At this moment she was especially happy with a new pastime.  Amidst the stately halls of Versailles she had often longed for a villa on a smaller scale, which she might call her own; and the wish was now gratified.  On one side of the park of Versailles, and about a mile from the palace, the late king had built an exquisite little pavilion for his mistress, which was known as the Little Trianon.  There had been a building of one kind or another on the same spot for above a century.  Louis xiv. had erected there a cottage of porcelain for his imperious favorite, Madame de Montespan; and it was the more sumptuous palace with which, after her death, he replaced it, that gave rise to the strange quarrel between the haughty monarch and his equally haughty minister, Louvois, of which St. Simon has left us so curious an account.[2] This had been allowed to fall into a state of decay; and a few years before his death, Louis xv. had pulled down what remained of it, and had built a third on its foundations, which had been the most favorite abode of Madame du Barri during his life, but which was now rendered vacant by her dismissal.  The house was decorated with an exquisite delicacy of taste, in which Louis xv. had far surpassed his predecessor; but the chief charm of the place was generally accounted to be the garden, which had been laid out by Le Notre, an artist, whose original genius as a landscape gardener was regarded by many of his contemporaries as greatly superior to his more technical skill as an architect.[3]

A few hundred yards off was another palace, the Great Trianon; but it was the Little Trianon which caught the queen’s fancy; and, on her expression of a wish to have it for her own, the king at once made it over to her; and, pleased with her new toy, Marie Antoinette, still a girl in her impulsive eagerness for a fresh pleasure (she was not yet nineteen), began to busy herself with remodeling the pleasure-grounds with which it was surrounded.  Before the time of Le Notre, the finest gardens in the country had been laid out on what was called the Italian plan.  He was too good a patriot to copy the foreigners:  he drove out the Italians, and introduced a new arrangement, known as the French style, which was, in fact, but an imitation of the stiff, formal Dutch mode.  But of late the English gardeners had established that supremacy in the art which they have ever since maintained; and the present aim of every fashionable horticulturist in France was to copy the effects produced on the banks of the Thames by Wise and Browne.

Marie Antoinette fell in with the prevailing taste.  She imported English drawings and hired English, gardeners.  She visited in person the Count de Caraman, and one or two other nobles, who had already done something by their example to inoculate the Parisians with the new fashion.  And presently lawns and shrubberies, widening invariably simple flower-beds, supplanted the stately uniformity of terraces, alleys converging