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 on
central fountains, or on alcoves as solid and stiff as the palace itself,
and trees cut into all kinds of fantastic shapes, which had previously
been regarded as the masterpieces of the gardeners' invention. Her
happiness was at its height when, at the end of a few months, all was
completed to her liking, and she could invite her husband to an