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The Luminous Gardens of Versailles
| Article
# : |
19995 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,802 Words |
| Author
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Curtis Cate
Historian and biographer Curtis Cate was greatly aided in the
preparation of this article by Liane Villemont and Jacques
Deschamps of l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel. |
Ours is an age of congestion. Today we rub up against it everywhere--not simply in the souks of Fez or the beggar-infested streets of Bombay, where it has existed from time immemorial. Modern department stores are congested; city subways and buses are congested; avenues, boulevards, and absurdly named "freeways" are congested; summer beaches are congested, the sand virtually disappearing beneath a sardine crush of bodies.
Today, on many Paris streets, cars are so tightly parked along the sidewalks that the frustrated pedestrian must often walk past five or six vehicles before finding enough space to squeeze in or our between them. Congestion has even become a cult with certain arbiters of contemporary taste. Thus, on the stately fore court of the Louvre, where there is ample space to move around, tourists must now line up in a long serpentine queue for half an hour or more to gain access to the steel-ribbed circus tent so ingeniously invented by I.M. Pei, simply because the prospect of allowing visitors to use one of the huge museum's four or five other entrances would constitute a sacrilegious case of lese-pyramid.
Yes, what a relief it is to get away from the suffocating claustrophobia that so many modern metropolises secrete (and the French capital as much as any other), to a verdant haven of peace where one can stroll as indolently as one wishes without being pushed from behind or elbowed in the ribs by persons in a hurry. Such a haven is the gardens and the parkland of Versailles, which anyone can enter free of charge through a dozen different entrances from seven in the morning until sundown (except on days reserved for special outdoor concerts or water and firework displays).
Three hundred and thirty years ago, when the "gentle land of France" numbered not much more than twenty million souls (roughly one-third of today's population), neither Louis XIV nor his gifted landscape architect Andre Le Notre could have foreseen what an oasis of tranquility--not for the "happy few" but the sight-seeing masses--they were about to create, a few miles southwest of a somewhat horse-cart and coach-congested capital, out of an area that up until then had consisted of marshy fields and forests traversed by a single stream. I am not a botanist, nor can I claim to have visited all the world's well-known gardens--there are simply too many of them--but I can honestly say that, in some fifty years of travel, I have never encountered one that more perfectly distills an illusion of majestic grandeur, a sense of that "ordre et beaute, luxe, calme et volupte" that Baudelaire so magically evoked in his famous poem, L'Invitation au
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