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 Provence 6. 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
16
de l’art des jardins, Leipzig, 1779, p. 135. 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. 379402, 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 French Revolution 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 petit Trianon, par la Varinière artificier à Paris » (O1 1877).
28
Cf. the old “frankish” “gart”.
29 C.C.L. Hirschfeld, op. cit., p. 134. 7 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 Hubert
Robert’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 crosssections (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 Louvre.
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
9 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 audessus 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.
10 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.
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.
44
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 SaintMeaux, 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 MarieAntoinette: 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.