When the mysterious planks were torn away, people beheld neither fortifications nor ramparts, ditches nor bastions, but mere folly and flowers. The King, who has a mania for building, took a fancy to make a little garden for himself and family in and separate from the great garden, which was effected by means of a common ditch and a wire-fence but a few feet high, and in the beds laid out there were already growing flowers as innocent as the garden fancy of the King himself.
Casimir Périer, however, was, it seems, very irate at this innocent idea, which was executed without his previous knowledge or consent.[1] In any case, the public could justly complain of the disfiguring the whole garden, which was a masterwork of Le Nôtre, and which was so imposing from its grand ensemble. It is altogether like cutting scenes from one of Racine's tragedies. English gardens and Romantic dramas may often be curtailed or lessened without injury, often even to advantage, but the poetic gardens of Racine, with their sublime and tiresome unities, pathetic marble statues, their compassed alleys with the cut severe, can—no more than Le Nôtre's green tragedy, which begins so grandly with the
- ↑ Vorwissen only in the German version; consentement only in the French.—Translator.
