1

ETIENNE JOLLET

INTERIOR IN THE EXTERIOR : MARIE-ANTOINETTE’S GROTTO AT TRIANON

On October 5th 1789, when the Parisian women arrived in Versailles to bring the royal family to the capital, Marie-Antoinette was in her grotto, with some friends. So says the legend, however real is the story. The grotto, this very interior space, some sort of superlative form of what the architects called “les dedans”, makes in this dramatic moment a spectacular contrast with the exteriorization of passions in the public space. The contrast is even stronger, since the type of grotto to which the one in Trianon belongs plays directly on an opposition between artifice and a nature which is here stressed by the simplicity of the interior; and also because of the opposition between history in the making and the seclusion of the place, the estate of Trianon, the function of which to create a distance with the decorum in Versailles. The grotto must then be associated with what the queen sought in Trianon : privacy. The second aspect concerns the interplay with the immediate exterior : the garden, the buildings, through dynamic relationships created by the fact that the grotto is part of a itinerary at the scale of the park considered as a secluded exterior. I will assert, as the third and last point, that the question of interiority has to be thought, as far as the second half of the 18th century is concerned, in terms of depth: a vertical interiority, which affects the grotto, the garden and, supposedly, the self.

The grotto : interiority as privacy - or intimacy ?

“Ici, je suis chez moi”: every contemporary witness stresses the fact that Marie-Antoinette seemed at home in her Trianon estate1. Did she feel so in the grotto that Richard Mique, the queen’s favorite architect and designer of the gardens of the Petit-Trianon, created it in 1781? In fact, very little is known about the way the grotto was actually used by the queen. No letter from her; no description of the project by the architect. The archives prove that she nevertheless was very interested and attentive : she asked for fourteen models of the hill, in 1777 et 1778, and seven projects of the grotto before she gave her acceptation2. We may be

1 Quoted by P. Higonnet, La Gloire et l’Echafaud. Vie et destin de l’architecte de Marie-Antoinette, , 2011, p. 97. 2 Archives nationales, O1 1877 (4).

2 tempted to use the testimony of madame Campan, Marie-Antoinette’s chambermaid – though an often suspicious one – who writes in her Mémoires that the queen said : “The sweetnesses of private life don’t exist for us except if we have the wit to be sure to get them”3. It gives some sort of a general indication concerning the use of the grotto : as a superlative form of privacy, that is, a negative conception : privacy as opposed to “publicity” (“publicité” is used in this sense in French at this time); the interior is a way to fight again a constantly aggressive exteriority, the one of the court. Various important features here are worth referring to. First, the entrance of the grotto is well hidden, at the extremity of a hollow. Second, there are two entrances – or an entrance at the bottom of the fake hill and a exit at the top of it; the two are closed, the former with a lattice work, the latter with a grid. Third, the interior is not easy to see. Hézecques déclares that « this grotto was so dark that the eyes, dazzled at first, needed some time to discover the objects »4. Fourth, the noise of the waterfall covers the sound of the voices. Fifth, through a crack – intentional or not - one can see who is coming5. The grotto is then a “retraite”, a retreat from the overwhelming hectic life of the court – one among others : as Chantilly for the prince of Conti since 1774, le Raincy for the duke of Orléans, or Montreuil for the countess of Provence6. A Hézecques put it: “Isnt’ it natural that it seems sweet for a sovereign, always in representation, in the midst of the chains of the utmost rigourous etiquette, to be able to retire in some lonely habitation to get rid there of the weight of grandeur ?”7. The contrary to “grandeur”: a tiny place for intimacy8. Would “Intimité” be here what Whately, the celebrated author of Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), the theoretical basis of Mique’s work, describes in such words: a place where “a small number of friends who came to hide from the rest of the society”9. Intimacy is here the new form of the

3 Speaking of a selected company, centered on the princess of Lamballe and the countess of Polignac : « Le jouirai des douceurs de la vie privée, qui n’existent pas pour nous, si nous n’avons le bon esprit de nous les assurer » (Mémoires sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette … par madame Campan, Paris, 1823, t. I, p. 142). 4 « Cette grotte était si obscure que les yeux, d'abord éblouis, avaient besoin d'un certain temps pour découvrir les objets » (Page à la cour de Louis XVI. Souvenirs du comte d’Hézecques, Paris, 1987, p. 100). 5 Ibid. : « Mais, soit par l'effet du hasard, soit par une disposition volontaire de l'architecte, une crevasse, qui s'ouvrait à la tête du lit, laissait apercevoir toute la prairie et permettait de découvrir au loin ceux qui auraient voulu s'approcher de ce réduit mystérieux, tandis qu'un escalier conduisait au sommet de la roche. » 6 For the Trianon, see Mémoires de la baronne d’Oberkirch, Paris, 1853, p. 205 (ch. X, 23 mai 1782) : « Je n’ai de ma vie passé des moments plus enchanteurs que les trois heures employées à visiter cette retraite ». 7 “N’est-il (pas) naturel qu’il semble doux à un souverain toujours en representation, au milieu des chaînes de l’étiquette la plus rigoureuse, de pouvoir se retirer dans quelque habitation solitaire pour s’y délasser du poids de la grandeur ?” (F. d’Hézecques, op. cit., p. 97). 8 E. Littré, 9 T. Whately, Observations on modern gardening, London, 1770, p. 117 : the buildings concieved as places for « retirement ». The French text is far more precise : « ils servirent aussi de retraites agréables à ceux qui aimaient

3 epicurean garden, valuating the link of real friendship10. What we see today from the grotto can corroborate this interpretation. The dimensions of the grotto imply the selectivity of people, the one which is the fundamental principle at Trianon : only few persons can be here with the queen11. It is a rather small place, very irregular in shape, which is never deeper than five meters (from the lower entrance to the bench) and wider than four meters (from the wall on the side of the hollow to the beginning of the stairs), with a height of approximately 2,5 m high (cf. ill. )12. Such a small place reminds us of the various places created by Mique for the queen: the architect designed a “cabinet”, i.e. a room for retreat in 1775, a bathroom in 1780, a “réchauffoir” at the Hameau de la reine in 1785. He replaced, in the “appartements de la reine”, the walls of marbles by some woodwork with pilasters, far smoother. In all these cases, a process of miniaturization is at work – Hézecques speaks of a “mysterious tiny room” (“mystérieux réduit”)13. Intimacy is a space : it is also acts. What about the actual use of the grotto ? The only testimony rather precise witness, the comte d’Hézecques mentions a bed “made of moss” which “was an invitation to rest”14. In the context of the critics addressed to Marie-Antoinette, resting couldn’t be resting : for the pamphlets, the depravated queen has here a place even more appropriated than Versailles, than the rest of Trianon, for her excesses. In fact, there is absolutely no proof about such a behavior. The « bed » surely permits to a body to lay down: but it is, along the wall on the opposite side of the entrance, nothing more than an horizontal and curved surface, two meters long. But in fact, there are two “benches” : very close, but separated by the rock, there is a narrow one, for one person. Mique seems here to refer to what C.C.L. Hirschfeld, the great theorician of these « jardins anglo-chinois » in his Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779-85), known in French as Théorie de l’art des jardins and translated from 1781 onwards, asks for : a « small bench of lawn, or a heap of earth that nature has

la solitude, et à un petit nombre d’amis qui venoient s’y dérober au tourbillon de la société » (L’Art de former les jardins modernes, Paris, 1771, p. 99) 10 Cf. the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, Paris, 1762 : « intimité » is a « liaison intime » and « intime » means « qui a, pour qui l’on a une affection très forte » (« who has, for whom one has a very strong affection »). 11 The count of Mercy-Argenteau, ambassador of the austro-hungarian empire in Paris, mentions in july 1779 that “the queen is more and more busy with her “country cottage and that she goes there almost every day, either during the morning or the afternoon : Her Majesty is followed only by two or three persons” (“la Reine est de plus en plus occupée de sa maison de plaisance et qu’elle s’y rend presque chaque jour, soit le matin, soit l’après-midi: Sa Majesté n’y est suivie que par deux ou trois personnes”). Quoted by P. de Nolhac, Le Trianon de Marie-Antoinette, Paris, 1927, p. 180. 12 We may note a tendency to small inner spaces: Mme Victoire’s grotto at the Ermitage is 8 feet high on 9 feet wide – approximately 2,60 on 2,90m. 13 Cf. note n° 5. 14 « It was entirely covered with moss and refreshed by the stream which strolls across it. A bed, also in moss, was an invitation to rest » (« Elle était toute tapissée de mousse et rafraîchie par le cours d'eau qui la traversait. Un lit, également en mousse, invitait au repos », Ibid.).

4 covered with moss »15 It was the case for the grotto at Trianon : “sparteries”, i.e. plaitings, a brand new technique for the period, was put everywhere on the walls16. And these, adds Hirschfeld, were « the usual type of seats known in the times of the first simplicity of gardens”. “Simplicité” is here the big word : it corresponds to the way back to nature. Furniture is reduced, according to Hirschfeld, “to penetrate the interior and to pierce some apertures which constitute seats and even convenient dwellings”. The authors of memoirs, as the archives, don’t mention any piece of furniture. What is here at stake is the questioning of social status, of “convenance”, of decorum : “One couldn’t get further from nature than by adopting the prejudice according which the grottoes must correspond to the status of the owner and increase with him in richness and magnificence”17. But even this supporter of grottoes of garden as “imitations of natural caves” (p. 102-103) says that they must be “as clean as necessary, and that they must not be harmful for the health because of their muggyness”. The problem is here the relationship to nature. From what we see today after the restoration of 200518, from what we learn from the archives, from what we notice in the contemporary testimonies, the relationship to nature, at the very origin of the valuation of the grotto in the western tradition from the Renaissance onwards, was very present at Trianon. Hézecques, the best source, gives only a few words on the topic : “it was entirely covered with moss and refreshed by the water flowing across it” – even if we have seen than the moss was fake19. Mineral and vegetal components are narrowly associated; and it is the case outside, with a important vegetation around the place : grass, bushes and trees everywhere. This grotto then can be called a “folie”, providing one doesn’t interpret it as “madness” but link it to its etymology : it comes from folia, the leaf, hence a vegetal frame. The absence of furniture inside stresses this desire to imitate an original state of things. In fact, it can be considered as also belonging as even older trend, the one illustrated by the abbé Pluche when he declares : “Let’s give the least possible modification to

15 C.C.L. Hirschfeld, Théorie de l’art des jardins, Leipzig, 1779, p. 135. 16 J.-F. Gavoty de Berthe obtained in 1775 the monopoly of a false lawn made with a plant, the spanish spart or Stipa tenacissima. D. Vivant-Denon quotes it in his erotic novel Point de lendemain (1777) : « Le parquet, couvert d’un tapis pluché, imitait le gazon » (Vivant Denon, Point de lendemain, dans Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle, vol. II, préface par Étiemble, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », n° 178, 1965, p. 379- 402, p. 397). 17 C.C.L. Hirschfeld, op. cit., p. 106. 18 By P.-A. Lablaude, ACMH. I thank Gérard Robaut and Annick Heitzmann, from the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, for having kindly given me access to the file concerning the restoration of the grotto. 19 The technique was already used : in the château of Aunois, at Champeaux; in Einville, both grotto and a rustic lodge have unrefined furnishings. In Commercy, a cabin is covered with moss.

5 what we have under our hand: our dwellings are converted into terrestrial paradise”20. It is here more a religious reference, but the result is the same: back to the state of nature. But to which nature ?

The grotto and the exterior : towards a dynamic approach of gaze

The best formulation of this phenomenon is given by the American politician Gouverneur Morris : in France, “Royalty has here endeavoured and at great Expense to conceal itself from its own Eye but the Attempt is vain”21. In vain, since privacy is shown. First, the grotto was, up to the end of the 17th century, a very architectonic building, placed at the end of the alleys or under the terraces22; but at the beginning of the 18th century, according to the same J.-A. Dezallier d’Argenville, « Perspectives and grottoes are now almost out of fashion, above all the grottoes which are very at risk to be wasted”23. With the “jardin anglo-chinois” the grotto as a “fabrique” is back, but with a new paradox : it is still an important component of the whole effect produced by the park; but, as it is supposed to represent the wild part of the world, it must stay remote from the eyes24. The solution is the effect of surprise, important in the aesthetics of the picturesque garden, from the “haha” onwards. But it has also to be remembered that the grotto, before being hidden in the vegetation, was seen by the queen from the top : when she looked at the various models of it made by the sculptor Deschamps, who used stone, plaster, cardboard for the rocks; water was made thanks to pieces of mirror, trees and lawn with wool, moss and bits of horn25. The grotto is placed between two hills, one bears the belvedere, the other is the “montagne de l’escargot” (the mountain of the snail). This location is even more easy to spot when it was illuminated for a feast, as for the one in honor

20 Abbé Pluche, Le Spectacle de la nature, Paris, 1752, t. II, p. 82 : “Donnons le moindre arrangement à ce que nous avons sous notre main, nos demeures se convertissent en un paradis terrestre ».

21 From A Diary of the by Gouverneur Morris, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, vol. I, Boston, 1939, p. 78 (May 14, 1789). 22 A.-J. Dezallier d’Argenville, La Théorie et la Practique du jardinage, Paris, 1742, p. 100 : « On les plaçoit ordinairement au bout des allées, et dessous des terrasses (a) (a) On a laissé ruiner les Grottes de Versailles, de Meudon, de Saint-Germain, de Saint Cloud, de Rueil, de Conflans, et autres ». 23 « Les perspectives et les grottes ne sont maintenant presque plus à la mode, surtout les (a) grottes qui sont fort sujettes à se gâter » (Ibid.). 24 cf. the count of Shaftesbury : « Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s sic, and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens » (The Moralists (1709), quoted by J. Dixon Hunt & P. Willis, The Genius of the Place. The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, Cambridge & London, 1988, p. 124).

25 It was executed by the sculptor Deschamps (Archives nationales, O1 1880).

6 of Joseph II, the emperor, in 1781. An account by « Geoffroy chandelier à Paris » mentions 1200 « terrines » (i.e. large pots in earthwork) and other pots used for such illuminations, which Louis-Claude Châtelet will paint 26. A whole setting seems to have been created thanks to 138 « transparents », oiled papers decorated, placed on frames and behind which a light is set, and artificial bushes made of « sparterie » (plaitings)27. In the normal conditions, the grotto exists as a place among others, considering that the pertinent scale is the garden as a whole – a garden, which is himself a play between closing and opening. We may here recall that the mere word “garden”, as “garten” and “jardin”, include the notion of limit, of fence28. The closure in the grotto is a version of what is happening in the garden itself - an interior. In the case of Trianon, the relationship is particularly strong, because of the effect of echo : the « grande rivière », already designed by the count of Caraman et used by Mique in his final project of 1777, is repeated inside the grotto : the stream gushes out from the « rocher », the vast fake rock. Inside, the river is, because of the steep, some sort of waterfall. The link between inside and outside is then of two types : by imitation ; by contiguity. The old logic linking the microcosm and the macrocosm is still valid here. In fact, the whole grotto has to be understood in terms of relationship to the other small world of which it is an echo ; this very deep interior has to be analyzed in its relationship to the exterior. This is why a dynamic approach of the grotto, as inscribed in a walk, in a promenade, must be considered. The fact we mentioned that they are places of rest is because of the walk; and they belong to a larger type, the “reposoirs”, mentioned by Hirschfeld : (“Des reposoirs, Ponts et Portes”): “one needs resting places to get rid of the wariness caused by the walks (…) Commodity wants them to be placed in cool and shadowed places”29. They must also give a nice point of view, of which one take greater pleasure during staying than during the wall. The most characteristic feature is the development of a new type of grotto during the second half of the Eighteenth-century : the “banc couvert”, “covered bench”. The most obvious case of the complexity of the game between hiding and showing the interior is constituted by the various representations of the grotto painted by Claude-Louis Châtelet. From 1779 onwards, Marie-Antoinette had him draw and paint with watercolours various views of the Petit-Trianon to offer to high-ranking visitors, after their stay in

26 « Mémoire des fournitures faites pour les quatre illuminations de la grotte du jardin de la Rene au petiti Trianon, par Geoffroy chandelier à Paris » (O1 1877). 27 « Mémoire des fournitures faites pour les quatre illuminations de la grotte et des deux du jardin de la Reine au , par la Varinière artificier à Paris » (O1 1877). 28 Cf. the old “frankish” “gart”. 29 C.C.L. Hirschfeld, op. cit., p. 134.

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Versailles. It seems that there were five of them, out of which three included views of the grotto30. The one for Joseph II includes twenty drawings, fifteen of the building, the rest about the fabriques in the garden. The last drawing shows the interior of the grotto : the stream at the center, two figures seated at the entrance (one an artist, with sketchpad on his lap). The positioning at the end of the series is interesting, since it evokes the idea of distance towards the palace, the views of which are placed at the beginning ; and so the mention of the artist, since it shows that the place is not associated with the figure of the queen, but presented as « picturesque » - what is worth being painted (it is a habit, shown in Fragonard’s or ’s paintings of Italy, to show artists in such a site31). The album of 1786 is, on the contrary, well known: executed for her sister-in-law and brother Archduke Ferdinand of Lorraine-Este in 1786, it is kept at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena32. There are three views concerning the grotto, placed before the ones about the hamlet : one of outside, showing the entrance – or, more precisely, the vale, since the entrance itself is hidden (ill.). Two men and a woman are there - they could be the visitors: in 1786, the archduke Ferdinand, travelling under the pseudonym of count of Nellenbourg and her spouse Maria Beatrice Cybo Malaspina, visited the park. The characters are dressed as visitors and the grotto is indicated, with a deictic gesture, by one of the men to a woman: it designates the object of the visit, but it is also a way to integrate the representation in the long tradition of “sentimental journeys” (to refer to L. Sterne’s contemporary book), since the Pilgrimage at the isle of Cythera by Watteau, or even more the Enseigne de Gersaint : what is important is the idea of direction towards an aim common to the two members of a couple. The stream, strolling along, but also the small bridge accentuate the idea of the existence of various steps before arriving to the aim of the trip. The views of the interior are executed according the norm used for the buildings: as cross- sections (ill. and ill.) . The first shows two visitors, who embody the two possible attitudes: sitting (on one of the “benches”) or standing. But what is surprising is not to find the same characters as in the view outside : the two men are represented as travellers, with a long coat. The notion of travel is accentuated by the fact that the man on the right is stopped at the very shore of the stream. The other drawing gives a different angle of view but above all stresses the power of nature inside the grotto : the main motive is the waterfall. A parallelism, which

30 An album for Joseph II, after his visit to his sister Marie-Antoinette in 1781 (private coll., sold at Christie’s New York on October 29th 2001) ; another for the grand duke Paul Petrovitch of Russia, in Pavlovsk Library, the frontispiece at the Metropolitan Museum, New York ; a third one, here mentioned, in 1786. 31 Cf. the Cascatelles de Tivoli by Fragonard, Paris, musée du . 32 P. Arizzoli Clémentel, L’Album de Marie-Antoinette. Vues et plans du Petit Trianon à Versailles, Montreuil, 2008.

8 one doesn’t not feel when in the grotto, is accentuated by the fact that there is a person on each side, both showing their backs : one is climbing the stairs in the direction of the way-out at the top, the other is half visible and goes back to the entrance – as if the visit was finished : but the fact he points with the left hand the waterfall creates a link with the possible interlocutor, the man outside – a guard, presumably, because of the gun. A fourth work, seeming to belong to another series, stresses even a bit more this relationship between the exterior and the interior33. The characters on the left ressemble the ones on the exterior view of the series of 1786, but in a far more gallant way, with a canon of proportions which is closer to the tradition of Boucher and Fragonard. There is the same gesture of invitation to enter the grotto than in the first painting, but this gesture is also, for the beholder, a guide which leads to the interior of the grotto, this time visible. The general scheme of the representation is not far from what is proposed in the second view of 1786 : the man on the left still climb the stairs, but the point of view is not in the same frontal way. In such a view, exterior and interior are associated as two components of a same picturesque presentation of the garden. In fact, this way of playing with the relationship between exterior and interior exists in a number of prints, where the point of view is situated in the interior of the grotto - we have to remember that “point de vue”, at this period, has a double meaning; it defines both the place to be seen and the place from which you see, as if both belong to the same apparatus. And it means also that the point of view chosen for the print we are dealing with is also something we have to question34. Chambers mentions the Chinese rocks with “apertures, through which one sees what is in the distance” and so says Hirschfeld : this writer mentions these “tableaux” which are what is to been seen in a garden – a word also used by Girardin at Ermenonville35. The most extraordinary perspective is the one mentioned by Le Rouge in his Jardins-anglois chinois of the greatest influence : these chinese grottoes, placed under water, with an glass window on the ceiling to see the animals above36. Being inside means to look outside the proper way.

33 A black and white photograph is held in the collections of the Département des Estampes et de la photographie of the BNF : “Histoire du château de Versailles: La grotte de la reine au petit Trianon; aquarelle ayant appartenu à Marie-Antoinette (collection Parmentier)”. 34 Such a point of view can be illustrated by the print of M. Tronchain’s garden at Saint-Leu Taverny. 35 C.L. Hirschfeld, Théorie de l’art des jardins, Leipzig, 1779, p. 48 : « Des cabinets posés avec choix ont offert des abris nécessaires et des tableaux qui arrêtent et attachent les regards » ; E. de Girardin, Promenade ou itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville, Paris, 1788 : « L’art des jardins, ou celui d’ajouter aux charmes de la nature champêtre, consiste uniquement à exécuter des Tableaux sur le terrain, par les mêmes règles que sur la toile » (« avis », no pagination). 36 Le Rouge, Jardins anglo-chinois, Paris 1784 : at the corner of the « Plan du rocher et de la grande cascade de Saint-Leu » - the plan of the rock and large falls of Saint-Leu, in the left inferior corner : « Projet d’un

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In Marie-Antoinette’s grotto, the legend gives to a crack between the rocks a use as a way to prevent a not-desired visit (ill.) – in fact there are two of them. But if we refer to the contemporary types of relationship between inside and outside in the houses, the fashion is more on a play between the two dimensions, with the presence of elements of nature in the house, and views on the garden37. The baroque salon terrena, so well named in German as Gartensaal, shows that there are reflections about the link between the two dimensions. Diana Balmori’s proposition to name the grottoes “intermediate spaces” is very pertinent for our period, since it plays with the two dimensions38: it is the time when Ledoux builds his hotel Thélusson with a grotto beneath the building, and Bélanger has similar projects. Another characteristic of the grotto as Trianon must here be mentioned : the fact that it has two entrances, but also that the stream goes through the space. The “intermediate” space is to be understood as associating two sides, like the famous Pope’s grotto in Twickenham, which is a long corridor with rooms; or the entrance of Retz, or in Mauperthuis, where it corresponds to a passage from one stage to another in some sort of psychic progression towards Truth, in a free-mason context; or at Arc-et-Senans : where the entrance is both a grotto and a sun. During the 1780s, numerous grottoes are becoming underground passages : at the garden of Saint-James in Neuilly ; in the park of Montceau. The grotto is here to be considered in a progression which is not only the one which leads, in the limits of the garden, from one “fabrique” to another, as a sort of spiritual progression. This one deals also with a dimension which is specific to the grotto : depth.

The grotto and the depth as the real interior

The grotto at Trianon is not in the ground : it is beneath a fake hill. That means that its ground is at the same level as the park, what Châtelet’s views restitute. But as the same time, it gives an image of nature in its rawest aspect: with rocks and moss – the rocks must have been given these “couleurs de vétusté” (“colours of dilapidation”) mentioned for the grotto in

Appartement sous l’Eau ». Le Rouge refers to the chinese Hoie-ta, or dwellings beneath water : “Le plafond composé de glaces admet la lumière au travers de l’eau qui le couvre. On observe à travers le cristal du plafond l’agitation de l’eau, le passage des navires, les jeux des oiseaux aquatiques, des poissons dorés qui nagent au- dessus du spectateur, les mandarins en font des retraites voluptueuses » (« the ceiling covered with mirrors accepts light through the water which covers it (…) one observes the movement of water, the crossing of ships, the plays of aquatic birds, of golden fish above the beholder, the mandarins make of them voluptuous retreats”). 37 Cf. Eva Börsch-Supan, Garten-, Landschafts- und Paradiesmotive in Innenraum. Eine ikonographische Untersuchung, Berlin, 1967. 38 D. Balmori, « Architecture, Landscape and the intermediate structure: eighteenth-Century experiments in mediation », Journal of the Society of Archtectural Historians, 1991, vol. 50, n° 1, p. 38-56.

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Bellevue39. Whately, then Watelet in France, had asserted that there were three fundamental characteristics: “dignity”, “terror”, “fancy” – in French le “majestueux”, le terrible”, le “merveilleux”. No way to decide to which type our grotto belongs, but it seems to belong to neither of the two first ones. However, the rocks and moss from inside inscribes it in the context of mountains, very close to the actual caves the same Claude-Louis Châtelet had drawn during his travel in the Alps (ill.). It absolutely fits with what Marie-Antoinette asked, the reference to the landscapes of the swiss Valais, supposed to be illustrated by the two hills between which the grotto is placed, the one on the top of which the Belvedere takes place, and the “mountain of the snail”. Marie-Antoinette’s grotto at Trianon belongs to the type of artificial grottoes which look natural. This type dominates during the 18th century. It leaves behind the built one, exemplified in Versailles by the grotto of Thetis. The knowledge of actual caves was in fact constant: the issue was, whether to refer to it or not. One deals here with serious problems – no more than the relationship between the activity of man and the reign of nature. As Félibien put it : “There are two sorts of grottoes : the ones are works from Nature, the others works of Art; and as Art never makes something more beautiful, as when it imitates well Nature: so Nature never produces something rarer, as when Art put on it its hand”40. It is a legitimization of false nature, which is immediately adapted to the interior – in a rather surprising way for a man who is going to describe the grotto of Thétys: Félibien describes a cave – or caves, the ones of Tibiran, in the Pyrénées, which looks like a real apartment, with several rooms, filled with marvels of craftsmanship41. The comparison between the grotto and an apartment is not that pertinent for the grotto at Trianon. It belongs to the ideal of false nature, a characteristic of the “jardin anglo-chinois”, the type to which the park at Trianon belongs (Richard Mique possessed, among other books, an exemplary verifier of Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening). But even in this genre there is a discrepancy between two types of grottoes. The first corresponds to the tradition of Renaissance grottoes, translating a conception of nature as natura naturans42. This

39 Cf. P. Biver, Histoire du château de Bellevue, Paris, 1933, p. 341 : Belot paints in « couleurs de vétusté » the fake rocks in cement made by the « rocailleur » Ménard. The colours were first tested by the parisian ornemanist Tolède (Archives nationales, O1 1536, p. 150). 40 A. Félibien, Description de la grotte de Versailles, Paris, 1679. He refers to Ovid, Metamorphosis, III, 157 : « Cujus in extremo est antro nemorale recessu, arte laboratum nulla : simulaverat artem ingenio natura suo » : « Here is a dark cave which owes nothing to art: nature has simulated art with its own genius”. 41 « Ceux qui ont eu assez de curiosité pour entrer dans les grottes de Tibiran, qui sont dan les Pyrénées, en ont remarqué trois, qui font comme un Appartement complet, et où l’on voit une imitation assez juste de ces riche ornements dont l’on pare les lambris et les plafonds des chambres les plus superbes » (Ibid.). 42 Cf. P. Morel, Les Grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle, Paris, 1998.

11 type remained during the 18th century. According to the duke of Croÿ, Boutin, with his “Tivoli” in Paris from 1766 onwards, “was the first who has here (in France) made real the idea of creating English gardens at a large scale (…)” and among other “fabriques”, “grottoes adorned with precious shells”43. Closer to the Trianon, the grotto of “Madame Victoire” at the Ermitage in Versailles (1782) is covered with shells, crystallization, minerals and marine plants, with at the bottom a fountain with a winged child. Mique’s grotto, on the other side, doesn’t exhibit the process of the Creation. It only shows an effect : the moss on the wall refers to humidity, as in a real cave. It is not the only case in France : as early as 1767, the Aunoy estate in Champeaux, ordered by P.J.B. Gerbier in 1767, includes a simply rusticated grotto. The king’s sister, “Madame Elisabeth”, has such a undecorated grotto at her estate of Montreuil, designed from 1783 onwards by the architect J.-J. Huvé. This one is also characterized by the fact that inside there are two ways down : stairs to go to the edge of the lake and stairs to reach a bench44. Verticality is doubly stressed. In fact, verticality in the grotto at Trianon is very present, and not only because of the stairs to the top of the hill. It is also so because the stream is first a waterfall, then a ditch above which a sort of bridge is built, stressing the fact that there is a depth inside the grotto, as an echo to the orientation towards the top. This double inner orientation in terms of verticality replaces here the more common model of the grotto at the bottom of a hill on which a belvedere takes place, as it is made very close from there, on the other side of the park of the château of Versailles : in the Balbi estate. There, the architect Chalgrin built from 1787 onwards both a grotto and a belvedere in another fake hill. Richard Mique, though, had in certain blueprints of 1786-88, maybe in relationsip to Chalgrin’s works, planned a fake ruin on the top of his grotto; but it was never achieved. Verticality is also stressed in the representations by Châtelet, in the way he uses, for a spectacular effect, the well-known procedure of the cross-section. Not only is the spectator absolutely in the heart of the grotto, but the rocks around, painted in the conventional pink which is traditionally attributed to the built parts on a blueprint, form some sort of a triumph arch (ill.). Châtelet here seems to use the angle “under the bridge” which a famous article by J. Langner associates to neo-piranesism45. Noticeable is also the tendency to conceive the whole grotto as a sort of frame, which stresses the central part, especially the waterfall, i.e the

43 Boutin created his garden, “Tivoli”, in what will become “la nouvelle Athènes” in Paris. 44 Archives des Yvelines, IV Q 483 : there was a “petite grotte avec un petit escalier dans le rocher au pied de la tour, quatorze marches pour descendre au lac et cinq autres pour descendre à une petite salle où est pratiqué un banc”. 45 J. Langner, « La vue par dessous le pont . Fonctions d’un motif piranésien dans l’art français de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle », Actes du colloque : Piranèse et les Français, Rome, 1976, pp. 293-302.

12 dynamic element stressing the verticality, as in the second view of the album of 1786. But in the first, on the right, one sees the stream as in situated outside of the grotto; whereas on the left, what the light part in front indicates is not clear: it might be a hole in the ground, which exists, but it can also be the soil of the place. In this way, some sort of a vertigo is created, which makes the place at the same time static and in movement, as the two travellers show by their attitude. In opposition to the abstraction of the cut in the rocks, some big stones are scattered, creating an idea of lively chaos. The man resting (or meditating) and the other one in movement are belonging to a logic of trespassing thresholds : the traveller on the right has his right foot on the very limit of the stairs, above the stream, the one which stresses the idea of movement in the representation. The grotto belongs to a system of dynamic approaches in which the task of the gardener is “To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend, To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot; In all, let Nature never be forgot”. The first verses of Pope’s“Epistle to Lord Burlington” 1731 says it : “sink the Grot” – the grotto is in movement, and in movement in the direction of the ground. Depth – of the ground, of man: it is the link between these two interiorities - a link which, historically, is characteristic of the 18th century. This grotto “to rest”, or more, is built as a period when the underground is valuated as never before. The utopian tradition is renovated thanks to the success of Ludwig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s underground travels, initially published at Copenhagen in latin in 1741 and quickly translated in French in 174346. The discoveries of Scheuchzer or Benoit de Baillet led the régent Philippe d’Orléans (1715-1723) to order his “Enquêtes”, inquiries about French mineralogical richnesses. The second half of the century we here refer to sees the birth of the term “geology” – in 1778, by the Swiss mineralogist Jean-André Deluc. It is in France the period of the creation of a special service for the quarries, especially under Paris. It gives some sort of scientific legitimacy to what architecture has organized for long, the idea according which a building present in itself the history humanity : ontogenesis associated with phylogenesis, with the grotto, it plays at another scale, the one of the ground – with all sorts

46 Ludwig Holberg, Le voyage souterrain de Niels Klim, trad. fr. M. de Mauvillon, Paris, 1743. For the utopian tradition, see Tyssot de Patot’s La vie, les aventures et le voyage de Troenland du révérend père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange, Paris, 1720, the chevalier de Mouhy’s, Lamékis ou les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la terre intérieure, Paris, 1738 or Casanova’s Isocameron, Paris, 1787.

13 of distance towards it : since the word “intime” is yet used to qualify the secret structure of nature, as with Buffon : “we will never penetrate the intimate nature of things”47. The 1780s are also the period during which a new valuation of the grotto as original place not only of manhood, but also of architecture, is developed by Jean-Louis Viel de Saint- Meaux, which sees in the grotto the origin of human shelter, in opposition to the well-known Vitruvian cabin : the grotto corresponding to societies which practiced a agricultural cult, the origin of the column being not anymore the tree, but the pillar in the cave. In fact, various features show the convergence of attitudes towards a valuation of a principle of fertility at the very basis of physiocracy : a new cult of Gaïa which makes of the grotto some sort of a native cave. The stream is here an element which can corroborate this valuation in terms of movement – but a movement of the present, in the heart of the earth. At Trianon, all the elements are present : rocks, moss, water, but no statue of Gaïa – and no trace of the queen : what the grotto brought to Marie-Antoinette, to her very inner feelings, is still unknown. Would it be then possible to refer to the oldest meaning of “intimité” ? The one we avoided to mention at the beginning of this paper, as too far away from what we know of Marie- Antoinette: the deepest layers of oneself, discovered through meditation. The grotto here would be the one of the anchorite – a “retraite”, a place for retirement. Here, no reference to what Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville, in 1755, associates with the grotto in the castle of Montgeron, south of Paris – a creative solitude : “As one is there protected from the sun, it has been called the cabin of solitude. It is there that the man of genius creates beauties in the place which is the least susceptible of welcoming them”. And no melancholy as mentioned by Girardin, in his Promenade ou Itinéraire des Jardins d’Ermenonville (1788), where he describes a grotto almost identical to the one in Trianon, slowly discovered and experienced : “This shaded path which runs along the river leads to a grotto covered with climbing plants, which contribute to give it an air of dilapidation; between several rocky vaults, a waterfall can be seen, that the dark colours of the grotto make even brighter. It is from the bench covered with moss that this effect of water, which is pleasant to the eyes, must be enjoyed, and brings the soul to a sweet and tender melancholy”48. Here, the owner speaks and characterizes the feelings which are supposed to be created by his grotto. Was melancholy already fashionable

47 « Nous ne pénétrerons jamais dans la structure intime des choses » (Œuvres complètes de Buffon, Paris, 1835, Histoire des animaux, ch. II, « De la reproduction en général », p. 17). 48 E. de Girardin, Promenade ou itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville, Paris, 1788, p. 16 : « Ce sentier ombragé qui suit le cours de la rivière, conduit à une grotte tapissée de plantes rampantes, de toute espèce, qui contribuent à lui donner un air de vétusté ; entre plusieurs voûtes de rochers, on aperçoit la cascade, que la couleur sombre de la grotte fait paraître plus brillante. C’est du banc de mousse qu’il faut jouir de cet effet d’eau qui est agréable aux yeux, et porte l’âme à une mélancolie douce et tendre ».

14 in the grotto at Trianon ? In fact, what we know is the queen spent more and more of her time in another cave, but this one with characters : the theater, so close, so far away, filled with people and life.

A shelter away from the court; a place to rest in the itinerary of the garden; a contact with nature, in depth ? The grotto at Trianon seems to have been a type the definition of which can be found in theoretical books, but which is in fact something rather new in France, before being imitated as the popular “fabrique”. The obvious interest the queen had in the whole project, and especially for the grotto (the seven different projects !) show it corresponded to an ideal of deliberate self-seclusion at a double scale, the one of the park and the one of the place. And the principle of fake nature triumphs here even more than in the “hameau”. The locus amoenus then executed belongs to a whole tendency leading to the appreciation of the underground – but at the very moment when this underground becomes something collective, where the mineralogists and the physiocrats find the richness of the nation, where the “antiquaires” find its past : in what will be called, during a 19th century characterized by the triumph of the idea of nation, Boden in Germany, “sol de la patrie” in French. Houdon, in these years, wanted to put Louis XVI at the top of a hill in Brest, but more precisely at the top of an old tower supposed to be Roman, the king being thus above what the ground concealed : the collective past. As far as his wife is concerned, her personal interior in the exterior, her grotto at Trianon, has been only for a very “happy few”. In both cases, but at different scales, the relationship to the ground was a way to define a problematic identity. But Houdon’s project in Brest failed; and in Trianon, after October 5th 1789, the grotto has been at it is today : for – nobody.