Hameau

I came down with a cold on Tuesday and by Wednesday was feeling droopy, so I spent most of the day in the apartment working on my Humanities course. We did go out and shoot some footage at our local bakery in the morning, and in the afternoon we went over to the Louvre and visited Napoleon III's apartments. This Napoleon wasn't the military genius that his more famous uncle was, but he certainly had taste.













Thursday I wasn't feeling any better and resting didn't help much, but we had a beautiful sunny day so we got on the train and went out to Versailles. This time we skipped the palace and the hordes of tourists and lost ourselves in the gardens.

Louis XIV's Versailles was a visible manifestation of his manly prowess, as he imposed his will over tree and brook and fountain, as well as over France. But a century later, when Marie Antoinette came here to marry Louis's great-great- grandson and become his queen, she wanted something a little more sensitive, a little less grand. Her father-in-law had given her a country house near Versailles called the Petit Trianon, but she wanted the gardens remodeled in the newly fashionable English style.

Marie's gardens look more natural to our eyes than Louis's sternly manicured beds and hedges. And yet everything here is carefully calculated to please. In the 18th century landscape painters took nature and ordered it on their canvasses to make it picturesque, conforming to the rules of form and balance that painting had long embraced. Now gardeners planted their gardens to recreate the pictured landscapes.  A renewed love of things Greek required the tasteful placement of Classically-inspired statues and fountains. Even an artificial ruin was required, as if some idyllic lost civilization had once stood here and magical gardens had grown up around it.

I was surprised when we first got here not to see many fall colors. But they are coming on now, and we had a full-blooded Indian summer day. A day walking in the sun wore me down to a nubbin, but when I went to bed I slept like a baby and feel much better. The exercise, the gardens, and some miracle elixir that I picked up in the pharmacie did the trick.