Word: trianon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Grand Trianon, a mile and a half from the vast palace of Versailles, was built as a royal hideaway. Ordered by the Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1687, it was a delight in pink and green Languedoc marble and, for all its 70 rooms, was considered intimate by a King's standards at that time. Even royal princes had to ask permission to visit. "Delicious gardens!" exclaimed that great collector of court gossip, the Duc de Saint-Simon. And in Louis XIV's day, the gardens did not stop at the doors; his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, liked...
...only to take it back a few years later and install Madame de Pompadour in the apartment next to his. An amateur botanist, he made its garden famous throughout Europe for its hothouse pineapples, coffee and figs. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette preferred the nearby, smaller Petit Trianon, but this did not spare either building when revolutionaries carted off their contents...
...Snuggling. It took the upstart Napoleon to bring it back to its former glory. In 1805, he had the palace redecorated in Empire style for himself and Josephine. The day of his divorce from her, Napoleon returned to the Trianon, spent the night there alone. His remorse was short lived: he was soon back with his new Queen, Marie-Louise, each with a separate wing. Last King of France to reside there was the bourgeois Louis Philippe, who raised a chuckle when he widened the bed in the Queen's chamber by a foot (overleaf) so that...
Rococo was a royal style, yet one born of relief at the passing away of the splendor and pomp of Versailles and Louis XIV. Aristocrats yearned to lay aside their powdered wigs and play peasant. Marie-Antoinette's fake hamlet in the Trianon park was a doll's house for kings in fustian and queens in dirndls. Watteau and Boucher drew members of the nobility in shepherds' clothing. But aristocracy saw poverty as happy simplicity, not as a wretched problem. Came the French Revolution of 1789, and the wistful sound in the sea shell was no longer...
...take. The Emperor Tiberius, for one. used to beat the Roman heat on the cliffs of Capri, where some of the house guests at his verdant Villa Jovis were said to have disappeared into the sea below. Perhaps the most famed second house of all is the exquisite Petit Trianon, begun by Louis XV for his mistress. Madame de Pompadour, and elaborated by Louis XVI's wife, Marie Antoinette. From the punkah-hung summer bungalows of Darjeeling to the marble "cottages" of 19th century Newport (where a four-bedroom, two-bath apartment has been fitted into what was once...