tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/>

The tower was connected by a passage with the "Dairy,"—an actual and practical creamery on a small scale, in which the Queen and her ladies played at making butter and cheese. The walls and floor were tiled with marble, and the tables on which the pans and utensils—all of decorated porcelain—were set out were also of marble. A running stream of water was conducted through the dairy to keep it cool.

The "Farm" buildings comprised a group of constructions, in which the farmer lodged, and in which were stables for cows of which the Queen had a splendid Swiss herd.

The completed gardens of the Little Trianon excited the most lively praise. The poet, Chevalier Bertin, dedicated a whole elegy to them; the Prince de Ligne wrote, "Here truly one may breathe air of happiness and liberty. One might believe one's self a hundred leagues from the Court." The village presented a real aspect of a rural hamlet. Indeed the Queen had under her eyes a living picture of the country, whence she could see the cows grazing, peasants laboring in the fields, the cultivation of gardens, the pruning of trees, the cows coming to drink at the lake, the washwomen washing their clothes at the stream which flowed from the mill, and the little mill itself, grinding grain for the inhabitants of this miniature village.

It was at this Trianon that Marie Antoinette spent her happiest days. "The Queen," writes Madam Campan, "spent sometimes an entire month together at the Little Trianon, where she had established her pianoforte and tapestry frames." There were but few apartments in the château of the Little Trianon and although Madame Elizabeth usually accompanied the Queen here, the ladies of honor could not be accommodated, and unless by special invitation from the Queen it was the rule to come from Versailles only at the dinner hour. The King and the Princess came regularly to sup. A white muslin and a straw hat was the accustomed dress of the princesses, and the pleasure of running about the little village to see the cows milked and to fish in the lake, enchanted the Queen, and with every successive year she showed less inclination for the stiff etiquette of the Court.

Here on the 5th of October, the news was brought her of the arrival at the Court of the crowd of women from Paris, and she was forced to go immediately to Versailles to meet them, never again to see her little domain.

PLATE XXXII

"THE MILL," PETIT TRIANON

In adopting the Renaissance style as a motive in interior decoration, England lagged behind the Continental nations. Such English mansions and furniture as remained after the Wars of the Roses were all of the Gothic type; and with no other models available, it was but natural that the first efforts of English workmen, after art began to revive, should be Gothic in feeling. Moreover, for a long time most of the carved wood-work and furniture in the new style with which England was supplied, was imported from Holland, and it is in some measure to Dutch example that the heavy character of the Elizabethan style in furniture and