found ourselves members of a happy pension family.
Then we decided to rent an apartment of our own, for the next year, and
soon we were considering the leases of houses, and finally we arrived at
the supreme audacity of negotiating for the purchase of one. We had a
great friend in Versailles, Victorien Sardou, the novelist and
playwright so honored by the people of France. His wonderful house at
Marly le Roi was a constant joy to us, and made us always more eager for
a permanent home of our own in the neighborhood. Sardou was as eager for
the finding of our house as we were, and it was he who finally made it
possible for us to buy our historic villa. He did everything for us,
introduced us to his friends, wonderful and brilliant people, gave us
liberally of his charm and knowledge, and finally gave us the chance to
buy this old house and its two acres of gardens.
The negotiations for the house were long and tedious. Our offer was an
insult, a joke, a ridiculous affair to the man who had the selling of
it! He laughed at us, and demanded twice the amount of our offer. We
were firm, outwardly, and refused to meet him halfway, but secretly we
spent hours and hours in the old house, sitting patiently on folding
camp-stools, and planning the remaking of the house as happily as
children playing make-believe.
I remember vividly the three of us, Miss Marbury, Sardou, and I,
standing in the garden on a very rainy day. Sardou was bounding up and
down, saying: "Buy it, buy it! If you don't buy it before twelve o'clock
to-morrow I will buy it myself!" We were standing there soaking wet,
perfectly oblivious to the downpour, wondering if we dared do such an
audacious thing as to purchase property so far from our American
anchorage.
[Illustration: A FINE OLD CONSOLE IN THE VILLA TRIANON]
Well, we bought it, and at our own price, practically, and for eight
years we have been restoring the house and gardens to their Seventeenth
Century beauty. Sardou was our neighbor, and his wonderful château at
Marly, overlooking the valley and terraces of St. Germain, was a
never-failing surprise to us, so full was it of beauty and charm, so
flavored with the personality of its owner. Sardou was of great help
to us when we finally purchased our house. His fund of information never
failed us, there seemed to be no question he could not answer. He was
quite the most erudite man I have ever known. He had as much to say
about the restoration of our house as we. He introduced us to Monsieur
de Nolhac, the conservator of the Château de Versailles, who gave us the
details of our villa as it had been a century and a half ago, and helped
us remake the garden on the lines of the original one. He loaned us
pictures and documents, and we felt we were living in a modern version
of the Sleeping Beauty, with the sleeping villa for heroine.
Our house had always been called "Villa Trianon," and so we kept the
name, but it should not be confused with the Grand Trianon or the Petit
Trianon. Of course everyone knows about the Park at Versailles, but
everyone forgets, so I shall review the history of the Park briefly,
that you may appreciate our thrills when we really owned a bit of it.
Louis XIV selected Versailles as the site for the royal palace when it
was a swampy, uninteresting little farm. Louis XIII had built a château
there in 1627, but had done little to beautify the flat acres
surrounding it. Louis the Magnificent lavished fortunes on the laying
out of his new park. The Grand Trianon was built for Madame de Main
tenon in 1685, and from this time on, for a full century, the Park of
Versailles was the most famous royal residence in the world.
The Petit Trianon was built by Louis XV for Madame du Barry. Later,
during the reign of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who was then Queen,
tiring of court etiquette and scorning the stately rooms of Versailles,
persuaded her husband to make over to her the Petit Trianon. Here she
built a number of little rustic cottages, where she and the ladies of
her court, dressed in calicoes, played at being milkmaids. They had a
little cottage called the "Laiterie," where the white cows with their
gilded horns were brought in to be milked. Here, too, little plays were
presented in a tiny theater where only the members of the court were
admitted. The Queen and her brother, Comte de Provence, were always the
chief actors.
Our villa adjoins the Park proper. In our deeds to the two acres there
is a clause which reserves a right-of-way for the King! The deed is
worded like the old lease that dates back to 1750, and so one day we may
have to give a King a right-of-way through our garden, if France becomes
a monarchy again. Anyone who knows French people at all knows how dearly
they cherish the dream of a monarchy.
[Illustration: THE BROAD TERRACE CONNECTS HOUSE AND GARDEN]
One of the small houses we found on our small estate had once been a
part of the _hameau_ of Marie Antoinette. We have had this little house
rebuilt and connected with the villa, and now use it as a guest
house. It is very charming, with its walls covered with lattices and
ivy.
Villa Trianon, like most French houses, is built directly on the street,
leaving all the space possible for the garden. The façade of the villa
is very simple, it reminds you of the square houses of the American
Colonial period, except that there is no "front porch," as is inevitable
with us in America. The entrance gate and the stone wall that surround
the place give an interest that our detached and hastily built American
houses lack. The wall is really a continuation of the façade of the
villa, and is surmounted by a black iron railing. Vines and flowers that
have flourished and died and flourished again for over a century climb
over the wall and through the graceful railing, and give our home an air
of permanence that is very satisfying. After all, that is the secret of
Europe's fascination for us Americans--the ever-present suggestion of
permanence. We feel that houses and gardens were planned and built for
centuries, not for the passing pleasure of one brief lifetime. We people
them with ghosts that please us, and make histories for them that are
always romantic and full of happiness. The survival of an old house and
its garden through centuries of use and misuse is always an impressive
and dramatic discovery to us: it gives us courage to add our little bit
to the ultimate beauty and history, it gives us excuse to dream of the
fortunate people who will follow us in other centuries, and who will, in
turn, bless us for our part in the remaking of one old house and
garden.
There was much to do! We hardly knew where to begin, the house was in
such wretched condition. The roof was falling in, and the debris of
years was piled high inside, but the walls and the floors were still
very beautiful and as sound as ever, structurally. We had the roof
restored, the debris removed, and the underbrush weeded out of the
garden, and then we were ready to begin the real business of
restoration.
The house is very simply planned. There is a broad hall that runs
straight through it, with dining-room and servants' hall on the right,
and four connecting salons on the left. These salons are charming rooms,
with beautiful panelings and over-doors, and great arches framed in
delicate carvings. First comes the writing-room, then the library, then
the large and small salons. The rooms opening on the back of the house
have long French windows that open directly upon the terrace, where we
have most of our meals. The note of the interior of the house is blue,
and there are masses of blue flowers in the garden. The interior
woodwork is cream, pointed with blue, and there are blues innumerable in
the rugs and curtains and _objets d'art_. There must be a hundred
different shades of blue on this living-floor, I think. We have tried to
restore the rooms to a Louis XV scheme of decoration. The tables and
cabinets are of the fine polished woods of the period. Some of the
chairs are roomy affairs of carved and painted wooden frames and
brocade coverings, but others are modern easychairs covered in new
linens of old designs, linens that were designed for just such interiors
when Oberkampf first began his designing at Jouy. The mirrors and
lighting-fixtures are, of course, designed to harmonize with the
carvings of the woodwork. Monsieur de Nolhac and Sardou were most
helpful to us when such architectural problems had to be solved.
We have not used the extravagant lace curtains that seem to go with
brocades and carvings, because we are modern enough not to believe in
lace curtains. And we find that the thin white muslin ones give our
brocades and tapestries a chance to assert their decorative importance.
Somehow, lace curtains give a room such a dressed-up-for-company air
that they quite spoil the effect of beautiful fabrics. We have a few
fine old Savonnerie carpets that are very much at home in this house,
and so many interesting Eighteenth Century prints we hardly know how to
use them.
Our bedrooms are very simple, with their white panelings and chintz
hangings. We have furnished them with graceful and feminine things,
delicately carved mirror frames and inlaid tables, painted beds, and
chests of drawers of rosewood or satinwood. We feel that the ghosts of
the fair ladies who live in the Park would adore the bedrooms and
rejoice in the strange magic of electric lights. If the ghosts should be
confronted with the electric lights their surprise would not be greater
than was the consternation of our builders when we demanded five
bathrooms. They were astounded, and assured us it was not necessary, it
was not possible. Indeed, it seemed that it was hardly legal to give one
small French house five American bathrooms. We fought the matter out,
and got them, however.
We determined to make the house seem a part of the garden, and so we
built a broad terrace across the rear of the villa. You step directly
from the long windows of the salon and dining-room upon the terrace, and
before you is spread out our little garden, and back of that, through an
opening in the trees, a view of the Château, our never-failing source of
inspiration.
The terrace is built of tiles on a cement foundation. Vines are trained
over square column-like frames of wire, erected at regular intervals.
Between the edge of the terrace and the smooth green lawn there is a
mass of blue flowers. We have a number of willow chairs and old stone
tables here, and you can appreciate the joy of having breakfast and tea
on the terrace with the birds singing in the boughs of the trees.
I have written at length in the other chapters of my ideas of
house-furnishing, and in this one I want to give you my ideas of garden
guilding. True, we had the old garden plan to work from, and trees two
hundred years old, and old vine-covered walls. Who couldn't accomplish a
perfect garden with such essentials, people said! Well, it wasn't so
easy as it seems. You can select furnishings for a room with fair
success, because you can see and feel textures, and colors, and the
lines of the furniture and curtains. But gardens are different--you
cannot make grass and flowers grow just so on short notice! You plant
and dig and plant again, before things grow as you have visualized them.
There was a double ring of trees in one corner of our domain, enclosing
the _salle de verdure_, or outdoor drawing-room. In the center of this
enchanted circle there was a statue by Clodion, a joyous nymph, holding
a baby faun in her arms. There were several old stone benches under the
trees that must have known the secrets of the famous ladies of the
Eighteenth Century courts. The _salle de verdure_ looked just as it did
when the little daughters of Louis XV came here to have their afternoon
cakes and tea, so we did not try to change this bit of our garden.
My idea of making over the place was to leave the part of the garden
against the stone walls in the rear in its tangled, woodsy state, and to
build against it a trellis that would be in line with the terrace.
Between the trellis and the terrace there was to be a smooth expanse of
greensward, bordered with flowers. It seemed very simple, but I hereby
confess that I built and tore down the trellis three times before it
pleased me! I had to make it worthy of the statue by Pradier that was
given us by Sardou, and finally it was done to please me. Painted a
soft green, with ivy growing over it, and a fountain flanked by white
marbles outlined against it, this trellis represents (to me, at least)
my best work.
The _tapis vert_ occupies the greater part of the garden, and it is
bordered by gravel walks bordered in turn with white flowerbeds. Between
the walks and the walls there are the groups of trees, the statues with
green spaces about them, the masses of evergreen trees, and finally the
great trees that follow the lines of the wall. Indeed, the _tapis vert_
is like the arena of an ample theater, with the ascending flowers and
shrubs and trees representing the ascending tiers of seats. One feels
that all the trees and flowers look down upon the central stretch of
greensward, and perhaps there is a fairy ring here where plays take
place by night. Nothing is impossible in this garden. Certainly the
fairies play in the enchanted ring of the trees of the _salle de
verdure_. We are convinced of that.
So formal is the _tapis vert_, with its blossoming borders of larkspur
and daisies and its tall standard roses, you are surprised to find that
that part of the garden outside this prim rectangle has mysteries. There
are winding paths that terminate in marble seats. There is the
_pavilion_, a little house built for outdoor musicales, with electric
connections that make breakfast and tea possible here. There is the
guest house, and the motor house--quite as interesting as any other part
of the garden. And everywhere there are blue and white and rose-colored
flowers, planted in great masses against the black-green evergreens.
We leave America early in June, tired out with the breathless business
of living, and find ourselves in our old-world house and garden. We fall
asleep to the accompaniment of the tiny piping of the little people in
bur garden. We awake to the matins of the birds. We breakfast on the
stone terrace, with boughs of trees and clouds for our roof, and as we
look out over the masses of blue flowers and the smooth green _tapis
vert_, over the arched trelliage with its fountains and its marbles, the
great trees back of our domain frame the supremely beautiful towers of
the Château le Magnificent, and we are far happier than anyone deserves
to be in this wicked world!