Etienne Jollet

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, Paris, 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”).

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