What: The Petit Trianon
at Versailles was intended as a gift from Louis XV to Madame de Pompadour, but
gained its greatest notoriety as the retreat of Louis XVI’s teenage queen,
Marie Antoinette.
Who: Ange-Jacque
Gabriel created the compact and elegant palace in the Greek tradition and
included elements such as a flat roof, Corinthian columns and sun-bleached
limestone.
Where: The Hameau, a
charming (and infamous) faux-rustic village was built on the grounds by Marie
Antoinette. Inside the house a
complex system of mirrors and pulleys shielded the windows to hide revelry from
the court outside.
When: The Petit Trianon
took six years to create, from 1762 – 1768. Madame de Pompadour did not live to see it completed; she
died just two years into construction.
Why: “Nowhere else did
the playfulness of spirit which prevailed among the French high nobility just
before the troubulous days of the Revolution find so unalloyed an
expression. For all time the
Little Trianon will remain the most refined, the most fragile and yet the most
indestructible shrine of this essentially artificial blossoming. The zenith and the nadir of the Rococo,
maturing to a climax in the last hour before its death, is, even in our own
day, best symbolized by the little clock placed in the centre of the
chimney-piece in Marie Antoinette’s boudoir… At the Little Trianon Marie
Antoinette felt really at home.” – Stefan Zweig writing on Marie Antoinette
