In all, fourteen hundred gushing fountain jets animated the gardens.  Le Notre, the author of these amazing water-works, died in the year 1700, when almost ninety years of age.  Saint-Simon declared him justly renowned in that he had given to France gardens of so unique and ravishing a design that they completely outran in beauty the famous gardens of Italy.  European landscape decorators counted it part of their education to journey to France for the purpose of studying the handiwork of the supreme craftsman.

An illustrated guide, printed at Amsterdam in 1682, contains the following quaint description of the Labyrinth, or Maze:  “Courteous Reader,” it begins, “it is sufficiently known how eminently France and especially the Royal Court doth excel above other places with all manner of delights.  The admirable faire Buildings and Gardens with all imaginable ornaments and delightful spectacles represent to the eye of the beholder such abundant and rich objects as verily to ravish the spectator.  Amongst all these works there is nothing more admirable and praiseworthy than the Royal Garden at Versailles, and, in it, the Labyrinth.  Other representations are commonly esteemed because they please the eye, but this because it not only delights the ear and eye, but also instructs and edifies.  This Labyrinth is situated in a wood so pleasant that Daedalus himself would have stood amazed to behold it.  The Turnings and Windings, edged on both sides with green cropt hedges, are not at all tedious, by reason that at every hand there are figures and water-works representing the mysterious and instructive fables of Aesop, with an explanation of what Fable each Fountain representeth carved on each in black marble.  Among all the Groves in the Park at Versailles the Labyrinth is the most to be recommended, as well for the novelty of the design as the number and diversity of the fountains that with ingenuity and naivete express the philosophies, of the sage Aesop.  The animals of colored bronze are so modeled that they seem truly to be in action.  And the streams of water that come from their mouths may be imagined as bearing the words of the fable they represent.  There are a great number of fountains, forty in all, each different in subject, and of a style of decoration that blends with the surrounding verdure.  At the entrance to the Maze is a bronze statue of Aesop himself—­the famous Mythologist of Phrygia.”

[Illustration:  The Fountain of Versailles]

To appreciate the engineering skill of the directors of fountain construction at Versailles it must be remembered that it was from an arid plateau that hundreds of streams were made to spring from the earth.  Thousands of laborers were employed to lay beneath the surface of the ground a net-work of canals and aqueducts to receive the tribute of water-courses directed hither from distant sources.  The waters were finally pumped into immense reservoirs adroitly