Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette 9780674059474

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Harvard Historical Studies u 176

Published under the auspices

of the Department of History

from the income of the

Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest

Robert Louis Stroock Fund

Henry Warren Torrey Fund

Dairy Queens The Po liTics of PasTora l a r c h i T e c T u r e

f rom caTh erine de’ medici To m a r i e - a n T o i n e T T e

 Meredith Mar tin

Harvard Universit y Press Cambridge, massaCHUset ts, and London, engLand 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The portrait of Catherine de’ Medici on page 29 is a miniature by François Clouet, ca. 1555. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Meredith Dairy queens : the politics of pastoral architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette / Meredith Martin. p. cm. — (Harvard historical studies ; 176) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04899-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Architecture and women — France — History. 2. Pleasure dairies — France. 3. Politics and culture — France — History. 4. Elite (Social sciences) — France — History. I. Title. II. Title: Politics of pastoral architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette. NA2543.W65M37 2011 728’.92 — dc22——2010010746

Contents IntroductIon 1

1 2 3 4 5

catherIne de’ MedIcI, the French cybele 28

absolutIsM and the sexual PolItIcs oF Pastoral retreat 68

health, hygIene, and the herMItages oF MadaMe de PoMPadour 114

MarIe-antoInette and the haMeau eFFect 158

regeneratIng the Monarchy: the Queen’s daIry at raMbouIllet 214

ePIlogue 258

notes 268 acknowledgMents 312 Index 315

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Figure I.1 Richard Mique, Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy, Hameau de Versailles, 1783 – 1787. Photo: by author

This book tells the story of an early modern building type that today has been largely forgotten: the pleasure dairy, or what is known in French as the laiterie d’agrément, or laiterie de propreté. Most of us are familiar with the legend of Marie-Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid and, together with her aristocratic female friends, churning butter at her faux-rustic hamlet, or hameau, at Versailles. Some are also aware of the luxurious white marble dairy that her architect Richard Mique built for her as part of this pastoral enterprise in the mid-1780s. From the time of its creation, Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy has been an essential site in the development of her bad reputation, both as a thoughtless and extravagant queen and as a historical figure who violated the boundaries of her class and gender. DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure I.2 Richard Mique, Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy (interior view), Hameau de Versailles, 1783 – 1787. Photo: by author

The Hameau de Versailles, in fact, had two dairies: the pleasure dairy and the functional preparation dairy, or laiterie de préparation. Marie-Antoinette’s servants used the preparation dairy to fabricate milk products that were then brought to the pleasure dairy to be admired and consumed by the queen and her guests. Though the two dairies resembled each other in exterior appearance and interior layout, the pleasure dairy’s furnishings were made of sumptuous white marble (rather than a plainer stone), and its interior stone walls were painted to resemble marble, complementing the trompe l’oeil coffered ceiling and rich crown moldings (Figures I.1 and I.2). The room was also outfitted with a lavish set of gilded porcelain dairy ware that was produced at Marie-Antoinette’s own porcelain manufactory in Paris and that imitated the INTRODUCTION

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basic stone and tin utensils used in the preparation dairy, including settling pans and milk jugs (see Figure 4.2). The Hameau’s pleasure dairy constituted an elegant re-creation of a typical working dairy, one whose “work” centered less on production and more on consumption, royal symbolism, and aristocratic display.1 It provided Marie-Antoinette with a venue in which to enjoy the pleasures, and embrace the values, of rural life in a manner fit for a queen. How can we begin to make sense of this curious building type and its historical and cultural significance? First, it is important to understand that the Hameau’s pleasure dairy was neither an isolated example nor the product of Marie-Antoinette’s frivolous imagination, as has been assumed. To the contrary, it was part of an established tradition of dairy construction in French royal and elite gardens that began in the mid-sixteenth century with Catherine de’ Medici at the court of Fontainebleau. This book, Dairy Queens, reconstructs the genealogy of the ancien régime pleasure dairy and traces aspects of continuity and change that characterized its life span of more than two centuries. Too long overlooked or dismissed as a trifling footnote in the history of the ancien régime, pleasure dairies, I contend, need to be taken seriously — both for their ability to enrich our understanding of early modern culture and society and for their potential to make us reconsider how the self and its environment were shaped therein. Little has been written about pleasure dairies.2 This is perhaps because few architectural remains of these sites survive, especially for those that were built before 1750. To tell the story of this building type, several examples of which are analyzed here for the first time, one must therefore rely on a diverse range of sources, starting with archival building records, memoirs, written descriptions, and architectural plans. Additional information can be gathered by studying the architectural complexes that surrounded pleasure dairies — menageries, hamlets, hermitages, and model farms — and informed their design and use. Pleasure dairies were a feature of courtly visits and pastoral fêtes whose programs can be analyzed, and they were decorated with furniture, painting, porcelain, and sculpture, examples of which survive and can shed light on the dairies’ character and meaning. They were also discussed and illustrated in a variety of texts — novels, architectural treatises, agricultural manuals, and medical tracts — that celebrated the virtues of milk and the pastoral retreat. Together, these visual, material, and textual remains offer a composite cultural history of this fascinating architectural form, clarifying the role that pleasure dairies played in shaping the status and identity of their patrons.3

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Obscure though they may be today, pleasure dairies were quite prominent within the upper echelons of ancien régime society. Their patrons were among the most significant political actors and cultural figures of the early modern period: Catherine de’ Medici, Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, Madame de Pompadour, Claude-Henri Watelet, Marie-Antoinette, Madame Elisabeth, and Napoleon and Josephine. Although Dairy Queens will concentrate on pleasure dairies in France, where the building type originated and had its most sustained aesthetic, social, and cultural development, examples could also be found throughout Europe, commissioned by queens Mary II and Caroline of England and Maria Feodorovna of Russia, among others. In Britain, where pleasure dairies had their own rich political and social history, they are more commonly referred to as “ornamental dairies.”4 Most ancien régime dairy patrons were royal and elite women. Dairies held particular appeal for women for several reasons. First, agricultural manuals and other texts associated these buildings with virtuous and industrious women — not just servants or milkmaids, but prosperous and capable estate managers, as well.5 Dairies were also related in early modern art and literature with images of fertile, nurturing female bodies that took both animal and human forms. This connection grew more pronounced in the eighteenth century, when pleasure dairies became tied to a public campaign, led by JeanJacques Rousseau, to encourage aristocratic women to cleanse themselves of the impurities and wanton values of the city by returning to their country estates and also by breastfeeding their children themselves rather than hiring wet nurses.6 All of these factors made pleasure dairies the province of aristocratic women, although some men also built them — especially kings, like Louis XIV, who wanted to assert their dominion over nature and agricultural production, and wealthy financiers, such as Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who fashioned themselves on the model of the munificent landed elite. In the eighteenth century, when pleasure dairies reached their apogee in France and beyond, they were consequently more widely discussed in architectural and garden treatises and more prominently featured in such blockbuster novels as Rousseau’s Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761); Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740); and Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747 – 1748). At the height of their popularity, in the 1770s and 1780s, pleasure dairies were the subject of four separate drawing competitions at the French Academy, one of which elicited a spectacular prizewinning entry from the architect A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer in June 1782 (Figure I.3).7 Vaudoyer’s spare, neoclassical design appears at once Arcadian and of

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the moment — a feature characteristic of virtually all pleasure dairies. Vaudoyer also evokes the pomp and ceremony associated with these buildings, by framing his design with parallel rows of trees that stand stiffly at attention and by situating the dairy atop a mound of earth from which the fountain in its rotunda seems to bubble forth. Adding to their visibility and prestige, nearly every major ancien régime architect, and several prominent artists, designed or decorated at least one pleasure dairy, including Francesco Primaticcio, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, AngeJacques Gabriel, François Boucher, Étienne-Maurice Falconet, FrançoisJoseph Bélanger, Louis de Carmontelle, Jean-François Chalgrin, Hubert Robert, Pierre Julien, and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. (In England their architects were equally prestigious, and numbered among them Robert Adam and Sir John Soane.) Pleasure dairies, like other ancien régime garden buildings, were often situated on the fringes of royal gardens and country estates, and this gave architects and clients a welcome sense of freedom from palace protocol and design restrictions, enabling them to be more creative and experimental. The first pleasure dairy was designed around 1560 by Primaticcio for the queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici, on the outskirts of the royal gardens at Fontainebleau. Attached to a model farm known as the Mi-voie (because it was situated “midway” between Fontainebleau and a nearby parish), this magnificent laiterie anticipated many of the features of later pleasure dairies. Created during a turbulent political period in which Catherine de’ Medici served as regent for her young son, Charles IX, this dairy had a plain, unremarkable façade, but its interior was richly decorated. Artfully designed, naturalistic forms — including antique-inspired painted grotesques, a multicolored stone grotto, and gilded astrological motifs — proclaimed the fertility and benevolence of its patron, who, because she was foreign born and recently widowed, needed a building that signified her rootedness in French soil and her divine right in governing it. From the start, pleasure dairies shared a strong symbolic and structural connection to the pastoral literary mode. The pastoral was revived in sixteenth-century France by court poets, most notably Pierre de Ronsard, who drew upon the classical texts of Theocritus and Virgil. Like other forms of early modern European pastoral art and literature, pleasure dairies offered an Opposite:

Figure I.3 A. L. T. Vaudoyer, “Dairy in a Magnificent Park” (prix d’émulation), 1782. Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts

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idealized representation of rural life that embodied the desires, alleviated the anxieties, and certified the authority of the ruling class in a time of great social and political upheaval.8 As the English writer George Puttenham observed in 1589, the pastoral’s true purpose was not to take up rural subjects or themes directly, but instead to use them as an aesthetic filter or “veil” through which to “insinuate and glance at greater matters.” Pleasure dairies manifested this impulse in their architectural form, by juxtaposing outward rusticity with interior refinement — as with the dairies designed for Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette — or by encoding complex messages aimed at the sophisticated, ruling elite within an ostensibly simple, rural veneer.9 Royal and elite patrons employed the pleasure dairy as a staging ground for pastoral performances and fêtes, often for the strategic purpose of conveying power while paradoxically appearing to retreat from it. Catherine de’ Medici inaugurated this tradition in 1564, when she hosted an elaborate banquet at her dairy before embarking on a royal tour of France with Charles IX. On this occasion, she transported courtiers from the palace to her bucolic farming retreat, where she entertained them with a meal that most likely featured milk products, along with the performance of a pastoral poem by Ronsard. Written to be read aloud by her children, Ronsard’s poem compared Catherine to the earth mother Cybele and made allusion to her success in nurturing and regenerating France after a difficult time of war.10 This event at Catherine’s dairy was the first of many instances throughout the ancien régime in which royal women used these seemingly unassuming buildings to express a political persona that heralded the abundant, hardworking contributions of queens, female companions, and mothers.11 Between 1560 and 1750, fewer than a dozen pleasure dairies were built in France, nearly all of them on the grounds of royal estates. From 1750 until the Revolution, however, they began to multiply and diversify in social, geographic, and aesthetic ways. In these years, they appeared throughout France (perhaps as many as forty were constructed there) and abroad, mostly in England, Russia, and the region that is now Germany and Belgium. As more people, and as different kinds of people — not simply the nobility and courtiers — encountered these buildings, the response to them broadened and grew more complex. Dairy Queens charts the evolving critical reception of pleasure dairies over the course of the ancien régime and the criticisms, sometimes venomous or satirical, that were made against them in reference to debates about the aristocracy’s character and purpose. In the mid-eighteenth century, the architectural design of pleasure dairies became increasingly elaborate, in keeping with their growing social, DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure I.4 Pleasure dairy in the form of a medieval ruin built for Frederick William II at Pfaueninsel near Berlin, mid-1790s. Photo: by author

cultural, and economic relevance. Pleasure dairies built before 1750 were outwardly quite modest, with clean lines, classical proportions, and little in the way of decoration or elaboration. By the 1770s and 1780s, however, many became as flamboyant on the exterior as they were within. They became more theatrical, whether by exhibiting a sentimental, picturesque connection to rural life, as at Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau, or a neoclassical severity that evoked a lost golden age. Outside of France (where the rustic and neoclassical styles tended to dominate), dairies were more eclectic, imitating Chinese pavilions, for example at Woburn Abbey outside of London, or Turkish mosques, INTRODUCTION

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Figure I.5 Georges Le Rouge, view of the dairies at Tivoli and Chantilly from Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode (1776 – 1789). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

in the case of a dairy designed by Bélanger for the prince de Ligne at Beloeil in Belgium.12 In the mid-1790s, the king of Prussia, Frederick William II, and his mistress commissioned a dairy on a lush island near Berlin, known as the Pfaueninsel, that resembled the ruin of a medieval church (Figure I.4).13 The design underscores the extent to which dairies, and the related activities of retreating to the countryside, communing with nature, and drinking milk, had by this time emerged as a new form of secular religion across Europe. Beyond this fascination with nature and the natural, several other factors explain the growing popularity and variety of pleasure dairies after 1750. One could first look to the early and pronounced influence of Madame de Pompadour, who sponsored the creation of no fewer than five pleasure dairies between 1748 and 1754. Pompadour also promoted drinking milk for health purposes, and she sponsored the creation of a new type of porcelain “milk goblet” for this activity. Around the same time, pleasure dairies became associated with a number of polarizing debates related to reforming the pastoral genre, reinvigorating the land and the aristocracy, and domesticating elite women. Last but not least, beginning in the 1760s, the ongoing distribution of wealth and titles to financiers and administrators who were attached to the court but based in Paris produced a new class of patrons who, in wanting DAIRY QUEENS

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to emulate the ancien nobility, commissioned dairies for themselves in or near the French capital. This last trend, and the effect it had in leveling social distinctions between the nobility and the elite whom they employed, is illustrated in a plate from the first volume of Georges Le Rouge’s Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode (1776 – 1789) (Figure I.5). The image juxtaposes a dairy that had been recently built for the treasury official Simon-Charles Boutin at Tivoli, his fashionable new residence in Paris, with a celebrated laiterie designed nearly a century earlier for the prince de Condé at Chantilly. The designs are quite similar, and they suggest a confounding equivalence echoed in a comment made by the Baroness d’Oberkirch after she toured Tivoli in 1782. Upon visiting M. Boutin’s dairy and enjoying a snack of “milk and fruits in golden vessels,” she affirmed, “It is only a king or financier who could indulge such expensive fancies.”14 Le Rouge’s plate and Oberkirch’s observation exemplify the pleasure dairy’s late-stage transition from a sanctified royal space invested with political and social meaning to a more widely available commodity, whose significance was less assured and more open for debate. In this case, the transition is made all the more apparent by the dairy’s inclusion in Le Rouge’s new pattern book of garden design, created for both established nobles and the newly rich bourgeoisie. Pleasure dairies reflect a broad history of social and political change. They are a means by which to understand how the monarchy, the nobility, and the financier class responded to such changes through their architectural and landscape commissions. These buildings emerged in sixteenth-century France during a time of great civil strife but also cultural development, a time when some of the old nobility began leaving their feudal estates for residence at court. Pleasure dairies enabled the crown and the nobility to project an image of Arcadian peace and prosperity and to profess an enduring devotion to the land, while also playing with new forms of courtly refinement, leisure, and display — thus merging old and new forms of the aristocratic self.15 This twinned purpose persisted into the seventeenth century, when pleasure dairies at Versailles and Chantilly could be regarded as a celebration of their owners’ mastery of nature and superior cultural stewardship. At the same time, however, the court nobility began to express through these buildings a capacity for renewal and reform, in reaction to an emergent body of criticism that accused them of neglecting the land and wallowing in luxury. These attacks were initiated in the late seventeenth century by the archbishop François Fénelon, and they intensified after 1750 with the development of Physiocracy and the rise of reformers like Rousseau and the marINTRODUCTION

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quis de Mirabeau.16 One can track the crown’s and the aristocracy’s response to these debates through the changing design and program of the pleasure dairy — from the building type’s association, starting in the 1760s, with hamlets and other self-legitimating displays of noblesse oblige, to its expression of a desire for regeneration in the 1780s, as manifested in a purifying neoclassical or primitive aesthetic. These arguments dovetailed with eighteenth-century discussions about amending the pastoral genre so that it might speak more directly to real-life social and agricultural concerns. In his 1589 text, Puttenham had already pointed out the pastoral’s capacity to “contain and inform moral discipline, for the amendment of man’s behavior,” and this idea gained significant traction in the 1750s among French writers, philosophers, and literary critics. Both Jean-François Marmontel, in the Encyclopédie, and Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, in his 1769 poem Les saisons, maintained that the pastoral should offer a less rosy depiction of the countryside in order to elicit pity for the rural poor and a desire to improve their lot — while at the same time enabling the feudal nobility to reclaim their past glory.17 Some dairy patrons attempted to represent this new version of the pastoral in architectural form, by commissioning picturesque hamlets that demonstrated a sentimental connection to (but also a superior control over) the peasantry, or by using their dairies to provide milk for needy servants as a display of aristocratic charity or bienfaisance. In the second half of the eighteenth century, pleasure dairies also became more closely tied to the georgic genre, another classical literary mode that was revived and made popular with the 1770 publication of Jacques Delille’s Les géorgiques de Virgile. (Marie-Antoinette had a copy in her library at Petit Trianon, the garden complex at Versailles where her Hameau was situated.) At the same time, French pastoral literature began incorporating georgic motifs with greater frequency. The two genres had much in common, but the georgic placed greater emphasis on agricultural labor rather than leisure and appealed to the nobility’s obsession with agronomy and all things rustic. As Jill Casid has noted, the georgic also preached the pleasures of hearth and home, inculcating values of domesticated femininity and heterosexual productivity at a time when many critics believed that France’s population, and not merely its morals, was in decline.18 Alongside this shift in emphasis to the georgic, pleasure dairies became more farm-like in their appearance, and artistic images of industrious milkmaids began to supplant those of languorous shepherdesses. An early example of this emergent fascination with the georgic is a group of Sèvres porcelain figurines based on statues DAIRY QUEENS

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of milkmaids and other female farm workers that was made in 1753 for Pompadour’s dairy at Crécy (see Figure 3.16). Whereas writers and artists in previous decades had depicted milkmaids as sexualized, transgressive creatures who roamed freely in the pastures or carried goods to market without male supervision, in this period they were more often associated with the domestic pleasures of the dairy or the home, dutifully making milk products or nurturing children. Although the health benefits of country air and milk consumption were cited in antiquity — both recur in Pliny the Younger’s villa letters from the early second century ad — these natural remedies fell out of fashion until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when they began to be revived and promoted in France and throughout Europe. By 1750, they flourished as part of a widespread neo-Hippocratic health craze that entailed a radically new medical and philosophical understanding of the relationship between the environment, the body, and architecture. Inspired by new techniques of empirical observation and by sensationalist philosophy, French physicians began urging their patients to repair to the countryside and rid themselves of the city’s deleterious influences by taking in fresh air and sunlight, enjoying moderate exercise, and consuming a diet of natural foods. This new health regimen, especially when combined with the avoidance of such artificial practices as wearing corsets and makeup, was thought to prevent or cure a variety of physical and mental ailments and promote a general sense of well-being.19 At the same time, French architectural theorists began considering how the built environment could affect, for better or ill, the health and behavior of its occupants. Madame de Pompadour, who learned about these new ideas from her physician François Quesnay, extolled the benefits of the pastoral retreat at the small residences or “hermitages” that she commissioned near the palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne. Pompadour’s hermitages were surrounded by gardens, all of which contained dairies that provided her with healthful, nourishing milk. In the early modern period, consuming milk in fresh or liquid form was far less common in the West than it is today. In the eighteenth century, the European elite largely considered milk to be a medicinal remedy, recommended for individuals diagnosed with gout, fever, or chest and stomach disorders, and for women said to be suffering from infertility, nymphomania, or hysteria. Occasional tracts on this subject were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — including one written by the mother of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet — but the number of treatises touting milk’s miraculous effects increased dramatically around 1750. A substance INTRODUCTION

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commonly found in ancient myths and in the Bible, milk became part of a new civic religion of nature and country living. Doctors began prescribing milk to healthy and unhealthy patients alike, believing that it was essential to preserving their natural equilibrium. Pompadour, who suffered from chronic poor health, eagerly embraced the milk cure and inspired other dairy patrons, including the princesse de Condé and Marie-Antoinette, to do the same. In response to reform-minded publications such as Rousseau’s philosophical novel La nouvelle Héloïse, dairies became increasingly regarded as places for women to regain their virtue along with their health. Rousseau associated dairies and dairy products with what he described as naturally feminine traits, such as “sweetness,” domesticity, and charity. Rousseau and several of his philosophe contemporaries — among them Mirabeau, Madame de Genlis, and the physicians Samuel Tissot and Edme-Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne — contended that aristocratic women were succumbing to an enervating mondain (worldly or urbane) lifestyle of selfish, sullying pleasures, and that only by getting back to the land and assuming their proper duties as wives, mothers, and efficient estate managers could they save themselves, and indeed the entire nation.20 By tending their homes and gardens, providing for their servants and needy peasant families, and above all by breastfeeding their own children, elite women could presumably revivify the state and provide an example for those beneath them to follow. Pleasure dairies that were built for royal and elite women in this period enthusiastically adopted this powerful new language of feminine reform, nurture, and rebirth in their iconography and design, by including womblike grottoes in their interiors and by linking images of women milking cows and making dairy products with images of mothers nursing their progeny (see Figure 5.8). It is important, however, to recognize the paradoxical ways in which elite female patrons responded to this rhetoric of reform in their own building schemes. The pleasure dairy embodies that conflicted impulse to honor but also to transcend the role that they were expected to play as women. Michel de Certeau understood this to be a kind of high-wire act of cultural consumption and negotiation, one in which individuals would make “transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.”21 Notable, for example, was the fact that pleasure dairies were not typically erected in the countryside or in the provinces — the very place where moralists and physicians insisted that women had to go, voluntarily or not, to be sheltered from the temptations of urban life. Most, instead, were in or near Paris, or otherwise in close proximity to the court. This enabled elite dairy owners to take up la vie champêtre withDAIRY QUEENS

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out having to truly abandon city life, or, for that matter, their professional and social obligations. Louis de Carmontelle, who designed a dairy for the duc de Chartres at Monceau near Paris in the 1770s, lampooned this tendency in a short play from around the same time entitled La rosière (The Rose-Girl). Its protagonist is a noblewoman who, bored and restless in Paris, fakes a hysterical attack so that her husband will take her to their country house just on the edge of the city, where she promises to rest and follow a strict milk diet. In truth, she secretly plans a “rose festival” at her retreat, a ceremonial display of rural purity and aristocratic bienfaisance that was revived in this period.22 Her husband, wise to her scheme and eager to have some fun at her expense, pretends that he is taking her not to their proto-suburban country house but instead to their remote château in the rural provinces, the very idea of which makes her panic for real. Carmontelle’s play was humorously satirical, to be sure, but it tapped into a larger, and largely male, cultural anxiety, namely, that aristocratic women were making a travesty of gender roles (and social and agricultural reform) for their own perverse amusement. In the case of pleasure dairies, these fears were magnified by the luxury and expense that were being lavished on these buildings, and by their unsettling pastoral character, which seemed to many observers to flirt too precariously with the boundaries between nature and artifice, production and pleasure. The American statesman Gouverneur Morris gave voice to this skepticism when he visited Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau in May 1789 and dismissed her dairy as “a semblance too splendid of rural life.”23 Others went much further in accusing the queen of using her gardens’ ostensibly virtuous, natural environment as a front for vice. In fact, Marie-Antoinette and other dairy patrons were not mocking rural life or Rousseauian reform. To the contrary, they were showcasing their admiration for these new ideas by using a building type and a form of pastoral expression that had served them well for centuries. Throughout the ancien régime, royal and elite women had embraced pastoral art and architecture precisely because it was so unbounded and fluid, enabling them to assert identity and power in veiled terms and to address the multiple, conflicting burdens of their gender and social station: as both guardians of nature and consumers of culture, objects of display who were paradoxically obliged to retreat from view. A central argument of this book is that pleasure dairies offered elite women both a refuge from such unrealistic demands and a way to reconcile them in a creative and ultimately liberating way. At the same time, pleasure dairies also provided fodder for critics who condemned the worldview that INTRODUCTION

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these buildings allegedly represented, and the mondain women who were seen to embody it. w h AT IS A plEASURE DAIRY? TERmINOlOgY, TYpOlOgY, AND DESIgN

 Prior to the eighteenth century, most pleasure dairies were referred to simply as “laiteries” in building records, letters, and travel guides. They were distinguished from working dairies by their noble provenance, their elegant design and decoration, and the high caliber of their architects. Yet as they became more prevalent, and as a body of French architectural theory began to develop that aimed to classify various gardens and garden buildings, they were differentiated in name as well as appearance. In a treatise on country houses and pleasure pavilions entitled De la distribution des maisons de plaisance (1737 – 1738), the Royal Academy architect and theorist Jacques-François Blondel referred to dairies as “agreeable amusements” that elite patrons could add to an estate’s farm or basse cour. This would create “un lieu décoré” that they could “retreat [to] in the event of some storm.”24 Blondel’s text seems to play on the word “storm” (orage) as denoting any number of eruptions — meteorological events, psychological disturbances, chaotic households — from which dairies could provide a refuge. Years later, in his Cours d’architecture (1771 – 1777), Blondel introduced the term “laiterie parée,” or adorned dairy, as designating a place on the grounds of country estates where “young people” could amuse themselves with “rustic occupations.” Here, he associated the dairy not with the estate’s basse cour but with the more elegant pleasure garden or jardin de propreté. This garden is described as containing an “ornamental menagerie” with lavish parterres, fountains, and several “useful” and “agreeable” buildings, including a salon for “taking the air” and a laiterie parée that Blondel compares with Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s celebrated design for the prince de Condé’s dairy at Chantilly. In recalling such illustrious precedents for garden pavilions — not just Chantilly but also the menagerie at Versailles, which had its own grande laiterie built for Louis XIV — Blondel is reminded of their exemplary construction and clever use of ornament, which he entreats his students to study.25 In his Essai sur les jardins of 1774, one of the first treatises devoted exclusively to gardens, the wealthy financier and arts connoisseur Claude-Henri

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Watelet similarly described dairies as the ideal fusion of the “useful” and the “agreeable” in landscape design. However, he tended toward the latter by associating dairies with ferme ornées or ornamental farms, and by claiming that “excess” was “justified” in their materials and decoration. This was due to the natural perfection of their product, milk, and their ability to conjure a feeling of rejuvenation, “a happy state whose charming images the poets never tire recounting for our pleasure.” In composing this passage, Watelet was most likely thinking of his own pleasure dairy at Moulin Joli, the country retreat near Paris that he had acquired and begun developing in the 1750s. Watelet’s dairy, designed for him by an artist friend (most likely François Boucher), resembled a simple farm building on the outside but had a luxurious white marble interior. Watelet spoke of such dairies as the ideal place in which to partake of the pleasures of nature and perhaps a restorative “country meal composed essentially of milk and some fruit.”26 The earliest use of the term “laiterie d’agrément” appears to be in a feudal document from 1786 drawn up by the prince de Condé in reference to his family’s pleasure dairy at Chantilly.27 As noted, this dairy had been designed by Hardouin-Mansart in the late 1680s for one of the prince’s predecessors, and it was part of the château’s menagerie complex, a spectacular site for collecting and viewing animals that was the highlight of touring the Chantilly gardens. The Chantilly laiterie was the most admired and emulated of all ancien régime pleasure dairies, inspiring the design for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau dairy as well as M. Boutin’s laiterie at Tivoli. It had a high vaulted ceiling, elegant marble furnishings, and copious amounts of water that flowed from fountains inserted into the walls and floor to keep the milk cool (see Figure 2.10). At Chantilly, these furnishings were multicolored, with a red marble table in the center and a buffet of brèche violette marble that encircled the room. There were also shell-shaped water basins with ram’s head faucets that were later copied at the Hameau. From the time of its construction, the Condé family, who were prestigious members of the royal house of Bourbon, used their pleasure dairy to entertain guests and celebrate milestone rituals like births and weddings. During the latter, new brides were brought to the dairy and made the focus of an elaborate pastoral ceremony that heralded the abundance and beneficence of the Bourbon line, and of this branch in particular. This theme was reinforced through an emphasis on milk, a liquid associated with female fertility and with French royal symbolism through the fleur-de-lis, the white lily flower that, according to myth, had originated from drops of Juno’s breast milk spilled

INTRODUCTION

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onto the ground.28 Through participating in this ritual, new brides learned early on that their principal function was to produce heirs to maintain the royal family’s fecundity. In the 1786 document, the prince de Condé proposed the creation of a large working dairy farm near the Chantilly menagerie, comprising forty cows and their calves, to offset costs incurred by maintaining this expensive facility. He stipulated, however, that four of his best cows be reserved for the menagerie’s “laiterie d’agrément,” to provide milk for himself and his guests. He also noted that the pleasure dairy should continue to be supervised by his personal hunting captain, and not by the agronomist whom he planned to hire for his new farm. One of these hunting captains, Jacques Toudouze, kept a journal outlining the family’s activities on the Chantilly grounds between 1748 and 1785. It shows that the Condés used their pleasure dairy throughout this period, especially in the summer months, as a destination point for outdoor promenades, fêtes, and intimate gatherings where a light meal or collation would typically be served.29 Sometimes the reigning prince de Condé would host these gatherings, and sometimes his wife or daughters would do it, bringing ladies to the menagerie while the prince took the men hunting. As Toudouze attests, the pleasure dairy continued as it had since the 1680s to serve as an important venue for the family to express their social and gender identity, which is at least partly why they wanted to maintain it. At the same time, the prince’s pledge to build a profitable dairy farm indicates his endorsement of new ideas of agricultural improvement associated with the Physiocrats and the marquis de Mirabeau. With both dairies, the prince de Condé must have reasoned, he could enjoy the best of both worlds — tradition and innovation, pleasure and production. He could have his milk and drink it too. Pleasure dairies were not just about carefree play or fun. Their pleasure involved work, and their play was serious and culturally significant.30 The word “agrément” evoked a plurality of meanings and contexts. It was part of the “agreeable/useful” (l’agréable à l’utile) dichotomy that originated in classical dramatic theory, specifically in Aristotle’s Poetics, before Voltaire and others appropriated it to describe different categories of gardens. “Agrément” had also appeared in seventeenth-century texts on honnêteté that attempted to articulate aristocratic modes of behavior and experience. According to the chevalier de Méré, it denoted an expression of pleasure that was distinguishable from (and superior to) another form, bon air, because it was “more modest and discreet” and required a deeper and more sustained level of contemplation, thus “[appealing] most to people of sophisticated taste.”31 DAIRY QUEENS

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Laiteries d’agrément could elicit feelings of pleasure that were aesthetic or intellectual, physical or psychological, individual or collective — or a combination of all of these. For patrons such as Pompadour who were committed to neo-Hippocratic ideas of healthy living, they generated the satisfying feeling of having “a sound mind in a sound body.” For others, they stimulated emotions associated with eighteenth-century notions of sensibility and bienfaisance, which encouraged individuals to be more receptive to their environments and more mindful of helping others, especially those of a lower social station.32 Pleasure dairies provided an arena not just to experience but also to demonstrate or perform these emotions, a vital part of their appeal. Few dairy owners associated these sites with lustful or sexual pleasure, even though this had been an aspect of the pastoral genre since its inception. Erotic frisson was part of what made the genre so attractive to artists and patrons who enjoyed flirting with the boundaries between propriety and impropriety, virtue and vice. But it also made the pastoral volatile and prey to an ungovernable range of physical and psychological reactions, interpretations, and desires. A striking indication of the pastoral’s instability occurs in Rousseau’s novel La nouvelle Héloïse, when the protagonist, Saint-Preux, visits a pleasure dairy presided over by his former lover Julie, who has married another man and retired to a country estate. Although Julie’s dairy, surrounded by a splendid garden complex whose creation she has supervised, is supposed to embody her successful transformation into a virtuous wife, mother, and estate manager, in fact it only serves to ignite Saint-Preux’s repressed sexual desire, an emotion that he struggles, and fails, to keep in check.33 Rousseau’s admission that sometimes even the most well-intentioned of pastoral constructions could elicit responses antithetical to its aims helps explain the negative reception surrounding Marie-Antoinette’s garden complex at Petit Trianon, which centered on rumors about the subversive sexual acts the queen was supposedly committing in her gardens. Several historians have astutely analyzed this negative reception, and though I draw upon their findings in Chapter 4 of this book, my analysis seeks to widen the interpretive frame by situating it within a long history of pastoral architecture that was designed to redress anxieties about queenly abuses of power — some more successfully than others.34 As their connection to the manifold concept of agrément suggests, pleasure dairies were places to establish hierarchies and boundaries, but also to confound or undo them. This capacity was invoked in their interior design, which merged the categories of the “useful” and the “agreeable” while also making subtle, or not so subtle, distinctions between them. Ancien régime pleaINTRODUCTION

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sure dairies closely mimicked the design of working dairies as outlined in treatises on rural economy, notably Olivier de Serres’s Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs of 1600. De Serres had stipulated that a dairy’s interior be spacious and vaulted to promote air circulation, and paved with stone to keep the room and its contents cool. He had also advised locating them on the ground floor, with ample room for storage and an abundant water supply.35 These recommendations were designed to ensure hygiene, a dairy’s most important qualification and one that brought both “honor and profit” to its owner. Though de Serres did not specify how the interior layout should be arranged, by the seventeenth century it was standard for both working dairies and pleasure dairies to have a table in the center and a built-in shelf around the perimeter. With pleasure dairies, architects took the functional requirements for working dairies and transformed them into something gracious and monumental. Hardouin-Mansart’s design for the Chantilly laiterie was not just vaulted; it featured a soaring dome above tall arched windows and oculi decorated with floral garlands. Most pleasure dairies contained fancy ornamental details that were naturalistic or classically inspired, and they were all outfitted with expensive furnishings, especially marble tables, consoles, and shelves. Marble kept the milk products cool but it was also luxurious, and white marble, the color that was most often used, heightened the effect of purity. Pleasure dairy utensils resembled refined, fragile versions of utilitarian vessels: porcelain pans, cups, saucers, and even — in the case of the queen’s dairy at Rambouillet — milk buckets made of Sèvres porcelain that had been painted to resemble wood. Though dexterous consumers could use such vessels, they were primarily meant to be seen and admired and to present their elite owners in a flattering light. Along with other trompe l’oeil details like the coffers on the Hameau’s dairy ceiling, these elements reinforced the laiterie d’agrément’s essentially theatrical character, one that was not meant to be duplicitous but rather nuanced and self-aware in its delicate fusion of reality and fantasy, life and art. Throughout the ancien régime, architects and clients tested the use value of pleasure dairies by situating them within ornamental gardens, far away from the stables that supplied their products. Or they subverted functional requirements for visual and symbolic reasons, for example by adding large windows and doorways to enhance the dairy’s capacity for display — even though de Serres had cautioned against this practice because it brought warmth and dust into the interior, potentially spoiling the milk. From the 1750s, pleasure dairies began to appear as freestanding pavilions, whereas before they had DAIRY QUEENS

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been attached to a larger estate or garden complex. One of the first dairies to do so was a laiterie built in 1753 for Madame de Pompadour at Compiègne. It was not until the 1780s, however, that “preparation dairies” were developed as surrogate garden pavilions; prior to this era, dairy products had been fabricated in a smaller workroom off the pleasure dairy’s main showroom. While these architectural developments signaled the pleasure dairy’s growing importance as a site of elite expression, they were viewed by critics as signs of the aristocracy’s growing detachment from reality and their merely ornamental role in society. Regardless of whether they were attached or freestanding, pleasure dairies maintained a vital relationship to the various building and garden complexes — villas, menageries, hermitages, and hamlets — that had surrounded them beginning in the sixteenth century. These buildings provide a valuable visual and interpretive frame for the pleasure dairy, especially for those dairies that yield little information about their appearance or use. They are revealing not only in themselves but also in the ways that they changed or were adapted over time, according to cultural imperatives and the needs of individual patrons. Like pleasure dairies, I consider these buildings to be forms of “pastoral architecture” because they share an interest in masking complexity and blurring boundaries between rusticity and refinement, display and retreat. A few preliminary remarks about the pleasure dairy’s built environment are worth making here. In the sixteenth century, Catherine de’ Medici commissioned two dairies, one at Fontainebleau and another at Saint-Maur, a country house near Paris that she acquired in the 1560s. These dairies were part of larger villas or model farms, classical building types that had been revived during the Renaissance. Sixteenth-century patrons in Italy and France, the majority of whom were men, associated these buildings with the pastoral mode, specifically with the desire to blend work and leisure by withdrawing to a country retreat on the outskirts of the city or court. Villas and model farms represented a desire to experience (temporarily) the restorative benefits of rural living and agricultural pursuits and to promote these activities to others. Architecturally they employed simple geometric forms and ornamental details with references to mythology and the golden age. These traits appear in an elevation view of Catherine de’ Medici’s farm and dairy at Saint-Maur, and in building records that describe the lush, antique-inspired grotesques on the walls of her Fontainebleau laiterie. Such references could highlight a patron’s cultural awareness or political ambitions in associating their rule with a valorized classical past. They signified both for Catherine, who appropriated these building types from male predecessors but refashioned them INTRODUCTION

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to express her identity as queen mother and regent of France. Adding a dairy, with its connotations of fertility and maternal care, helped her do this. At Versailles and Chantilly in the second half of the seventeenth century, pleasure dairies were built on the grounds of vast menageries that were used for raising and displaying animals, as well as crops for the royal table. While they fulfilled some of the same practical and symbolic functions as model farms, menageries tended to be grander in design and presentation, and they emphasized themes of mastery and surveillance over the natural and human realms. This mastery was typically expressed in masculine terms, whereby menagerie owners not only lorded their collections over their male peers, but also demonstrated their ability to harness “feminine” nature and make her prosper. When Louis XIV assumed control of his father’s hunting estate at Versailles in the early 1660s, one of the first projects he undertook there was an impressive menagerie with a grande laiterie. With this site and its surrounding gardens, the king sought to display his ideology of absolute power, infinite bounty, and autonomous generation, or what Claire Goldstein has termed “royal parthenogenesis.”36 In the 1660s and 1670s, as we will see, the king reinforced these themes during diplomatic visits to the menagerie and pastoral fêtes that flaunted his success in taming nature, the fecund bodies of his mistresses, and the disobedient noblewomen who had opposed him during the Fronde (1648 – 1652). Years later Louis XIV added a second, smaller dairy to the menagerie when he renovated the complex and gave it to Marie-Adélaïde, duchesse de Bourgogne, the child bride of one of his heirs. Brought to Versailles as part of a peace agreement between France and her native Savoy, Marie-Adélaïde and her young husband embodied the hope that the crown, whose reputation had been tarnished through endless wars, famine, and the selling of noble offices, might reestablish harmony and prosperity by promoting estate management and noble reform. Marie-Adélaïde enacted this role at the dairy that was created for her in one of the menagerie’s former animal courts. There she assumed the role of a virtuous noble estate manager or seigneuse, manufacturing dairy products for the king and courtiers who could watch her activities from a central viewing platform. In these performances she mimicked and brought to life the milkmaids and other industrious “good girls” who had been painted on the walls of her apartment at the menagerie for didactic purposes.37 Pleasure dairies continued to be built by men for women at royal menageries in the eighteenth century, including the laiterie created by the comte d’Angiviller for Marie-Antoinette at Rambouillet in the 1780s. In DAIRY QUEENS

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this era, dairies gained in stature while menageries became more modest, as the monarchy attempted to downplay outward luxury and emphasize a more sober commitment to estate management. At the same time, this shift underscored the ongoing attempt on the part of male rulers to reform or tame the women for whom they were built. This was notably the case with foreignborn women like Marie-Antoinette and the duchesse de Bourgogne, who had been imported to France for political and economic reasons — not unlike the Swiss cows and other animals housed at these menageries, who were also expected to assimilate, behave well, and breed. Pleasure dairies, as this analogy suggests, could be sites of containment as well as liberation for women. Sometimes they were both at once. Madame de Pompadour’s pleasure dairies were associated with the building type of the hermitage. Originally a space of religious withdrawal and contemplation, eighteenth-century hermitages proclaimed the new secular religion of pastoral retreat. As garden pavilions built for royalty and the elite, hermitages enabled their owners to profess (or, in some cases, parody) a lack of interest in material possessions and undertake a program of purification and self-improvement. They were typically smaller and more intimate than villas or menageries, reflecting their focus on individual rather than social or political regeneration. Like pleasure dairies, hermitages were often quite simple on the outside but elegantly appointed within, offering their patrons comfort, leisure, and a sense of privacy. Although traditionally associated with men, eighteenth-century hermitages were associated with the persona of the “female hermit,” an enlightened woman who eschewed courtly pleasures for a superior form of physical, emotional, and intellectual development.38 Pompadour sought to embody this persona by using her hermitages as therapeutic health retreats that professed the benefits of nature and milk. Marie-Antoinette’s dairies were situated in hamlets that, unlike hermitages, were communal rather than personal spaces, resembling rural villages in Normandy and the Ile-de-France. Members of the French elite began erecting hamlets in their gardens in the late eighteenth century out of a desire, both nostalgic and reform-minded, to commune with the land and its inhabitants, inspired by Rousseau, the Physiocrats, and sensible pastoral poets like Saint-Lambert and Delille. Hamlets at Versailles and elsewhere in France evoked rural architecture in an artful or picturesque way, by using thatched roofs, half-timbering, and trompe l’oeil “cracks” to create a look of charming disrepair. Their outward appearance belied the fact that they were encircled by palatial gardens and that their interiors were typically more refined than their exteriors, in keeping with elite tastes. Peasants were occasionally invited INTRODUCTION

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to hamlets and other pastoral sites during dances and other fêtes, and patrons sometimes even pretended they were peasants or masqueraded as them; but feudal hierarchies, and the aristocracy’s “natural” authority over the agrarian and servant classes, were never in doubt.39 Marie-Antoinette built her Hameau to escape court formality but also to carve out her own separate empire where, like Rousseau’s Julie, she imagined herself presiding over a pastoral community of happy and productive farm laborers and female friends. Recalling Catherine de’ Medici’s model farm and dairy at Fontainebleau from the sixteenth century, the Hameau was a matriarchal environment that celebrated the contributions of royal women and provided an alternative to patriarchal French rule. Part of what made the Hameau and its dairy so threatening to outsiders was that it embodied feminine authority and self-governance, the culmination of a trend that Catherine de’ Medici had initiated more than two centuries before.

ORgANIzATION Of ThE BOOk

 Each of the subsequent chapters in Dairy Queens begins with an auspicious moment in the lives of pleasure dairies and their owners. Chapter 1, which opens with the 1564 banquet that Catherine de’ Medici organized at her Fontainebleau laiterie, focuses on this site and, to a lesser extent, on another dairy that she built at Saint-Maur outside of Paris. With these two dairies, Catherine attempted both to resurrect a place from her childhood — the cascina, or dairy farm, that her great-grandfather Lorenzo de’ Medici had built outside of Florence in the late 1470s — and to link these buildings to a native French tradition of pastoral literature as developed by Ronsard. Built while she was governing as regent in a time of intense personal and political crisis, Catherine’s dairy at Fontainebleau helped articulate and naturalize her precarious position at court — as a woman, a female ruler without a king, a foreigner, and a Medici — by symbolizing Arcadian prosperity, maternal care, and the natural right of rule. Despite its marginal location, the site was central to Catherine’s efforts to situate herself within a dominant discourse of kingly rule and to rewrite that discourse in a language made for queens. Both of Catherine de’ Medici’s dairies survived into the eighteenth century, and they influenced the development of this building type, particularly at Versailles, where Louis XIV commissioned an extravagant menagerie and dairy not long after he visited the Fontainebleau dairy in the summer of DAIRY QUEENS

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1661. Chapter 2 analyzes the king’s program of pastoral architecture and fêtes as key elements in shaping his royal image, a crucial aspect of which was his ability to be seen conquering and ruling both nature and women. At the same time, pastoral architecture and pleasure dairies were also useful to his mistress, Madame de Montespan, in solidifying her status at court, and to members of the ancien nobility — especially noblewomen like La Grande Mademoiselle — who conversely wanted to distance themselves from the king and protest their marginalization under his absolute rule. In the 1690s, Louis XIV’s menagerie became associated with new ideas about reforming the nobility by improving agriculture and domesticating women. These ideas were expressed in the writings of Fénelon and Madame de Maintenon, and they were employed by the duchesse de Bourgogne in the dairy that was built for her onsite. Chapter 2 opens with a description of this dairy’s construction and then moves back in time to trace the sexual politics of the menagerie and other pastoral sites during the long reign of the Sun King. Chapter 3 focuses on the pleasure dairies and garden retreats created for Madame de Pompadour in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Beginning with her hermitage at Versailles, which was constructed on a piece of land that Louis XV had given her at Versailles in 1748, Pompadour commissioned numerous works of pastoral architecture to establish strong roots in the royal landscape and convey her authority as maîtresse-en-titre, a position that she held for nearly two decades. Pompadour also used these sites to position herself in relation to evolving ideas about women and nature, and a new conception of the body as malleable and fluid. These theories were related to the neoHippocratic medical revival and to a new scientific and cultural understanding of milk, a medicinal remedy that was recommended for mondain women to prevent or cure a variety of illnesses. Fashioning herself as an Enlightened arts patron and a paragon of good health, Pompadour embraced these ideas in her architectural projects; in new forms of Sèvres drinking vessels that she promoted; and in pastoral portraits like Carle Van Loo’s c. 1754 – 1755 depiction of her as “La belle jardinière” (see Figure 3.14). Chapter 4 begins in August 1785, during Marie-Antoinette’s three-week sojourn at Petit Trianon and the Hameau. It was a particularly eventful summer on the farm: both dairies had been put into operation, and a herd of plump dairy cows had been imported from Switzerland. But beyond the walls of this idyllic community, things were not so rose-colored. Members of the Parisian press were excoriating the queen for her purported involvement in the Diamond Necklace scandal, in which she was said to have arranged a secret meeting in the gardens of Versailles to procure an extravagant piece of INTRODUCTION

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jewelry.40 This was but one of many attacks on the queen that accused her of misbehaving in the palace gardens, despoiling what had been thought of as a place of purity and virtue and was now seen as a locus of depravity and greed. Other royal women, including Madame de Balbi, for whom the architect Chalgrin built a dairy in Luxembourg Gardens that same summer, were similarly pilloried for sponsoring indulgent building projects that seemed to travesty agricultural and social improvement. In documenting the proliferation of dairies and hamlets in and around Paris and Versailles in the 1770s and 1780s, Chapter 3 explores the widespread popularity of these buildings and the divergent interpretations to which they were subjected. While some architects and patrons viewed pleasure dairies as sincere bids for social and moral reform, others, like Carmontelle, reveled in their artifice and ambiguity, or exploited their commodity status for personal gain. By the time that Marie-Antoinette showed favor for them, not only had the symbolic language of pastoral art and architecture — a genre that was already, by its nature, unstable — broken down even further, but it also left her vulnerable to attacks in ways that she did not foresee or comprehend. The final chapter opens with Marie-Antoinette’s visit in June 1787 to her newly completed pleasure dairy at Rambouillet. The construction and decoration of this building was painstakingly overseen by Louis XVI’s building administrator, the comte d’Angiviller, perhaps to compensate for the fact that he had not been consulted on the design of Trianon or the Hameau. The Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet diverged from the rustic exterior of the Hameau dairy by taking the form of a neoclassical temple. The interior of this dairy, with its large, naturalistic grotto at the far end, comprised an antique-inspired decorative program with “Etruscan” furniture by Georges Jacob, Arcadian sculptures by Pierre Julien, and Sèvres porcelain milk vessels that were based on prototypes from Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of these vessels was a trompe l’oeil cup in the shape of a woman’s breast, rumored to have been modeled after Marie-Antoinette’s own. Along with other decorative devices including the marble medallion of a mother nursing her infant, the breast cup reinforced the dairy’s conflation of human with animal milk, and was part of a larger endorsement of maternal breastfeeding as a means of social and political renewal. Unlike other pleasure dairies discussed in this book, the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet was built without the input of its patron, Marie-Antoinette. As such, I argue that it offered d’Angiviller the opportunity to enact royal regeneration on his terms, and to provide a corrective to the queen’s scandalous, distasteful, and domineering behavior in the gardens of Versailles. DAIRY QUEENS

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D’Angiviller’s own fantasy of royal renewal was based on reforming French aesthetics, revitalizing arts and manufactures, and sponsoring agricultural improvement, ambitions that he pursued at the Rambouillet laiterie and at an experimental garden and sheep farm that he built next to the site. D’Angiviller also wanted to recover the patriarchal image of the monarchy from previous eras, and to accomplish this he devised an architectural environment that was designed to put the queen in her place. The centerpiece of the Queen’s Dairy was an iconographic program based on the mythological story of Amalthea, the nymph who had nursed Jupiter with goat’s milk when he was separated from his mother and father. Rich with political and symbolic undertones, the myth had been adopted by French rulers, including Catherine de’ Medici and Louis XIV, for a variety of purposes throughout the ancien régime. At Rambouillet, I argue, Amalthea was employed to represent an allegory of feminine virtue and subservience that would supplant Marie-Antoinette’s dominant image. But d’Angiviller’s desire to realize this vision was frustrated by his failure to separate the royal body from that of the queen, which became synonymous, on the eve of the Revolution, with degeneration rather than renewal, destruction rather than rebirth.

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1

Catherine de’ Medici, The French Cybele

In the middle of this same park is another logis de plaisance called the My-voie . . . where there is a beautiful garden and some canals and fountains. The queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, bought this place where she had a menagerie set up with some cattle and a beautiful dairy, in order to go and amuse herself, keep cool and consume milk products during the summer. Father P ierre Dan , Le trésor des merveilles de la maison

royale de Fontainebleau (1642)

The outskirts of Fontainebleau palace, February 13, 1564: It was the Sunday before Lent, and a carnival atmosphere was in the air. For the past week the French court had been indulging in festivities to kick off an elaborate Royal Tour that their new king, Charles IX (1550 – 1574), was about to embark on with his mother, Catherine de’ Medici (1519 – 1589). The tour, which lasted two years and entailed a visit to all parts of the realm, was designed to present Charles IX to his people and demonstrate the power and resilience of the monarchy.1 The political stakes of this endeavor were high. Charles, a young teenager, had recently been declared of age in August of 1563; for the first three years of his reign his mother had served as his regent. He had risen to power during an incredibly tumultuous period in which his father, King Henri II (Catherine de’ Medici’s husband), had been accidentally killed during a jousting tournament, and his elder brother, Francis II, had ruled for just one year before dying of a brain abscess in 1560. Some members of the nobility, including the ambitious Guise family, had seen this as an opportunity to question the strength of the Valois dynasty, to which Charles and his family belonged. To make matters worse, the first of the Wars of Religion, a conflict that wreaked havoc on France for the rest of the century, broke out in March of 1562.2 In her capacity as regent, Catherine de’ Medici had negotiated a fragile peace in 1563, but tensions still ran high and colored the strenuous celebrations that were held in advance of the Royal Tour. Many of these fêtes were staged in and around the gardens at Fontainebleau, reinforcing the theme of a renewed golden age. Those that were hosted by high-ranking male members of the court, including the cardinal de Bourbon and the duc d’Orléans, featured lavish chivalric combats as their principal form of entertainment. But Catherine, perhaps having seen enough violence, chose a pastoral rather than a martial theme for the fête that she organized on Sunday, February 13. That morning, she led courtiers beyond the palace grounds into the forest, where she had established a model farm known as the Mi-voie a few years earlier. (The name “Mi-voie” derived from the site’s location “midway” between the palace of Fontainebleau and the nearby parish of Avon.)3 The centerpiece of her farm was an elegant pleasure dairy decorated with a grotto, painted grotesques, and gilded astrological motifs, all of which proclaimed the natural abundance and beneficence of the site and its patron. DAIRY QUEENS

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Along with a visit to her farm, Catherine treated courtiers to a latemorning banquet and a performance at the palace based on Ludovico Ariosto’s pastoral epic Orlando furioso.4 The court poet Pierre de Ronsard also wrote a pastoral poem or Bergerie in honor of the occasion that may have been performed at the Mi-voie. Its tale of woodland shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking in an Arcadian landscape of gardens, fertile fields, and milk contained a political subtext heralding the role that Catherine, who is referred to in the poem as “the mother of our Gods, the French Cybele,” had played in returning peace and prosperity to France.5 Like the mythological earth mother Cybele, to whom she is compared, Catherine is described as a fertile regenerator: “She restored to us our fields and our woods,” Ronsard wrote, “she made us return to our former pastures, she gave us back our homes, and also drove fear and care far from us.”6 Ronsard wrote the poem to be read aloud by the royal children, who accompanied Catherine during her outing to the Mi-voie. If they did in fact perform the poem at her farm, as Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm-Maddox have suggested, the Bergerie’s message would have been enhanced not only by the bucolic setting but also by these youthful readers, who embodied the crown’s robust future and their mother’s contribution to its health and stability. The Mi-voie and its dairy featured prominently in the events leading up to the Royal Tour, but the building’s significance for Catherine extended far beyond the life of this festival. The Mi-voie was more than just a farming retreat, more than just a place for the queen mother to “amuse herself, keep cool and consume milk products during the summer,” as Father Dan wrote in his 1642 guidebook to Fontainebleau. In design and program, this site, along with a second model farm and dairy that Catherine built at Saint-Maur near Paris in the early 1570s, provided her with an arena in which to express her political identity and role at court. Inspired by new cultural imperatives of villa life, pastoral rejuvenation, and estate management, Catherine used her farming retreats to combine work (negotium) with leisure (otium), and to demonstrate her authority while appearing to remain on the sidelines, engaged in domestic activities like dairying that were deemed appropriate for women.7 These venues also allowed her to solidify her connection to the Valois monarchy, by signifying her attachment to her offspring and her rootedness in French soil. Finally, in their emphasis on fertility, nurture, and milk, they underscored her contribution to the state as distinctly feminine and maternal, initiating an architectural language of female political agency that would resonate for centuries in pleasure dairies (laiteries d’agrément) and other forms of pastoral performance art. CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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THE MI-Vo IE AT FoNTAINEBLEAU

 Catherine de’ Medici had been sent to France from Italy in 1533 to marry King Francis I’s second son, Henri. Her uncle, Pope Clement VII, had brokered this arrangement to forge an alliance between France and the papacy, but he died the following year, leaving her dowry only partially paid. Surrounded by courtiers who had begun to question the logic of the match, Catherine tried to demonstrate her usefulness in other ways, by providing heirs for the throne. Yet despite her best efforts she was unable to conceive and bear a child for the first decade of her marriage, a situation that led the crown to consider replacing her. To add to her humiliation, her husband ignored her in favor of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. This problem continued even after she had become queen of France (in 1547), and it lasted until Henri’s death in 1559. Little by little, Catherine succeeded in gaining the respect and admiration of the court. She first endeared herself to her father-in-law by bravely offering to go back home, and by accompanying him on hunting expeditions, as Marie-Antoinette would later do with Louis XV. Once she became queen, Catherine was applauded for accepting her husband’s infidelity and remaining discreet about it, not unlike political wives of more recent times. Most important — given that many considered it to be her raison d’être — she overcame her fertility troubles and went on to bear ten children, three of whom later became king of France. In 1553, Catherine purchased the Mi-voie from Aloph de l’Hôpital, whose father had been governor of the palace at Fontainebleau. At the time she may have been looking for a place to begin asserting her independence. The property consisted of a small tract of land (approximately 5 – 6 acres) with a farmhouse, a garden, a stable, a granary, and a sheepfold.8 It was about five hundred yards from the main palace and just outside the king’s domain, a situation that may have appealed to its new owner. No sixteenth-century images survive of the Mi-voie, which was torn down in 1702, but the site appears on a map of Fontainebleau published in 1700 by Nicolas de Fer (Figure 1.1). Located in the center of the map about two-thirds of the way down, the Mi-voie is represented as a small enclosed complex of rectangular buildings, gardens, and canals surrounded by forest. In the 1550s and 1560s the site was even more secluded and rustic than it appears on de Fer’s plan, given that the Grand Canal and formal gardens (shown to the left of the property) did

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Figure 1.1 Nicolas de Fer, view of the château and gardens at Fontainebleau from L’atlas curieux (1700). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

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Figure 1.2 Plan of Catherine de’ Medici’s Mi-voie at Fontainebleau, 1693. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, Cartes et plans, VA LX

not yet exist. They were added in the early seventeenth century by Henri IV, who annexed the Mi-voie and made it part of the royal park.9 Catherine paid 1,150 livres for her new farm. Given that her husband gave her an allowance of 200,000 livres, this was a modest sum.10 For the first few years that she owned it, she did not do much with the property. However, it may have whetted her appetite for land ownership, because in 1556 she had Henri II transfer to her the seigneurie of Montceaux near Paris. One year later she hired royal architect Philibert de l’Orme to design a threestory, classically inspired garden pavilion and a grotto on the grounds of the Montceaux estate, next to an outdoor pall-mall court.11 After her husband died in 1559 and she became queen mother and regent, Catherine began commissioning works of art and architecture on a grand scale. One of her first projects was renovating the Mi-voie, which she charged to the royal accounts beginning in 1560. The most significant change to the property was the addition of a lavish dairy that was housed in a new building and decorated under the supervision of Francesco Primaticcio.12 DAIRY QUEENS

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It quickly became the signature space at the Mi-voie, given that the royal accounts refer to the entire complex as the Dairy, or Lecterie (Laiterie). Other sources have sometimes referred to the Mi-voie as the Cowhouse, or Vacherie, because of the dairy cows that were kept onsite. In addition to the dairy and cow stable, the Mi-voie contained a residential apartment with a reception room, a study, and a bedroom. According to the accounts, there was also an allée or passageway in the form of a grotto that linked the dairy to the reception room. A plan of the Mi-voie made by royal architects in 1693 offers a sense of the original layout (although some changes could have been made in the intervening years) and verdant setting (Figure 1.2). The plan indicates three L-shaped buildings that may have housed the dairy, the apartment, and the cow stable — stalls are shown in one of the buildings. Apart from their clean lines and classical proportions, these buildings would have been spare and unadorned on the exterior, with plain stone walls, windows, chimneys, and pitched roofs. This is how they appear, peeking out of the trees, in a bird’s-eye view of Fontainebleau from the late seventeenth century,13 and it also fits the description of the farm (cassine) that Catherine built at Saint-Maur, according to an illustration of that site from 1701 (see Figure 1.12). V ILLA LIFE IN SIxTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE AND ITALY

 The Mi-voie exemplifies Catherine’s love of nature, gardens, and architecture, passions that she shared with her Medici forebears and expressed in numerous commissions.14 It also embodies the practice of villeggiatura, or withdrawal to one’s country estate, a popular pastime in antiquity that was revived in the early Renaissance. In his mid-fifteenth-century treatise De re aedificatoria, Leon Battista Alberti recommended that “gentlemen” construct villas for reasons of health, pleasure, and profit (through farming), and that they establish them close to towns so that they were easily accessible. Alberti celebrated the villa’s openness to nature and the “allures of license and delight” that were allowed in its design, which could be rustic and simple, or luxurious and elegant, or both.15 Though sharing similarities with this building type, the Mi-voie wasn’t grand enough to be a villa — it was more like a model farm. In 1642, Father Dan described it as a “menagerie,” a term that denoted a small farm for raising domestic animals for food, or a place to observe these and CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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other creatures.16 Built for a gentlewoman, Catherine’s retreat blended these dual interests in farming and display. The Mi-voie combined a longing to experience villa life with a desire to advertise this new mode of living to courtiers. Although villeggiatura was not new to the French nobility — in the late medieval period, Charles V and other royal family members had built small country houses near their palaces to convalesce, hunt, and engage in pastoral pleasures — the practice gained new significance in the first half of the sixteenth century, partly through the influence of Italian models.17 Villas near Naples and elsewhere captured the imagination of the French during the Italian Wars (1494 – 1559). Upon his return from Italy, Francis I persuaded several Italian artists and architects, among them Sebastiano Serlio, to join him in France. Architectural and agricultural treatises celebrating villa life were also translated into French in this period, including Vitruvius in 1547, Alberti in 1553 (Catherine owned both of these books), and three editions of Columella’s De re rustica in the 1550s.18 At the same time, French authors began publishing their own books on agriculture and estate management. Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault’s L’agriculture et maison rustique (1564) inaugurated a long tradition of French writings on the subject, from Olivier de Serres’s Le théâtre d’agriculture (1600) to the Physiocratic texts of François Quesnay. Villas also responded to a growing need on the part of the French elite to reside in closer proximity to the court. Strengthening of the monarchy under Francis I (ruled 1515 – 1547) meant that some members of the ancien nobility were obliged to abandon their feudal estates and take up positions as court administrators and aristocrats. In their new role as ornaments to the king they embraced a refined, aestheticized way of life that was reflected in the satellite residences they built near the crown, in the Loire Valley and elsewhere. Architecturally, these “sham castles” retained elements of their former feudal châteaux — such as ramparts, towers, and crenels — that had originally been designed for defensive purposes, but that now stood as vestigial markers of status and prestige.19 Similarly, the ornamental farms and gardens that they created around these residences served as pointed reminders of the agricultural landscape they had left behind or now managed from a distance. It is no accident that the pleasure dairy or laiterie d’agrément, a building type that is predicated on an embellished, simulated, or nostalgic attachment to the land and its products, first appeared around the time of this political and cultural transition. It was not only the feudal or landed nobility who participated in this phenomenon. In the sixteenth century recently ennobled court functionaries, DAIRY QUEENS

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French cardinals, and socially aspirant bourgeoisie also built country houses near palaces and cities to emulate their social betters and demonstrate their worthiness. This practice escalated in the seventeenth century, notably during the reign of Louis XIV, and was revived again around 1750 partly as a result of the back-to-nature campaign promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The impact that these social and economic forces had on architecture and landscape design remained pronounced throughout the eighteenth century and especially in the two decades prior to the French Revolution, a period that witnessed a veritable explosion of ornamental farms and dairies in the vicinity of Paris. At the top of this pyramid of aristocratic display was the monarchy, which had a constant need to reaffirm a commitment to the land in literal and symbolic terms. Catherine assumed this role in the early 1560s, when she became regent and oversaw the decoration of the Mi-voie. Though she does not refer to this site in her correspondence, she does describe her reasoning behind acquiring a second villa at Saint-Maur outside of Paris in 1563, and building a farm or cassine with a dairy there a few years later. Her motivations, which included a wish to retire — or, at least, appear to retire — from court politics, are put forth in a letter that she wrote to her cousin, Cosimo I de’ Medici, in October 1571: After having done so much work in the service of my children, I desire, when we are near Paris, to have some property where I might spend my time in honest pleasures . . . as I have acquired a house for this purpose, called Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, I want to build a farm (cassine) there, and would like to have all sorts of cheeses, milk products, jams, saleures, salads, and fruits; and, knowing that, having the same desire, you have done a similar thing, I would like for you to please procure people for me who can do this, and finally so that you understand my conception, I am sending you a mémoire and measurements.20 In her letter, Catherine begins by proposing a healthy balance between work (negotium) and “honest pleasures,” or leisure (otium), a dichotomy that was central to the experience of villa life. In the fifteenth century, the relative merits of work and leisure, or the active and contemplative lives, had been debated among humanists like Alberti and Catherine’s great-grandfather, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Leisure, or otium, was associated with the countryside and signaled a retreat from civic or courtly duty and military service. In her letter, Catherine refers to her responsibilities at court but also to her role as a CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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hardworking mother, expanding the definition of negotium to include work performed by women. Given the date of her letter, she may be specifically referring to an elaborate Parisian entrance ceremony that she had planned in 1571 for her son, Charles IX, to celebrate his marriage. Cosimo I de’ Medici was an appropriate person with whom to discuss the issue of retirement. Though he held the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1571, he had transferred many of his responsibilities as ruler to his son, Francesco I, seven years before, and since then he had spent a lot of time at the Medici villas of Castello and Poggio a Caiano near Florence. There he fished, planted gardens, made cheese — some of which he gave away as gifts to foreign dignitaries — and drank milk for his health, as the ancient writer Pliny the Younger had recommended in his villa letters.21 Along with consuming farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, these were also activities that Catherine pursued at her pastoral retreats. Yet Catherine continued to maintain an active role in state affairs long after her son acceded to the throne. Her critics resented her for this, including the Huguenot writer Henri Estienne, to whom a libelous pamphlet published against her in 1575 is attributed.22 Some of this resentment was directed at her Medici origins (many still viewed them as venal bankers), and some of it stemmed from sexism. In France, women were barred from inheriting the throne under the Salic law — an early medieval legal code that was revived and consolidated in the fifteenth century — and those who claimed authority as regents or advisors were greeted with suspicion. As Katherine Crawford has shown, Catherine dealt with this problem over the years by professing to stay within the boundaries of accepted female behavior and by constantly referring to her satellite roles as “wife, mother, and widow,” even as she used these roles to create “a new logic of political entitlement.”23 Catherine’s dairy farms at Fontainebleau and Saint-Maur, both of which emphasized feminine domestic economy and the practice of retreat, were vital aspects of the gendered persona she created at court. Toward the end of her letter to Cosimo, Catherine alludes to the creative role that she took in designing her Saint-Maur farm, referring to it as “my conception.” The phrase evokes a Renaissance theory of patronage that was described in a fifteenth-century treatise by the architect Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete. Filarete compared the symbiotic role of architect and patron to that of two parents, with the patron acting as the father in “conceiving” the building, and the architect acting as the mother in “carrying” and giving birth to it. Filarete’s theory invoked classical and Renaissance theories of generation, whereby the father’s role was considered active and the DAIRY QUEENS

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mother’s was passive — she supplied the “vessel.” Aristotle had analogized this process to that of making cheese and other dairy products, in which the mother’s body provided the “milk” or raw matter and the father supplied the rennet, or active agent, that set the process in motion.24 Catherine de’ Medici, however, resisted this binary construct of active (male)/passive (female) by assuming both roles in her patronage. Finally, she writes in her letter to Cosimo that she has drawn up a work order and measurements for the cassine. This reference underscores the active role that she took in her building projects, an idea that is also indicated by her correspondence with Primaticcio, with whom she collaborated on several designs (including the Mi-voie) over the years. In dedicating his Premier tome de l’architecture (1567) to Catherine, Philibert de l’Orme complimented the queen mother on her skill at making detailed, accomplished renderings of her own buildings.25

THE CASCINA AT PoggIo A CAIANo

 Catherine’s architectural activities recall those of her great-grandfather Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449 – 1492). In the 1480s, he had collaborated with Giuliano da Sangallo on the design of his family’s villa at Poggio a Caiano.26 Catherine likely alludes to this villa and its working dairy farm, known as the Cascina, in her letter to Cosimo. Certainly she was aware of the Cascina’s existence, since she spent part of her childhood at Poggio a Caiano during the Florentine uprisings of the 1520s, and stayed there again in 1533 before she left for France.27 It is tempting to suggest that she was thinking of Lorenzo’s dairy when she developed the Mivoie and her Saint-Maur cassine, a term that evokes the Italian word cascina (farmstead) though it was also used more broadly by the sixteenth-century French elite to mean “country house.”28 Whether or not there was a direct connection between Catherine’s dairies and Lorenzo’s Cascina, the latter is worth describing as a prototype for pastoral retreats in both Italy and France. Lorenzo de’ Medici set up the Cascina at Poggio a Caiano in the spring of 1477, several years before he broke ground on the main villa. The dairy survives today in altered form (Figure 1.3). Situated in the midst of the estate’s agricultural fields, some distance from the main residence, it resembled an imposing, castellated fortress, with thick stone walls surrounded by a moat. Four rectangular building blocks enclosed a central pool; three of CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Figure 1.3 Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Cascina at Poggio a Caiano, c. 1477. Photo: by author

these blocks were used to house animals, and the fourth contained production facilities and living quarters. According to an inventory made after his death, one of Lorenzo’s daughters, Mona Maddalena, had an apartment in the Cascina; she was the only family member to do so.29 Because she was a sickly child, she may have resided there on occasion to take the “milk cure,” whose health benefits had been touted in a 1477 treatise by the Lombard physician Pantaleone de Confienza. Or perhaps she stayed there so that her father’s servants could teach her how to make dairy products. Such domestic activities were recommended as appropriate pastimes for young women — even women from royal and elite families — in Renaissance household manuals. The Florentine writer Michele Verino, who described the Cascina around 1487, noted the presence there of “a great number of most fertile and productive cows, which afford a quantity of cheese, equal to the supply of the city and vicinity of Florence.” Lorenzo de’ Medici had imported the cows from Lombardy a decade earlier, so that Florence would not have to rely on Lombardy for its milk products. He may have also had a personal incentive to invest in agricultural pursuits, which was to offset losses incurred through banking.30 However, his motivation was equally political and symbolic, insofar as the Cascina allowed Lorenzo to fashion himself as a gentleman DAIRY QUEENS

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farmer — not a mere banker — whose capable land management had ensured Florence’s prosperity. As the city’s unofficial ruler, Lorenzo ascribed to a “self-endorsing fusion of pastoral and georgic” that was both practical and philosophical, active and contemplative.31 He wrote pastoral poetry with his humanist friends while retreating to his villa in times of political crisis, where he used this space to retool his image. Poggio a Caiano’s symbolic potential is expressed in a poem that Angelo Poliziano dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1485. Part of a series of pastoral poems (known as the Silvae) that Poliziano wrote in imitation of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, this one was named “Ambra” after an old farmhouse on the estate. The story follows the adventures of a wood nymph, but the narrative is mostly just a pretext for lauding Poggio a Caiano’s lush and prosperous landscape. References to milk proliferate, including descriptions of pregnant cattle (“Whose swelling teats the milky rill distends”) and dairying (“Mean time the milk in spacious coppers boils, With arms upstript the elder rustic toils”).32 Poliziano portrays the estate as a modern-day Arcadia, whose pastoral virtues reflect positively on its patron. The villa emerges as a sign of Lorenzo’s beneficent authority, one that augurs a new golden age for Florence. Numerous references to milk in the poem supplement this transition by evoking a sense of rebirth and a return to Arcadian origins, a landscape that is removed in time and space. Catherine de’ Medici’s dairies were smaller than the Cascina, and they probably provided just enough milk for the queen mother, her family, and a few courtiers. But their political message was no less significant, especially in the context of court gatherings like the Mi-voie banquet of 1564. On that occasion, her message was made all the more palatable by the site’s apparent modesty and rusticity. As an architectural analogue of the pastoral literary mode, the Mi-voie adopted a simple, rustic “veil,” as George Puttenham had described the workings of the pastoral in 1589, in order to “insinuate and glance at greater matters.”33 In this case the “greater matter” concerned Catherine’s political authority and identity, which she conveyed through the building itself and through a rich decorative program that emphasized her aesthetic tastes, maternal attributes, and natural right of rule. In doing so she expanded the expressive capacity of model farms and dairies into something that celebrated the accomplishments of royal women — and this woman in particular.

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gRoT ToES, gRoTESQUES, AND A S TRoLogICAL SIgNS: D ECoRATINg CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI’S DAIRY

 To achieve its full impact, the Mi-voie depended on the element of surprise: not just the surprise of leaving the palace and entering an unfamiliar, bucolic realm, but also the shock of entering the dairy and seeing the rich, intricate ornament that covered its walls. The striking contrast between the dairy’s interior and its exterior was part of what made the complex “mi-champêtre, mi-mondaine” (“half-rustic, half-worldly”), in the words of Louis Dimier.34 A team of skilled designers carried out this ornamental scheme under the supervision of Francesco Primaticcio, whom Catherine de’ Medici had appointed royal building director two days after her husband’s death in 1559. Primaticcio replaced Philibert de l’Orme, who had spent much of the previous decade working on architectural projects for Henri II’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers. In addition to sharing Catherine’s Italian heritage, Primaticcio had extensive experience collaborating on building schemes for the French court. He had also decorated pleasure retreats in Italy, notably the Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, a project that he had worked on with his teacher, Giulio Romano, before departing for France in 1531. Giulio had sent him to France at the request of Francis I, who had asked for an accomplished Italian artist to assist him with Fontainebleau. Primaticcio had supervised nearly all of the decoration at Fontainebleau after the death of Rosso Fiorentino in 1540. For the Mi-voie, he directed the work of the painters and artisans Nicolò dell’Abate, Gaspard Mazery, Jacques Renoust, and Ruggiero de Ruggieri; the sculptor Frémin Roussel; and the gilder Nicolas Hachette. Two of these artists, Nicolò and Ruggiero, hailed from the same Emilian region in Italy as Primaticcio.35 The Mi-voie’s decoration comprised four main components: grotesque ornament, astrological references, rusticated stonework, and narrative tableaux that were set in stucco bas-relief. Nicolò dell’Abate also executed a painting for the dairy’s interior that was installed around 1570. Information about the dairy’s decoration comes from the royal building accounts and is frustratingly limited, in that the accounts only list the work that was done without describing its appearance. (They also document when artists were DAIRY QUEENS

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paid for their decorative work, not necessarily when they executed it, meaning that the dates given in the accounts often represent a period sometime after the work was completed.) Still, it is possible to analyze the dairy’s decorative program by comparing it to similar architectural schemes executed at Fontainebleau and other elite residences around this time. After summarizing the information from the royal accounts, I will analyze each component independently and then consider the project as a whole. In 1560, Gaspard Mazery and Jacques Renoust were paid for painting grotesques on the walls of the dairy’s salle, or reception room. In one of the account entries, this room is referred to as a “grande salle,” which suggests that it was large and used for entertainment purposes. Along with Nicolò dell’Abate, these artists executed additional grotesques and other painted work in the salle, the dairy, and the bedroom around 1562. That same year, Frémin Roussel received payment for creating a zodiac in plaster, along with three histories (historical or narrative scenes) in stucco bas-relief for the walls of the laiterie.36 In 1562, Nicolas Hachette was paid for gilding a portion of the dairy’s ornament, possibly the astrological signs and other motifs. The following year, Ruggiero received 135 livres for painting done “in the grotesque style as well as in mixed stones and other colors” for the allée, or outdoor passageway, that led from the dairy to the reception room.37 Additional grotesques, “ordered by master Francesco Primaticcio,” were added to the reception room and the study in 1566. Last but not least was Nicolò’s painting, for which he received payment in 1570. Although the subject of this work is not specified, it was likely one of the artist’s rustic landscapes, which would have complemented the dairy’s program and aesthetic. * * *

Grotesque ornament: All of the Mi-voie’s principal interiors were decorated with grotesques, an antique style of ornament that was rediscovered during the Renaissance. Much of this rediscovery, which began in the late fifteenth century, took place in Rome, with the excavation of Nero’s Domus Aurea and other ancient sites.38 Because these sites had been filled in with earth over the years, restricting access, their cave- or grotta-like appearance led to labeling the ornamental style that developed from them “grottesco” or “grottesca” (grotesque). In 1518 – 1519, Raphael employed this style in the decoration of the Vatican Loggia, a project that was widely admired and emulated. Raphael’s student, Giulio Romano, later adopted it at the Palazzo del Tè, where Primaticcio was employed before departing for France. CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Grotesque ornament entails a loose and fanciful grouping of organic linear patterns with architectural elements, human figures, mythical creatures, and other motifs. In the classical era, Vitruvius condemned the style as unnatural and licentious and in violation of rational design principles.39 Renaissance artists delighted in the style’s inventiveness but sought to temper the license by imposing a structure on the ornament, either by organizing it symmetrically around a vertical axis or by anchoring it within strapwork. (Both of these techniques were used in the Vatican Loggia.) Renaissance grotesque decoration had a seemingly infinite diversity of applications and varied considerably by geographic region. At the court of Fontainebleau, Rosso and Primaticcio developed a wholly original style of grotesque ornament in the 1530s that departed from Italian precedents and was characterized by the use of stucco in high relief. The most celebrated application of the Fontainebleau grotesque style was the decoration of the Galerie François I. Here license extended to the use of ornament and the play of materials, where stucco imitated marble and painting looked like sculpture. The effect was intended not so much to “fool the eye” (trompe l’oeil) as to propose a complex visual game, in which courtiers

Figure 1.4 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, view of the Ulysses Gallery ceiling at Fontainebleau from Grandes grotesques (1566). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

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recognized the trick and took pleasure in the artifice. As Henri Zerner has shown, the Fontainebleau style, with its “intentionally artificial character,” offered a visual analogue to the stylized comportment of its inhabitants, and helped articulate a sense of collective identity among courtiers. The notion of identity as a “manipulable, artful process” also appeared in literature around this time, notably in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), translated into French in 1537. But at Fontainebleau, it was the visual, plastic, and spatial arts that helped shape this courtly sense of self prior to its formulation in texts like Castiglione’s.40 After Rosso’s death in 1540, Primaticcio developed a new style of grotesque ornament that was flatter and adhered more closely to classical precedents. The style was used in the decoration of the Ulysses gallery at Fontainebleau, an enormous undertaking that occupied Primaticcio and his designers intermittently from 1541 to 1570. Torn down in 1739, the gallery occupied an entire floor of the south wing of the palace’s Cour du cheval blanc. Its walls were decorated with paintings devoted to the life of Ulysses, while the vaulted ceiling comprised fifteen bays of grotesque decoration attributed to Antonio Fantuzzi, interspersed with painted panels featuring mythological and astrological references. Androuet du Cerceau engraved a portion of the gallery’s ceiling for his Grandes grotesques of 1566 (Figure 1.4).41 He depicted a pulsing, frenetic riot of vegetal motifs, fantastic creatures, and human figures bracketed and contained in individual registers, like a set of puzzle pieces. The last phase of the Ulysses gallery’s decoration coincided with the embellishment of the Mi-voie and was executed by many of the same designers. Du Cerceau’s engraving, then, likely provides a sense of the Mi-voie’s grotesques as well. On the walls of the dairy, these fanciful, organic motifs, with their skillful blend of nature and artifice, would have enhanced the site’s rusticity while also anchoring it to the sophisticated symbolism of the court. At the same time, this ornament would have evoked a hint of controlled chaos that reflected the ambitions of its patron, who wanted to be seen as not only cultivating nature, but taming it as well. * * *

Astrological decoration: The Mi-voie’s dairy contained astrological imagery, including the twelve signs of the zodiac that Roussel sculpted in plaster for its interior. The Ulysses gallery also featured an astrological program designed by Primaticcio. Several preparatory studies by Primaticcio have been linked to this gallery. They depict astrological signs, among them Taurus, the bull, CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Figure 1.5 Circle of Primaticcio, drawing of a medallion with a zodiac (possible study for the Mi-voie), c. 1560s. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

and Leo, the lion, surrounded by gods and goddesses: Venus, Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo, and Diana.42 Like grotesque decoration, astrological imagery was widely employed during the Renaissance, especially in Italy. One of the most renowned of these programs was commissioned in the late fifteenth century by Borso d’Este at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. Astrological motifs later appeared around 1521 in the Sala dei Pontefici at the Vatican — a project commissioned by Catherine’s great-uncle, Leo X — and at the Palazzo del Tè, where Giulio designed the Sala dei Venti from 1527 to 1528 with the likely aid of Primaticcio. The ceiling of the Sala dei Venti featured painted panels representing the labors of the month, combined with framed sculptures of the signs in gilded stucco. Below these were medallions laid out in a friezelike format, depicting the effects of the different constellations on those born under their signs.43 A drawing now in the Louvre may be connected to the Mi-voie’s astrological decoration, according to Dominique Cordellier (Figure 1.5).44 DAIRY QUEENS

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Formerly attributed to Primaticcio and now to the artist’s circle, the image depicts a circular medallion representing Apollo in his chariot surrounded by a zodiac. Below this medallion, two female figures sit on either side of a plinth with their faces in their hands. Resembling Michelangelo’s figures for the Sistine lunettes or the Medici tombs of San Lorenzo in Florence, they may signify the opposing forces of abundance and death, or the active and contemplative lives: one of them sits atop a cornucopia, while the other rests her foot on a rock and a skull. As Cordellier notes, the themes of cosmology and fertility would have been appropriate for Catherine’s laiterie. Represented on the central plinth in the drawing are faux-hieroglyphs, Egyptian motifs that became popular in sixteenth-century France owing to the publication of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and Piero Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556).45 The Hypnerotomachia, an esoteric architectural treatise involving the story of a young man who goes in search of his beloved and encounters strange and wondrous buildings along the way, caused a stir at Fontainebleau around this time. No fewer than four French editions of the treatise — whose translations are attributed to Jean Martin, and engravings to Jean Cousin — appeared between 1546 and 1561, and Francis I himself owned a copy.46 The Hypnerotomachia appealed to the mannered sensibilities of the French court and especially to court ladies, who revived the book in the seventeenth century under the auspices of the précieuses (a group of elite literary women discussed in Chapter 2). If Catherine had intended to allude to this text at the Mi-voie, not only through these hieroglyphs but in other motifs as well (see below), the connection would have reaffirmed her desire to envision a pastoral realm ruled by women, just like the island of Cythera in the treatise. As for the zodiac imagery, Aby Warburg has argued that Renaissance astrological decoration depicted the determining influence of the stars and the planets on human destiny. More recently, Anthony Grafton and William Newman have challenged Warburg’s reading as anachronistic, in that it regards astrological thinking as antithetical to the Renaissance tenets of humanism, rationality, and self-will.47 By contrast, they cite texts by Renaissance scholars such as Alberti and Marsilio Ficino that reveal astrology working in concert with humanism. For example, in the Renaissance self-help manual Three Books on Life, Ficino offered his readers a dietary regimen based on the signs of the zodiac that, if followed correctly, was supposed to alter one’s physical and psychological makeup and promote well-being. Ficino’s philosophy, according to Grafton and Newman, was meant to be liberating rather than constricting. It did not consider the practice of astrology CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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as a mere submission to one’s fate, but rather as a mechanism of free will, a way of harnessing the power of the cosmos to effect a positive outcome. A similar view of astrology may have prevailed at the sixteenth-century court of Fontainebleau, where astrological decoration was imagined to implement, and not simply reflect, royal destiny. I have already noted how architecture and decoration played a critical role in shaping courtly identity at Fontainebleau; astrological imagery reinforced the idea that this identity extended beyond the phenomenal world to encompass the divine. To that end, Sylvie Béguin has argued that the Ulysses gallery’s symbolism offered a cosmic validation of the rules of Francis I and Henri II, whose royal power was heralded in Primaticcio’s designs from Europe to the outer Antipodes.48 This iconography, moreover, was not just visual but was enacted in space, time, and ritual. Although it pertained to the subjectivity of one individual — the king — the overall purpose was collective and participatory. Courtiers and visitors who traversed the gallery while taking in these signs and symbols received, incorporated, and confirmed the larger dynastic message. Buildings and images were powerful tools in establishing and maintaining this symbiotic relationship. The iconography of kingship was reinforced by the doctrine of divine right, which was commonly invoked in the sixteenth century. French kings, as Ernst Kantorowicz has argued, possessed “two bodies”: a corporeal entity that expired with them, and a “body politic” that lived on after their death and assumed divine power.49 But what about French queens? Their connection to the monarchy and dynastic line was much more tenuous, owing not only to the restrictions of the Salic law but also to the fact that many of these women, like Catherine herself, were foreign born or from enemy territory. Their role was relegated to three duties: to serve as a consort, to rule in the king’s absence, and to produce heirs for the royal line.50 This third duty left them pregnant for much of their reign and reinforced their primarily corporeal, expendable image. Throughout her time at the French court, Catherine de’ Medici faced personal and political crises that threatened her authority and legitimacy. One of the most difficult of these crises was her decade-long struggle with infertility. To redress the issue she sought every possible remedy, including consulting astrologers and physicians and attempting such bizarre remedies as drinking camel’s milk and mule’s urine. She may have also read medical books on the subject; a manual entitled Sur la fertilité along with the ancient writings of Hippocrates and Galen were found among the books in her library at Saint-Maur.51 DAIRY QUEENS

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The sixteenth-century European medical community was largely unsympathetic to the problem of fertility. In 1563 the Italian physician Giovanni Marinello published a treatise on female illness that was later translated into French by Jean Liébault, a prominent physician and the coauthor of L’agriculture et maison rustique. The book described an infertile woman as “empty” (vide), since “nature has created her above all to conceive and engender her own kind.” Most of the text was given over to advice for countering this “disease,” and for transforming a sterile woman into “a fertile garden of generation.”52 Marinello and Liébault were far from the only authors in this period to connect fertile women with fecund landscapes. Long after she overcame her fertility struggles, Catherine drew upon this analogy, in a self-affirming sense, at the Mi-voie. As noted above, the years in which Catherine decorated her dairy were extraordinarily fraught ones for her and the monarchy. She lost her husband and one of her sons; France lost two kings in less than two years; and the first of the Wars of Religion broke out in 1562. As both queen mother and regent, she was faced with the task of creating a political language and body of imagery that proclaimed her right of rule. One possibility that she drew upon was the iconography of widowhood, reminding courtiers of her ties to her former husband. After Henri’s death, she wore black mourning dress for the rest of her life, and she commissioned several portraits by François Clouet that depicted her in this costume. She also erected a column commemorating conjugal piety in her private apartments at Fontainebleau, which had been relocated to a part of the palace formerly occupied by her husband.53 Such statements of grief may have been sincere, but they were also strategic. Catherine frequently drew upon astrological symbolism to harness the power of the cosmos and create an iconography of queenly rule. She was a lifelong devotee of astrology, and she depended upon it in times of crisis, as was in keeping with the culture of her time. The astrological decoration at Catherine’s dairy no doubt celebrated her destiny as queen of France, royal mother, and regent. At the same time, it linked the pastoral environment she had created to the forces of nature and the cosmos. The association between astrology and the themes of birth, the life cycle, and the seasons would have harmonized well with the dairy’s message. * * *

Rusticated stonework (and garden grottoes): Francis I had commissioned a grotto at one end of the Ulysses gallery around 1541 – 1543. Known as the CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Grotte des Pins (Pine Grotto), it was positioned between the palace and the king’s pine garden. Part of its design has been attributed to Primaticcio, who made preparatory drawings for the interior.54 The grotto survives today, though it has been damaged, and the interior has been restored (Figure 1.6). As a great admirer of Francis I’s architectural projects, Catherine may have asked Primaticcio to design something similar for her at the Mi-voie. On the Pine Grotto’s rusticated stone façade, four muscled male figures or atlantes stand guard over three arched openings. The grotto’s interior ceiling is decorated with a mosaic of crystalline rocks, shells, and stucco animals, including dolphins and waterfowl. There are also three painted di sotto in sù panels depicting Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva; they are encased in stucco frames that imitate natural rock formations. The grotto’s enclosed walls originally contained niches with water basins, and the entire structure, along with the aquatic-themed decoration, may have evoked a nymphaeum, an ancient sanctuary for water nymphs that was revived in Renaissance garden design. By

Figure 1.6 Francesco Primaticcio (attributed), Pine Grotto at Fontainebleau, 1541 – 1543. Photo: by author

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linking the palace to the garden, the grotto suggested that the king’s dominion extended into the natural realm as well. Grottoes were fashionable constructions in sixteenth-century France that took a variety of forms. They were valued for their ancient pedigree; their mannerist play with natural and manmade materials; and their ability to mediate between the worlds of nature and art. Many were larger and more refined than the Grotte des Pins, including a grotto that Primaticcio designed for the Cardinal de Lorraine at Meudon in the 1550s. The Meudon grotto’s exquisite decoration, including lavish marble floors and a vaulted ceiling with grotesques, was celebrated by Vasari and in pastoral poems by Ronsard and Rémy Belleau.55 Catherine de’ Medici, who commissioned several garden buildings in the late 1550s and 1560s, had a grotto at Montceaux and possibly another one at Tuileries designed by Bernard Palissy. She was a fan of Palissy’s rustic stoneware, given that she had 141 pieces of his imitation jasper vessels in her possession at the time of her death.56 In his Recepte véritable of 1563, Palissy offered to create a dinner service for Catherine to use in her gardens. Perhaps she employed his rustic vessels during banquets at the Mi-voie, a site that was devoted as much to consuming dairy products as it was to producing them. Connecting the dairy to the reception room was a grotto-like passageway decorated with grotesques and painted stonework. According to Scott and Sturm-Maddox, Ronsard may have described this grotto in the Bergerie that he wrote for the fête of 1564. Ronsard composed many pastoral poems for the queen mother; he was the Poliziano to her Lorenzo de’ Medici. In this particular Bergerie, he describes the setting as “rustic” and mentions three natural openings or caves that may have resembled a three-bay portico. If so, they would have recalled not only the Grotte des Pins but also the grotto with three arched doorways in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Scott and SturmMaddox quote a line from the Bergerie’s chorus that suggests the Mi-voie’s natural appearance and polychrome décor: “Just as a Meadow is represented with a hundred flowers,” Ronsard wrote, “this new Bergerie is painted with a hundred colors.”57 Along with a love of nature, Catherine de’ Medici’s gardens and grottoes professed an attachment to French soil. She repeatedly took pains to align her identity with that of France, and in festivals and allegorical representations she often presented herself as Gallia, the nurturing mother and peaceful ruler of Gaul.58 This representation may have been designed to counter negative remarks about her Italian/Medici heritage, attacks that were somewhat misguided given that her mother, Madeleine de la Tour CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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d’Auvergne, had been related to the French royal family. Such remarks began soon after she arrived in France but grew more heated during the Wars of Religion, for which she was often blamed even though she made repeated efforts to keep the peace. As the libelous pamphlet published against her in 1575 claimed, “Have you seen how both her native soil, her race and family . . . will us to look for terrible matters at her hands?”59 These attacks may have spurred her to establish strong roots to the French terroir in her patronage. The principal way that Catherine established these roots was by having children, becoming what Marinello and Liébault had described as “a fertile garden of generation.” Analogies between ripe female bodies and fertile agricultural landscapes were common in early modern France; perhaps the bestknown example is the duc de Sully’s famous dictum that “tilling the land and tending the flock are the two breasts from which France is fed.”60 In early modern architectural theory it was common to propose analogies between bodies and buildings. Catherine’s dairy signified her body by engaging themes of fertility and nurture and making them both feminine and maternal. This symbolism helps explain why the dairy remained such a compelling building type for Catherine and the ancien régime women patrons who succeeded her. Dairies allowed women to emphasize their “natural” femininity and their powerful role within the monarchical machine. Cavelike grottoes that were erected alongside or within these buildings, at the Mi-voie and at a pleasure dairy built for Marie-Antoinette at Rambouillet two centuries later, reinforced this gendered aesthetic by evoking a natural site of nurture or a womb.

THE MYTH oF AMALTHEA

 In addition to the decoration described above, the royal building accounts mention three histoires, or narrative tableaux, that were represented on the walls of Catherine’s dairy in stucco bas-relief. They were overseen by Primaticcio but executed by Frémin Roussel, who carried out several sculptural commissions for Catherine around this time. Among these projects was a tomb for her and her husband that featured a marble bas-relief depicting the figure of Charity (1565 – 1566). The dairy’s stuccoes likely recalled ancient bas-relief sculpture, similar to those that Primaticcio had executed for Francis I’s bathing complex two decades before. Like so much of Primaticcio’s oeuvre, these sculptures were probably inspired by his work at the Palazzo del Tè.61 DAIRY QUEENS

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Taking into account the dairy’s form, function, and symbolism, we can speculate on a possible subject for these tableaux. Since the building was a royal commission, a classical or a mythological reference — ideally one that glorified its queenly patron — would have been appropriate. Valois family members frequently depicted themselves as ancient heroes or Olympian gods and goddesses, highlighting their strength and attributes of power. Catherine de’ Medici often represented herself as Juno or other goddesses in architectural projects and festivals.62 One possible candidate for the subject of these reliefs is Artemisia, a fourth-century bc queen who ruled her kingdom in Asia Minor after her husband’s death. In the Renaissance, Artemisia was viewed as an exemplary widow and a paragon of wise female leadership. Catherine was compared to Artemisia in texts and artistic commissions from the 1560s to the 1580s. The most comprehensive of these was “L’histoire de la Reine Artémise,” a 1562 manuscript written by her apothecary, Nicolas Houel, and illustrated with drawings by Antoine Caron and other artists. In dedicating the text to Catherine, Houel compared her to a gardener who, like Artemisia, had coaxed her nation back to life after a long and brutal winter — an analogy that evoked the politically turbulent events of 1559 – 1562. 63 As Sheila ffolliott has observed, Houel’s manuscript embellished several aspects of Artemisia’s life to mirror Catherine’s own, including the addition of a son, who was a stand-in for Charles IX. 64 He also emphasized Artemisia’s passion for la vie champêtre, her interest in agricultural production, and the “retired” life she led at her country villa. One of Caron’s drawings depicts Artemisia in the gardens of her villa, accompanied by courtiers who have arrived to conduct royal business. Artemisia’s political use of this natural space recalls Catherine’s interest in rural retreats, buildings that are represented in Houel’s text as appropriate venues for female rule. Houel, however, makes no mention of a dairy, and Artemisia’s name does not appear in the Bergerie, which focuses more on Catherine’s roles as royal mother and guardian. Indeed, the entire Royal Tour emphasized these themes. Many of its festivities invoked Catherine’s nurturing capacities, including the program for a banquet hosted by her son, the duc d’Orléans, the day after her Mi-voie excursion. Significantly, the first stop on the Royal Tour (after the events at Fontainebleau) was a visit to Bar-le-Duc, where Catherine and her courtiers witnessed the christening of her first grandchild.65 Ronsard’s description of Catherine in his Bergerie as “the mother of our Gods, the French Cybele” compares her to the mythological earth mother Cybele, a frequent fixture in the palace’s decoration since the era of Francis I. CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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In her representation at the palace and in Valois festival design, Cybele signified the generative power of the earth and the origins of the French nation. This latter designation stemmed from her association with the ancient Gauls, who were sometimes described as Cybele’s priestesses, and with Isis, the Egyptian goddess who was linked to the founding of Paris. (A guidebook to the city by Gilles Corrozet, published in 1532 and expanded in 1550, claimed that Paris got its name from an ancient temple to Isis that was located nearby, thus making it “Par-Isis” [“near Isis”].)66 Cybele was also identified with Rhea, the mother of Jupiter and other Olympian gods, many of whom were personified by Catherine’s children. Although Cybele had long been an icon of the French nation and its abundance, Catherine may have invoked the goddess to remind courtiers of her personal authority and fertility. In the same year that Frémin Roussel carved the stucco reliefs for her dairy, he also sculpted a wooden figure of Cybele for the newel (vertical support) of a spiral staircase in her palace apartment.67 Cybele was often depicted as a multibreasted deity, similar to allegories of Nature personified as a woman with many breasts, usually lactating. Catherine’s wooden sculpture may have resembled a marble statue of Nature by Niccolò Tribolo that Francis I acquired for Fontainebleau in the late 1520s (Figure 1.7). The goddess’s association with nature, fertility, and milk would have made her an ideal subject for the interior of the dairy. In addition, there is a mythological story involving Cybele (or Rhea) that would have complemented the Mi-voie’s architectural program and may have been used for its decoration. That is the story of Amalthea, the nymph who nursed the infant Jupiter with goat’s milk after his mother, Rhea, hid him from Saturn, his cannibalistic father.68 Saturn had planned to devour all of his children to prevent being supplanted by them, but Rhea had shielded her son from this patriarchal tyrant — thereby ensuring the earth’s prosperity — with the help of Amalthea and the Corybantes, a group of worshippers devoted to the goddess. The story’s themes of death, maternal protection, dynastic succession, and regeneration would have resonated strongly with courtiers in the 1560s. Moreover, Charles IX was often identified with Jupiter in artworks and festivals around this time, for example in his Paris entrance ceremony of 1571. In the myth, Amalthea, who is sometimes represented as the goat rather than the nymph herself, protected and cared for the infant Jupiter in a secluded grotto or cave on Mount Ida in Crete. The Corybantes assisted her by making noise with musical instruments, so that Saturn could not hear his cries and detect his hiding place. After Jupiter became king of the gods, DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 1.7 Niccolò Tribolo, La nature, late 1520s. Château de Fontainebleau. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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Amalthea broke off one of the goat’s horns and presented it to him, and he placed it among the stars, creating the constellation Capricorn. This fabled horn became known as the cornucopia or the “horn of plenty,” a symbol of abundance that was often used in Valois festivals, including the one at the Mi-voie. In his Bergerie, Ronsard makes repeated reference to the symbol. As Rebecca Zorach has noted, the Valois monarchy adopted the “horn of Amalthea” to suggest not only that France was “infinitely abundant,” but also that “‘she’ regenerates all the more richly when injured.”69 Motifs from this story appeared in a series made for Catherine de’ Medici around this time entitled Histoire des rois de France (c. 1562 – 1572). Comprising twenty-eight drawings that were likely intended for tapestries, the project was conceived by Nicolas Houel and executed by Antoine Caron.70 The Histoire celebrated the glorious reign of the Valois kings from Francis I to Charles IX, and one of its drawings represented Catherine offering a flaming cornucopia to her deceased husband, along with vignettes that depicted (on the left) a woman with a goat, and (on the right) a harvest scene flanked by women holding horns of plenty (Figure 1.8). The flaming cornucopia derived from Christian iconography and was associated with Charity, as represented in Nicola Pisano’s thirteenth-century design for the Baptistery pulpit in Pisa. By connecting herself with Charity, Catherine may have signaled her ability to provide for her subjects after her husband’s death. (The flame could have also symbolized her undying love for Henri, as represented on her coat of arms.) But the lateral vignettes evoke pastoral themes, and the woman with the goat may be Amalthea. If so, the central vignette could portray Catherine as Amalthea and Henri II as Hercules, accepting the horn of plenty. It was quite common in this mannerist artistic climate for an image to have multiple references, just as it was common to fuse Christian and pagan deities.71 In antiquity, the myth of Amalthea had inspired a grotto-like structure known as an amaltheum, a secluded sanctuary used for relaxation or contemplation, similar to a nymphaeum. Cicero describes such an amaltheum in the gardens of his friend Atticus that was shaded by trees and cooled by water. The amaltheum signified Atticus’s embrace of pastoral otium. At the time of her death, Catherine de’ Medici owned a copy of Cicero’s letters, and she also owned the works of Lactanius and Ovid, both of whom recounted the Amalthea myth.72 In addition to these ancient authors, the story of Amalthea makes an appearance in the Hypnerotomachia. Near the beginning of the treatise, the protagonist comes upon a magnificent entrance gate built in the classical style. He describes the gate’s intricate decoration at length, including, DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 1.8 Antoine Caron, portrait of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici from the Histoire des rois de France, c. 1562 – 1572. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

on its pediment, a sculptural representation of the infant Jupiter suckling the goat with the help of Amalthea. In the woodcut illustrations that accompanied the original Italian publication of the text, the gate’s pediment is left blank, but in the sixteenth-century French editions the engraver has included this detail (Figure 1.9). There were precedents for using the story of Amalthea as a decorative program in Italy. Not long after Primaticcio left for France, Giulio Romano executed twelve paintings on the theme of Jupiter’s childhood and infancy, possibly for the decoration of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. The cycle, which included The Nurture of Jupiter by Amalthea, The Infant Jupiter Guarded by the Corybantes on the Island of Crete, and Jupiter and Juno Take Possession of the Throne of Heaven, may have decorated a private apartment for the Duchess of Mantua, who had given birth to a son and heir in 1533, shortly before the cycle was created.73 Primaticcio could have seen this cycle or preparatory drawings for it on a trip to Italy in the 1540s. Some of the paintings were also reproduced as prints that circulated in France, including an engraving of The Nurture of Jupiter by Giulio Bonasone around 1550 (Figure 1.10). The image, whose figural arrangement resembles to some extent that CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Figure 1.9 Detail of Jupiter and Amalthea from the Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du songe du Poliphile (1546). With permission of the Wellesley College Library, Special Collections

depicted in the Hypnerotomachia pediment (Figure 1.9), later inspired Nicolas Poussin, who used it as the model for at least two paintings of the Amalthea myth.74 Cosimo I de’ Medici’s wife, Eleonora of Toledo, commissioned Niccolò Tribolo to design a small grotto or amaltheum for her in the mid-1550s on land that became the Boboli Gardens in Florence. Known as the Grotticina di Madama, its interior evoked a rocky landscape presided over by a pregnant she-goat. Next to this animal was another goat signifying Capricorn, Cosimo’s astrological sign, which the Grand Duke often invoked to associate himself with Augustus (a fellow Capricorn who had ruled Rome during its golden age). But the grotto was meant to signify his wife’s fertility and the prosperity that she had brought to Tuscany.75 Along with Giulio Romano’s Jupiter cycle, the Boboli grotto implies a strong association between the story of Amalthea and female patronage in the Renaissance. Catherine, who corresponded with Eleonora as well as with Cosimo, would likely have been aware of this grotto and its decoration. The myth of Amalthea provided a powerful message about women and their contribution to the survival and strength of the ruling order. The dairy’s bas-reliefs may have depicted this story, in the form of Jupiter/Charles’s IX birth; Amalthea’s nurture of the young god; Jupiter’s eventual triumph; or the threat posed by his father, Saturn. A preparatory drawing by Primaticcio, executed for an unknown project, depicts Saturn Devouring His Children; perhaps it inspired or was linked in some way with the Mi-voie’s decoration.76 If Amalthea was represented in Catherine’s laiterie, the reference would have established an iconographic precedent recalled more than two centuries DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 1.10 Giulio Bonasone (after Giulio Romano), The Nurture of Jupiter, c. 1550. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum

later in the decorative scheme for Marie-Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet, which centered on the Amalthea myth.

PASToRAL RITUAL AND THE BURDEN oF PERFoRMANCE

 The final addition to the Mi-voie was a painting by Nicolò dell’Abate for the dairy’s interior. Not many of his easel paintings are known, but a few rustic landscapes have survived that were executed by the artist and his entourage, including his son, Giulio Camillo. One of them dates from around 1570, the same year that the dairy’s painting is listed in the royal accounts. Entitled The Winnowing of Grain, it depicts a farm similar to the Mi-voie and a lush green and gold landscape that bustles with georgic activity (Figure 1.11).77 Some workers are shown threshing grain; others are driving cattle to graze; still others are cleaning laundry beside a stream and a watermill. The painting’s image of peaceful, communal productivity is precisely the same kind of tableau that Catherine hoped to project at her pastoral retreats. CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Figure 1.11 Nicolò dell’Abate, The Winnowing of Grain, c. 1570. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

All of the agricultural labor shown in the painting is being performed under the watchful eye of a well-dressed man and woman who sit on a low hill in the foreground, gazing down on the graceful choreography of the landscape and its figures. They seem to be engaging in a conversation about what they are seeing, based on the tilt of the woman’s head and the gesture that she makes with her outstretched fingers. The theatrical device of placing one or more pointing figures in the foreground to draw a viewer’s attention into the scene had become common in European painting by the sixteenth century. Here the woman seems to assume the primary dramatic role, instructing her male companion in the pleasures and challenges of running a farm. The Winnowing of Grain depicts not just any rustic landscape, but a scene that is enacted and observed — a “theater of agriculture,” to borrow the title of Olivier de Serres’s treatise. It offers a fitting emblem for the Mi-voie, a site that similarly performed an image of land management and royal guardianship for the benefit of its patron and her court. In this period, the gradual DAIRY QUEENS

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decline of the feudal economy and the concurrent rise of the court aristocracy elicited a desire on the part of the nobility to display an attachment to the land through acts of pastoral ritual and festival. Furthermore, the growing spectacle of court life meant that identity itself became performative — and that noble status, whether based on land ownership or the mastery of court etiquette, had to be rehearsed and displayed time and again for an audience of one’s peers. Over time, this led to a negligible distinction between reality and performance, as the aristocratic self and everything around it turned into a work of art.78 No one felt this burden of performance more than Catherine de’ Medici, not just at the palace but also at the relatively secluded environment of her pastoral retreats — the one place where one might imagine she would be removed from such courtly responsibilities. After all, this was how villas had functioned for male rulers in the Renaissance, including Federigo Gonzaga at the Palazzo del Tè, who celebrated the freedom that this building afforded him in its design and use. But for a variety of reasons that included her gender, Catherine worked just as hard at her retreats as she did everywhere else. She did not simply use them to escape and indulge in private pleasures, but to craft and express her public identity, to fuse otium with negotium. At her retreats, Catherine signaled measures that she had taken to improve the health and prosperity of the kingdom. For example, she planted mulberry trees on the grounds of her rural château at Chenonceau (which she had acquired in 1559 through forced exchange with Diane de Poitiers) to demonstrate her commitment to the silk industry.79 Catherine always made sure that there was an element of productivity, not just pleasure, at her country estates. Although it is unlikely that she did any of the farm work herself — she had servants to milk the cows, for example — she still reaped the benefits of this labor, just as a feudal landowner or seigneur would take credit for a successful harvest. By emphasizing industry over indolence, she may have sought to distinguish herself from her husband’s mistress Diane, who was famous for her luxurious spa complex at Anet and for her extravagant indulgences, including drinking gold and bathing in milk.80 Catherine organized political festivals at her estates to broadcast a message of peace and harmony. According to a letter that she wrote to the Paris Parlement in 1563, she felt that these festivals could engender peace, which was “so necessary for the conservation of this kingdom and the health of this state.”81 Her desires to demonstrate peace, along with authority and Arcadian prosperity, were the motivating forces behind her Royal Tour of 1564 – 1566, and they inspired other fêtes that she organized with pastoral and CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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georgic themes. Prior to the Mi-voie banquet, she staged two important fêtes in her gardens at Chenonceau, whose remodeling she had just completed. One of these, held in 1560, celebrated the marriage of her son Francis II; the second was held in March 1563, just after the end of the first War of Religion. Francis’s wedding fête included an elaborate entrance ceremony during which courtiers encountered a carefully arranged tableau vivant of nine hundred peasants, farmers, and their wives, who waved banners and offered greetings to the royal couple and their guests. The 1563 festival at Chenonceau, which took place over several days, began with a banquet where nobles dressed up as peasants and performed rustic dances. The following day, the royal children staged a pastoral performance, assuming the roles of shepherds and shepherdesses in white satin costumes. On the third day, Catherine led courtiers to her new aviary and menagerie to view birds, sheep, and other animals before offering a light, wholesome meal of fruit and jam. Roy Strong has described these events as “dress rehearsals” for the festivities at Fontainebleau.82 The banquet that Catherine staged at the Mi-voie in February 1564 was replicated in a fête that she organized at Bayonne in June 1565. We know more about this fête than we do about the one at Fontainebleau, since several sixteenth-century descriptions of it were published. The court’s visit to Bayonne in 1565 was a critical part of the Royal Tour because it involved an important diplomatic meeting between Catherine and Philip II, Spain’s Catholic monarch. The royal entourage stayed in Bayonne for nearly two months, and during that time Catherine hosted celebrations that lasted several days, similar to the ones at Fontainebleau. Among these was an entrance ceremony featuring an image of the queen mother surrounded by her children. The inscription on the image referred to these children as “the fruits of the fecund Cybele.” A description of the Bayonne banquet published in 1566 claims that the queen mother adopted a “rustic” theme for the event because she wanted to do something distinctive, “of her own invention,” that would contrast with the splendor of the other fêtes.83 Held on the third day of the festivities, it began with an excursion by boat to a small island in a river northeast of Bayonne. Once Catherine’s noble guests had reached this island, they were greeted by a group of shepherdesses, who were dressed in her colors (green and white) and held satin-covered houlettes (shepherdess crooks). They presented silk flowers and sheep dolls made of silver wool to the ladies. The guests then traversed a long green allée populated with nymphs, who chanted pastoral poems of peace and renewal. DAIRY QUEENS

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At the end of this allée was an octagonal banquet hall surrounding a large oak tree with a fountain at its base. The pavilion’s octagonal shape, later reprised in Louis XIV’s garden fêtes at Versailles, may have symbolized renewal, as it did in Christian iconography. More oval tables filled the hall; the largest table in the center was reserved for Catherine and her family. Throughout the meal, courtiers disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses served the guests; afterward they performed regional dances that she had helped choreograph. According to an account written by her daughter Marguerite, these dances were held in an illuminated grotto in a corner of the room. Given the “remarkable similarities” between the festival events at Bayonne and those at Fontainebleau, it is likely that the Mi-voie banquet followed a similar program.84 Catherine de’ Medici’s festivals recall what Victor Turner has described as the “subjunctive” mood of performance rituals. Like the grammatical tense of the subjunctive, these festivals invoked a wishful state — what Turner calls “a world of as if ” — that did not so much reflect reality as attempt to alter it. Celebrating transformational events like weddings, peace treaties, and coronations, the queen mother’s festivals were staged in threshold spaces — islands, forests, “halfway” houses — that underscored their liminal status, halfway between the world as she knew it and the world that she wanted to bring into being. Political tensions may have run high at Bayonne or Fontainebleau, but her festivals, like a segment of intricately linked grotesque paneling, proposed a universe of perpetual order, harmony, and regeneration, overseen by a skilled and benevolent designer. Turner has emphasized the “cultural innovation” that is possible in such rituals, where “new meanings and symbols may be introduced.”85 At Bayonne and the Mi-voie, the various components of these fêtes — cosmological symbolism, music, dancing, and eating — added to their transformative power. This was also true of the rituals of gender and status reversal, in which a woman assumed “divine” authority, and the nobility masqueraded as peasants and servants.86 Although courtiers may have resented the queen mother’s influence on other occasions, in these moments they were willing to suspend disbelief, participate in the ritual, and embody or imbibe — literally, in the form of milk — her soothing message. This is not to say that the audience was fooled by these temporary inversions of class or sex, or that this exchange carried over into encounters beyond the life of the festival. If anything, these fêtes did not so much give agency to peasants as they solidified a feeling of communal identity for elites, by reinforcing a sense of “natural” distinction between them and the lower classes and by adding a sophisticated CAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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element of theatricality and artifice. However, they did create an opportunity for Catherine de’ Medici to expand the definition of female political identity and leadership, and to communicate her new status to courtiers. C o DA: TH E AFTERLIFE oF SAINT-MAUR AND THE MI-VoIE

 Catherine de’ Medici’s Mi-voie and cassine are significant not only for what they tell us about pastoral retreats in the sixteenth century, but also for their formative role in establishing a building type — the pleasure dairy — whose expressive potential for elite women, and some men, remained active throughout the ancien régime. Many female members of the French court, among them the duchesse de Bourgogne (Louis XV’s mother), Madame de Pompadour, and Marie-Antoinette, faced similar challenges. Like Catherine, they too were foreigners, or had fertility problems, or came from banking families, or were thought to wield undue influence.87 Most of all, their presence was considered to be unnatural and unfeminine, or feminine in the “wrong” way, and so to counter these attacks they created dairies on the outskirts of the royal domain to present themselves in a more positive light: as natural, domestic, healthful, beneficent, and maternal. Pleasure dairies and the pastoral environments that surrounded them provided women with a sense of liberation and self-worth in addition to their social and political symbolism. Although the signification, reception, and use of these royal laiteries differed greatly over the course of two and a half centuries — and part of the task of this book is to document that shift — it is striking to note the degree of continuity in the building type from the 1560s to the 1780s, from its debut with Catherine de’ Medici to its denouement with Marie-Antoinette. In addition to the broader political and cultural history they shared, it seems that Catherine de’ Medici’s retreats at Fontainebleau and Saint-Maur may have exerted a direct influence on some of the pastoral architectural projects that followed them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter will conclude by tracing the fate of these two sites in light of this possible influence, beginning with the cassine. Although Catherine mentions her desire to build a farm and a dairy at Saint-Maur in her letter to Cosimo of 1571, the physical existence of this site has not previously been confirmed. The cassine did exist, however, and it did contain a dairy. According to archival documents, it survived until the DAIRY QUEENS

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Revolution, when it was confiscated from its then owners, the BourbonCondé family.88 In the intervening years the cassine was enjoyed by the Condé family and their guests, notably the seventeenth-century writer and salonnière Madame de Lafayette. When Catherine died in 1589, Saint-Maur was put up for sale. Charlotte-Catherine de la Trémoïlle, the widow of the prince de Condé, acquired it in 1598. Henri IV convalesced there at least twice during her tenure; once for his gout, and once so that his wife could take the waters at nearby Vanves.89 Charlotte later gave the cassine to one of her ladies, and it passed through royal administrators in the seventeenth century. The Condé family reacquired the farm in 1703. In 1701, Étienne Marlet made a plan of the estate with a small vignette depicting the cassine (Figure 1.12). According to Marlet’s plan, the farm was close to the château and resembled it on a reduced scale. A modest, two-story building with little ornamentation, the cassine had a front lawn enclosed by an iron grill. Beyond this were service buildings, a formal garden, and a large potager or vegetable garden. The interior of the cassine contained living quarters, a kitchen, a chapel, and a dairy. In the early eighteenth century, it was sparsely but fashionably furnished, with items that included a rustic chaise à la capucine, a wooden chair named after the ascetic order of Capuchin monks. There was also a chandelier made of deer antlers and utilitarian items of blue and white porcelain.90 In the late seventeenth century, the Saint-Maur estate was managed by the Condé’s surintendant, Jean Hérault de Gourville. Around 1680, Gourville hired architect Daniel Gittard and landscape designer Claude Desgots, a protégé of André Le Nôtre, to renovate the property.91 While at Saint-Maur, Gittard must have seen the cassine and dairy, which may have inspired a pavilion and dairy he helped build at Chantilly (discussed in Chapter 2). Gourville spent nearly 400,000 livres of Condé money on Saint-Maur, and to celebrate its remodeling he hosted parties attended by the leading luminaries of the day, among them Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Lafayette. The latter was especially enamored with the estate and gardens. Despite Gourville’s misgivings, she became a frequent guest and used it as a retreat to write La princesse de Clèves (1678), her historical novel about the era of Henri II. In his memoirs, Gourville grumpily reports that Madame de Lafayette not only appropriated the château’s best appartement but also turned the entire property into her personal “maison de campagne.”92 Like her novel’s protagonist, who retires from court life to undergo a program of self-improvement at a country villa, she took restorative outdoor promenades at SaintCAT H E R I N E D E ’ M E D I C I , T H E F R E N C H C Y B E L E

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Figure 1.12 Étienne Marlet, detail of Catherine de’ Medici’s cassine at Saint-Maur, 1701. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, N III Seine 203

Maur and followed a restrictive “milk diet” according to Madame de Sévigné, who visited her there in 1677. In a letter describing this visit, Sévigné reports that milk had become a fashionable health remedy among elite women, sometimes taken with coffee and recommended by physicians “for the stomach and colds.”93 Madame de Lafayette’s extended stay at Saint-Maur recalls Catherine de’ Medici’s own desire to retreat from society, consume dairy products, and engage in “honest pleasures” there and at Fontainebleau. At the same time, Lafayette’s use of Saint-Maur as an intellectual and therapeutic sanctuary anticipates the eighteenth-century activities of such dairy patrons as Madame de Pompadour. In the early eighteenth century, Saint-Maur was the favorite champêtre estate of Louis III de Bourbon, the son of the prince de Condé. With the help of the abbé de Chaulieu, Louis composed pastoral poetry for his sister, the duchesse du Maine, who resided on the opposite side of Paris at her château at Sceaux. In a poem from 1702, Louis tries to persuade his sister to traverse the city and visit him at Saint-Maur, where he promises “long garden promenades” and “natural pleasures,” including “cheese, fresh milk, country bread, some strawberries, and other fruits.”94 In this epistle and in other examples of the siblings’ correspondence, rustic fare and milk products, which likely came from the cassine, emerge as an essential part of the pastoral experience of their estates. The cassine continued to crop up in family letDAIRY QUEENS

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ters and accounts through the 1780s, when repairs were made to its gardens for the prince de Condé’s son and his son’s wife, Bathilde d’Orléans, who frequented Saint-Maur after the couple separated in 1780.95 As for the Mi-voie, the complex survived until 1702 and went through numerous permutations in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1596, Henri IV’s royal milkman was listed as living there. In the 1650s and 1660s, it housed Nicolas Fouquet, the king’s ill-fated finance minister, and Bregide Converset, a woman in the service of Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria. Known as “la femme Laloy,” Converset supplied court ladies with dairy products and purportedly arranged trysts at the Mi-voie for Fouquet and his paramour, Mademoiselle de Menneville. During the summer of 1661, which Louis XIV and his court spent at Fontainebleau, the Mi-voie also served as the theatrical setting for the performances of plays by Molière, including The School for Husbands and The Imaginary Cuckold.96 These plays may have been staged outdoors, or in the Mi-voie’s reception room. Louis XIV attended one of the performances on July 13, 1661, and saw what remained of the Mi-voie’s dairy at that time. Perhaps he had also visited the site and sampled its products earlier, during one of the daily promenades he took that summer near the palace’s Grand Canal.97 The court left Fontainebleau in December, and Louis XIV began to develop his father’s small hunting retreat at Versailles that same year. Eventually, as we know well, he created an immense garden complex, where he staged pastoral fêtes that bore a great deal of similarity to Catherine’s own. But prior to this moment, and even before he began work on his new palace, one of the first activities that Louis XIV undertook at Versailles was the construction of a menagerie featuring a grand dairy designed by Louis Le Vau. Might Louis XIV have been thinking of Catherine de’ Medici’s dairy when he conceived this project?

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2

Absolutism and the Sexual Politics of Pastoral Retreat

Let there be a corner of the world in which it can be said that women are their own mistresses and do not have all the faults that are attributed to them; and let us celebrate ourselves for the centuries to come through a way of life that will immortalize us. The du chesse de Mon Tp ensier , writing to

Madame de Motteville in 1660

The royal menagerie at Versailles, summer of 1698: Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy (1685 – 1712), duchesse de Bourgogne and future mother of Louis XV, arrived at Versailles in 1696 to marry Louis XIV’s grandson, the duc de Bourgogne. Ten years old at the time, she was part of a peace agreement between France and Savoy that had involved a territorial dispute. The new pint-sized duchess was a hit with courtiers and the king, who was completely enamored of her. Throughout the summer of 1698, with her marriage festivities and his military campaigns (temporarily, at least) behind them, Marie-Adélaïde and the sixty-year-old Louis XIV (1638 – 1715) spent their days promenading in the gardens of Marly and Versailles, where he offered to set her up with a pleasure retreat like those that “all the [other] princesses” had nearby.1 When she couldn’t find a property that suited her, Louis XIV gave her his own menagerie, a pastoral showpiece for viewing and raising animals that he had established at Versailles in the 1660s. The king’s menagerie, now destroyed, was approximately one mile southwest of the palace, at the edge of the formal gardens. Designed by royal architect Louis Le Vau, it comprised a central pavilion linked to an observation deck that overlooked seven fan-shaped animal courts, stocked with birds, farm animals, and other creatures (Figure 2.1). To make the complex more suitable for the duchess, Louis XIV’s premier architecte, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, proposed remodeling the pavilion and transforming one of the animal courts into a garden retreat with ornamental parterres, gazebos, and a pleasure dairy on the opposite side of the garden wall (Figure 2.2). Marie-Adélaïde accepted this gift on May 23, 1698; by May 25, she had already taken over the central pavilion, and Louis XIV had promised to refashion it “as she desired.” Marie-Adélaïde visited her new property several times that summer, sometimes bringing along the king, Madame de Maintenon, or her husband, the duc de Bourgogne. On August 12, she went there to meet HardouinMansart, who was waiting “to receive her orders regarding a lot of things she wanted to have done.” But most of the time she went there with court ladies who shared her passion for elegant country living, or la vie champêtre. Together these women dined outdoors and carried out tasks for the menagerie, like tending gardens, caring for animals, and making dairy products. Marie-Adélaïde was particularly adept at this last activity; according to her governess, when guests arrived she liked to serve them “milk that [she] sometimes took pleaDAIRY QUEENS

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sure in milking herself, or some butter that she churned with her own white hands, and that Louis XIV found excellent.”2 The duchess’s fascination with her pastoral retreat continued throughout the summers of 1699, when she traveled to the site on an almost daily basis, and 1700, when the remodeling was finished. Courtiers who visited the menagerie in this period could have stood on the pavilion’s observation deck and gazed down on the duchess as she walked in her gardens or entered her dairy to prepare, with delicate “white hands,” a light, wholesome meal or collation. Marie-Adélaïde’s activities evoked and brought to life the pastoral subject matter that was then being painted on the interior walls of her pavilion, depicting young girls blissfully churning butter, planting flowers, and guarding sheep. In design and program, her menagerie exhibited a graceful, feminine performance of rural life. But why was this performance staged, and for whom? Along with the amusement and high-profile visibility that the menagerie afforded its new owner, the complex served a political purpose in the waning years of Louis XIV’s reign, by signifying royal renewal, domesticated femininity, and agricultural reform. The story of the menagerie’s renovation and the various political actors involved, a story that I will return to at the end of this chapter, reveals the extent to which pastoral architecture and representation had become a battleground for the French elite by the late seventeenth century, pitting the king against his nobility, courtiers, and family members. This battle played out in the arenas of building and landscape design and on the bodies of women like Marie-Adélaïde, who were compelled to fit a certain political and social mold. Aristocratic women who resented this manipulation and preferred to remain “their own mistresses” — like the duchesse de Montpensier, whose complaint provides the epigraph to this chapter — fought back by creating pastoral retreats that protested the limited role they had been assigned in the new absolutist regime.3 The French nobility’s attachment to and investment in the pastoral genre, already strong in the sixteenth century, escalated in the years following the Wars of Religion (1562 – 1598) and the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy (1589 – 1793). No longer required for military service, the old sword nobility (noblesse d’épée) needed a new way to display their value and distinctiveness. They did so by creating a highly refined code of behavior and artistic culture exemplified in works such as Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, an influential pastoral novel written by a rural nobleman and published between 1607 and 1627.4 Beyond the allusive, enigmatic qualities that this group admired in the pastoral genre, it also satisfied their nostalgic longing for an earlier era, A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.1 Plan of the menagerie at Versailles, c. 1700. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes Opposite:

Figure 2.2 Detail of Figure 2.1 with the duchesse de Bourgogne’s pleasure dairy. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes

Figure 2.3 Detail of Figure 2.1 with Louis XIV’s grande laiterie. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes

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idealized to the extreme, of benevolent feudal seigneurs, fertile fields, and cheerful peasants. For some, pastoral architecture provided an insular environment shut off from the realities of the changing world; for others, it offered a blueprint for social and political change or a veil through which to critique the encroaching power and centralization of the state. This frustration came to a head during the civil crisis known as the Fronde (1648 – 1652), when the nobility challenged the authority of the young Louis XIV and his mother, Anne of Austria, who was serving as his regent. Several prominent noblewomen sided against the monarchy during this crisis, and some of them, including the duchesse de Montpensier, even took up arms. After the Fronde, Louis XIV exiled leaders of the opposition and developed Versailles as a way to control and preoccupy his noble subjects. During the lavish festivals that he staged in the Versailles gardens in the 1660s and 1670s, the king relied heavily on the pastoral genre as an instrument of propaganda, magnifying its association with peace, abundance, and male sexual prowess. With the help of his gardens and menagerie, where Le Vau built for him a so-called “grand dairy” in the 1660s (several years before MarieAdélaïde’s), Louis XIV developed a political persona that heralded his ability to tame “feminine” nature and flesh-and-blood women (Figure 2.3). He also created a one-sex, absolute model of rulership — what Claire Goldstein has termed “royal parthenogenesis” — that credited him exclusively for generating all of the natural prosperity and artistic glories of his reign.5 The king’s grande laiterie, which paid an unacknowledged debt to Catherine de’ Medici’s dairy at Fontainebleau, was just one aspect of his sui generis model of rule, a feminine space that he co-opted and transformed into a symbol of male political authority and beneficence. While some of the elite were seduced by Louis XIV’s patriarchal power and brought into the fold, others retreated from court life, indicating their refusal to play along. Members of the old nobility resented the king’s practices of selling court positions to finance his schemes and of creating noble titles with no estates attached, which they felt diluted the significance of rank and transformed their long-standing connection to the land into a bankrupt performance.6 They expressed their dissatisfaction by spending less time at Versailles and by adopting a lifestyle of rural retirement, upholding their own enlightened model of la vie champêtre over the profligacy and vulgarity of the court. Several royal family members, among them Montpensier, the prince de Condé, and the duchesse du Maine, commissioned works of pastoral art and architecture to voice their critique, while proposing new ways for the nobility to contribute to the glory and vitality of the realm. DAIRY QUEENS

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Some of these architectural projects contained pleasure dairies (laiteries d’agrément); others entailed rural châteaux, garden pavilions, and menageries, a building type whose special relationship to the pleasure dairy is explored in this chapter. Because nearly all of these sites have been destroyed, they are reconstructed here based on building records, plans, memoirs, and analogous projects. In the case of the Versailles menagerie, no images survive of the two dairies that were built for Louis XIV and the duchesse de Bourgogne, apart from their appearance in aerial plans. Fortunately, several images and descriptions survive of the laiterie at Chantilly, designed by Hardouin-Mansart and constructed in the late 1680s for the prince de Condé. The Chantilly dairy helps us imagine what other ancien régime dairies would have looked like and how they would have been experienced. In Louis XIV’s later years, dissent infiltrated the grounds of Versailles, promoted by royal reformers who pinned their hopes for renewal on the duc and duchesse de Bourgogne. Led by François Fénelon and Madame de Maintenon, this group professed that the nobility, especially noblewomen, could realize their political destiny only by returning to the land and becoming good wives, mothers, and estate managers.7 Their version of la vie champêtre was perhaps closer to the georgic genre than the pastoral in that it emphasized farm labor and the pleasures of hearth and home. Still, the fact that all of these competing interest groups laid claim to some kind of pastoral topos reinforces the genre’s extraordinary malleability and widespread appeal. In architectural projects like menageries and pleasure dairies, the pastoral could satisfy escapist fantasies while also articulating a new world order with new responsibilities of class and gender.

OF MENAgERIES, DAIRIES, AND MEN

 Louis XIV’s decision to expand his father’s hunting estate at Versailles beginning in 1661 coincided with the death of his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and his quest to rule alone — an initial step toward “l’état, c’est moi.” As Versailles developed, it came to embody the ideology of absolutism, which the king deployed in every aspect of his patronage and especially in the arenas of landscape and architectural space.8 Along with commissioning André Le Nôtre to design the gardens, one of the first projects he undertook there was the royal menagerie, a site that reflected in microcosm his ambitions as king. The project was initiated around 1662, and much of the menagerie’s pavilA B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.4 Pierre Lepautre, map of The Town and Cháteau of Versailles, 1717. Versailles, Bibliothèque Municipale. Photo: Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library

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ion was finished by 1664.9 On Pierre Lepautre’s 1717 map of Versailles, the menagerie appears to the left of the southern (transverse) arm of the Grand Canal, whose creation it preceded by several years (Figure 2.4). The king’s menagerie occupied the site of a small farm that, in Louis XIII’s day, had provided food for the royal table. During Louis XIV’s reign, it continued to fulfill this role in addition to its symbolic function.10 The French word “ménagerie” can mean simply a farm for raising livestock to eat, though it can also refer to a place where animals are collected and put on display. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catherine de’ Medici’s pastoral retreat at Fontainebleau, known as the Mi-voie, was also described as a menagerie, though it contained few animals apart from cows and functioned more as a model farm or a villa. There were, however, several similarities between the Mi-voie and the Versailles menagerie, not least of which was the crucial role that both sites played in shaping their owners’ political identities. As noted at the end of the previous chapter, Louis XIV had visited Catherine’s farm with its splendid dairy in July 1661, when a theatrical performance by Molière was staged there. It’s possible that the Mi-voie influenced his decision to build a menagerie and dairy at Versailles shortly thereafter. Le Vau, the architect of the king’s menagerie and grande laiterie, was working at Fontainebleau in 1662; perhaps he visited the Mi-voie at that time.11 The Fontainebleau laiterie could also have inspired Hardouin-Mansart’s later designs for the pleasure dairies at Chantilly and Versailles; the latter was built around 1698 – 1699, just a few years before Louis XIV ordered the Mi-voie to be razed (in 1702). The destruction of Catherine de’ Medici’s pastoral retreat may have represented another instance of Louis XIV’s desire, observed elsewhere, to repress architectural and cultural precursors that he did not want to acknowledge.12 As for the similarities between the Mi-voie and the Versailles menagerie, both buildings were positioned on the edges of royal gardens, in slightly remote, verdant settings. They both contained spaces for production and display, and they shared certain design features like a multicolored stone grotto, which at Versailles was located on the ground floor of the menagerie’s central pavilion. As conceived by Le Vau, the grotto’s placement within the building reflected the triumph of art and human ingenuity over nature, an important theme at the menagerie. The effect was reinforced by the grotto’s rough rockand-shell surface, which contrasted with the pavilion’s smooth stone walls and elegantly austere design. Finally, both the Mi-voie and the menagerie had dairies of some significance. Louis XIV’s dairy, known as the grande laiterie A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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to distinguish it from the second, smaller dairy that was later built at the site for the duchesse de Bourgogne, comprised two rooms: a large, octagonal showroom more than seven and a half meters in length, and a smaller, rectangular workroom with two basins and a well for water.13 A plan of the menagerie from the early eighteenth century indicates that the king’s dairy was near the entrance and could be accessed via a long avenue leading up to the pavilion (see Figures 2.1 and 2.3). Part of an area of the complex devoted to bucolic pursuits, the grande laiterie was surrounded by a potager or vegetable garden, a barn, and a livestock courtyard (basse cour). To better understand the significance of this site, we should consider how it fits into the history of the menagerie as a building type. Since antiquity, when menageries were associated with Roman emperors and gladiatorial spectacles, they had symbolized power, political connections, and imperial ambitions, especially if the animals were obtained through war or were gifts from foreign dignitaries.14 In the medieval and Renaissance eras, menageries continued to be associated with commanding male rulers. Catherine de’ Medici’s great-grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent, possessed in his menagerie a giraffe given to him by the Egyptian sultan; and, when Catherine’s marriage to Henri was brokered between Francis I and Pope Clement VII, the French king had sent a live lion to Rome to seal the agreement — or to suggest the wrath that would incur if the Pope backed out of it. The exchange illustrates one way that women were linked to menageries, especially female relatives who were exchanged between ruling powers to forge connections or promote peace. It may be significant that when Marie-Adélaïde took over the Versailles menagerie her garden was established in one of the animal courts, as if to imply that this Savoyard princess was not so different from all of the other delectable specimens that had been brought to the site for Louis XIV, like his demoiselle cranes from North Africa or his elephant from Portugal. The Versailles menagerie exhibited several typical characteristics of the building type in architectural form. Entering the complex from one of two iron gates (illustrated at the bottom of Figure 2.1), visitors had to traverse a long, axial avenue before passing through another gate into the main courtyard. The pavilion’s façade, less than thirty meters across, was simple and symmetrical, with large windows, quoins, and small projecting wings with pitched roofs that flanked the central building block. To enter the pavilion one had to climb a set of stairs to the first floor, which led either to two appartements in the side wings or to a narrow gallery hung with paintings of the animals on display. This gallery led into the pavilion’s pièce de resistance, an octagonal salon with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the animal courts, DAIRY QUEENS

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which were populated primarily by domestic and exotic birds such as pelicans, ostriches, and storks. When Madeleine de Scudéry visited the menagerie in the 1660s, she described the anticipation that the painting gallery instilled, with images that functioned “as if in preparation for what was going to be seen, or as a reminder after having seen it.”15 An engraving by Pieter Boel from around 1670 depicts the menagerie’s salon and one of its animal courts, where different species of birds are being watched over by four lifelike stone herms (Figure 2.5). Boel’s image elucidates another purpose of menageries: to gain knowledge about the natural world through empirical observation and comparative study. The king’s scientists particularly liked comparing these animals to their imagined human counterparts, leading to some creative theories about the behavioral patterns of both. In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671 – 1676), Claude Perrault observed how the demoiselle cranes seemed to solicit the gaze of visitors while dancing and preening in front of admirers, presumably like the young ladies of his day.16 Other visitors noted how similar species

Figure 2.5 Pieter Boel, the crowned crane and other royal birds at the Versailles menagerie, c. 1670. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes

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of male and female birds seemed to care tenderly for one another, like a good husband and wife. Most often, royal scientists and artists represented the menagerie and its animals as a mirror of the court, a parallel arena in which male and female specimens were gathered and put on display. For example, the male crowned crane, whose height and fan-shaped “crown” of feathers made him look regal, was viewed as the “royal bird,” the avian equivalent of Louis XIV.17 In Boel’s engraving the crane appears in the left foreground, standing at attention while gazing imperiously at the lesser species below. Ultimately the Versailles menagerie aimed to be a didactic space, one that was geared not just to observing similarities between humans and animals, but to teaching courtiers how to assimilate the “good” behavior and disavow the “bad” behavior of the animals they surveyed. The menagerie complemented other didactic areas of the gardens like the Labyrinth (c. 1664 – 1672), which attempted to provide edifying moral lessons based on the fables of Aesop.18 The Labyrinth had been specifically designed to teach the dauphin how to be a good king, a goal that was later echoed at the menagerie when the building complex was redesigned to train Marie-Adélaïde to be a good wife and royal consort. The male crowned crane was not the only symbol of royal or patriarchal domination at the menagerie. Michel Foucault has referred to the menagerie’s pavilion, which appears phallic-shaped in plan, as an early example of “panoptic” design, representing mastery over the natural and social realms.19 Like other components of the Versailles gardens, the menagerie’s artful creation was conceived in masculine terms, while its natural elements were considered feminine. These elements included the womblike grotto, where the king installed trick fountains to surprise his guests, and the grande laiterie with its basse cour. In Olivier de Serres’s Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) and other early modern agricultural manuals, dairies had been gendered feminine through their association with housewives and “mothers of the family” who were responsible for keeping these buildings pristine and productive, thereby bringing “honor and profit” to the domestic realm.20 For de Serres, dairies were both practical and symbolic: they helped families prosper while also signifying virtue and good stewardship. The design of the grande laiterie followed de Serres’s advice that dairies be kept cool with adequate air circulation, water, and storage. One of its rooms was devoted to preparation and a second, larger room to consumption and display (see Figure 2.3). The larger room contained a fountain and an octagonal table in the center, along with a built-in stone ledge where the DAIRY QUEENS

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milk could be stored while it was settling. The dairy was made of stone to promote coolness, and it seems to have been spare in its decoration, unlike Catherine de’ Medici’s laiterie at Fontainebleau. Still, a great deal of care seems to have gone into its design, and the octagonal form may have had symbolic overtones. In Christian iconography, the octagon was a sign of regeneration, recalling Christ’s resurrection on the eighth day.21 Catherine de’ Medici had used this symbolic shape in the design of her royal banquets, seemingly to signify renewal, and Louis XIV also employed it in his garden fêtes. Along with power, abundance and regeneration were key themes that Louis XIV hoped to cultivate at the menagerie, especially in the wake of the political crises that had precipitated his reign. Moreover, he wanted to take sole credit for reviving the monarchy, not to give any of the glory to Mazarin and certainly not to his mother, who had served as his regent during a traumatic period. Louis XIV’s pursuit of absolutism depended upon erasing the past and forging a myth of royal parthenogenesis, whereby he alone was responsible for conceiving and nurturing himself and the state. At Versailles, this desire developed into a gendered model of artistic creation whereby a male ruler was shown to make art out of nature, without nature’s help. Louis XIV’s historian, André Félibien, conveyed this notion of royal parthenogenesis in his Description de la grotte de Versailles (1672), as Goldstein has shown. Although the Description was written about the garden’s Grotte de Thétis, its themes are relevant to the menagerie and grande laiterie. Félibien analogizes the process of creating Versailles to biological generation, as formulated by Aristotle and others. Aristotle had argued that women constituted the raw matter for generation, whereas men supplied the active form to set it in motion. Drawing upon this Aristotelian model in his text, Félibien genders nature as feminine and art as masculine when he writes, “Nature furnishes the material and art gives it form.”22 However, whereas Aristotle had proposed a hierarchal, two-sex model of generation in which the man’s role was superior, in Félibien’s account women/nature are removed altogether, and men (or rather the king) are shown to create on their own. “Versailles,” he writes, “is a place where Art works alone, and that Nature seems to have abandoned, in order to give the King the opportunity to make appear there, by a kind of creation, if I dare call it, several magnificent works and an infinity of extraordinary things.” Félibien’s passage explains the process by which Louis XIV appropriated numerous prototypically feminine elements in his gardens — dairies, grottoes, flowers, even Nature herself — and made them into symbols of his own kingly fertility and largesse.23 The gendered aspects of the king’s patronA B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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age were especially evident at the menagerie, where he fused feminine and masculine architectural forms to express a single, controlling authority, one who could be both father and mother, master and ménagère. The menagerie and grande laiterie gave birth to an ideology that extended throughout Louis XIV’s realm, conceived as “an enlargement of his household.”24 The dairy and its milk products constituted raw nature that the king had gathered, purified, and transformed into art — as well as food through which he signified his ability to provide for his subjects. Although Louis XIV had servants at the menagerie to make his dairy products, he took credit for these operations and proudly displayed the results to others. The king scrupulously monitored the construction of his dairy: in August 1664, he went there to determine if its fountain jets were functioning properly, turning them on and off and dousing himself in the process.25 The previous month, he had taken Cardinal Flavio Chigi, the Pope’s nephew, on a tour of the menagerie; perhaps he had debuted the dairy then and been dissatisfied with its performance. He later brought other diplomatic visitors to the menagerie, including, in 1669, Cosimo III de’ Medici, who may have discussed his family’s own dairy at Poggio a Caiano with the king.26 Such visits were designed to smooth over conflicts between opposing factions, and one can imagine the grande laiterie serving as an effective tension breaker, especially if its products were shared and consumed. It was common for the king to serve a light meal during these visits that likely featured ice cream or cheese. Such gastronomic delicacies played their own diplomatic role in proclaiming Louis XIV’s France to be blessed with both agricultural riches and culinary skills. Before turning to the king’s garden fêtes to see how they reinforced these themes, it is worth noting two final characteristics of menageries: the element of competition that they instilled in their patrons, and their negative associations with luxury and despotism. Menageries weren’t just about accumulating animals; they were about having more and better animals, and better facilities to house these animals, than one’s peers. As Louis XIV was developing his menagerie in the 1660s, he was also involved in a game of oneupmanship with his cousin, the Grand Condé, who was then renovating his family’s menagerie at Chantilly. The two men had fought against each other during the Fronde; in retaliation for his cousin’s betrayal, the king had ordered the destruction of the Chantilly menagerie and exiled the Grand Condé to Spain. Upon his return, the Grand Condé made peace with Louis XIV, although he gradually began to withdraw from court and turn his attention to his family’s estate. Eventually, he built a menagerie that surpassed the DAIRY QUEENS

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king’s. The Grand Condé’s activities at Chantilly represent an early instance of the nobility creating pastoral retreats to resist the king’s dogmatic authority and indicate their own superior management capabilities. It underscores the notion that Louis XIV was always looking over his shoulder at Versailles, and that absolutism was always a struggle, never a guarantee. Similarly, the pastoral projects the king commissioned to reinforce his message never proclaimed peace or abundance in unambiguous terms. They were always shaped as much by what they left out — war, famine, political repression — as by what they put in.27 The crown’s strict policy of censorship meant that few people commented on the discrepancies between the pastoral idyll represented by Versailles and the harsh realities of the French countryside, but that didn’t mean they didn’t notice them. In the 1690s, the monarchy was subjected to criticism from reformers who tried to get courtiers to stop pursuing luxury and excess and start taking care of the land. Led by François Fénelon, this group had close ties to the duc and duchesse de Bourgogne. Fénelon’s theories were revived in the eighteenth century, when the public became more outspoken against the royal hypocrisy they observed. In many cases, these detractors focused their anger on buildings — such as menageries, hermitages, and pleasure dairies — which they felt embodied this duplicity. In an entry on menageries in the Encyclopédie (1751 – 1772), Denis Diderot associated these structures with despotic sovereigns and argued, “one should destroy menageries when people lack bread; it would be shameful to nourish animals at great expense, when one is surrounded by men who are dying of hunger.”28 Diderot’s comments suggest why the crown, in later years, began sponsoring menageries that stressed agricultural production over opulent display, and perhaps why the Versailles menagerie was virtually abandoned in the wake of Louis XIV’s death.

TH E SUN KINg AND HIS WOMEN

 Louis XIV extended the menagerie’s message of royal abundance and power to other areas of the gardens and to the pastoral-themed fêtes that he staged at Versailles in the 1660s and 1670s. In their iconography and program, these events recalled Catherine de’ Medici’s political festivals, and they were similarly designed to usher in and celebrate a new era of peace and prosperity following war. But while they embraced the pastoral dialectic of relaxation or leisure (otium) as the natural result of work (negotium), the Versailles fêtes A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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were nearly as arduous to plan and implement as the king’s military campaigns, indicating a continuation of the strains of absolutism from the battlefield to the royal landscape. Jean de La Fontaine made this comparison explicit in 1677 when he dryly observed, in reference to one of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s bombastic operas written for the king, “His divertissements all resemble war.”29 While showcasing ad infinitum Louis XIV’s strengths as a warrior, these fêtes magnified another aspect of his royal persona: the king’s sexual virility and ability to seduce unruly women and mistresses. At the same time, they provided an opportunity for these mistresses to enhance their status and visibility via the pastoral mode. Since the Versailles fêtes and gardens have been explored in detail by other scholars, I will only point out a few aspects of their construction that reinforce how deeply the king’s pastoral propaganda was embedded in the politics of gender.30 The first major fête, known as “The Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle,” was held over several days in May 1664, just as royal designers were putting the finishing touches on the king’s menagerie and grande laiterie. The event aimed to celebrate the pastoral splendor and plenitude of the Versailles landscape, along with the sexual satisfaction that Louis XIV had found with his new mistress, Louise de La Vallière. The program included an extravagant collation based on the four seasons, announced by a parade of young men dressed as gardeners bearing fruit (spring); grain harvesters with bread products (summer); wine harvesters toting wine (fall); and old men carrying baskets of ice (winter).31 On the festival’s fourth day, Louis XIV brought courtiers to the menagerie, where they likely toured the dairy and observed its progress. Through these events, the king and his artists highlighted two themes that would remain dominant at Versailles for the next two decades: an association between the fertility of the land and royal fertility, and the equation of a healthy appetite with a healthy sex life. Both themes were recalled in another pastoral fête held at Versailles on July 18, 1668. This occasion heralded the ascendancy of the king’s new mistress, Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Madame de Montespan (1641 – 1707), who was also newly pregnant. (She would go on to bear seven of Louis XIV’s children in less than a decade.) It repeated the motifs and structure of the 1664 fête, albeit collapsed into one spectacular evening. In an account of the events, Félibien described an elegant snack or collation in the gardens, followed by a lavish supper in an octagonal pavilion erected for the occasion.32 Designed to imitate a classical temple, the pavilion symbolized the theme of Arcadian renewal, with pastoral motifs on the façade and a rustic grotto in the interior. Inside was a large octagonal table with sixty-four DAIRY QUEENS

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place settings that, along with the grotto, resembled the design for Catherine de’ Medici’s 1565 banquet at Bayonne (see Chapter 1). But here these signs of fertility and regeneration functioned differently, signaling the male monarch’s ability to master nature through the bodies of his mistresses and their frequent pregnancies. Known as “Les divertissements de Versailles,” the last festival of note was held over several days in the summer of 1674 to honor Louis XIV’s conquering of the Franche-Comté. On the first day, courtiers enjoyed a light meal in the gardens followed by a performance of Lully’s Alceste, whose prologue featured a chorus of nubile nymphs pining for the king’s return from battle. Alceste was staged in an outdoor pavilion adorned with a fountain and a corne d’Amalthée, or a horn of plenty.33 This icon of abundance and regeneration was associated with the myth of Amalthea, the nymph who, according to Ovid, hid the infant Jupiter in a cave and nursed him with goat’s milk while he was separated from his mother and father, who wanted to murder his son and thereby prevent his succession. French rulers were drawn to the rich symbolic potential of this story for a variety of reasons throughout the ancien régime. At Louis XIV’s Versailles, where Amalthea was later represented on the palace’s garden façade and at Grand Trianon, she may have helped the king express his own myth of self-creation and his break from the past, notably from his mother and Mazarin.34 Amalthea was a useful “mistress” for Louis XIV because her assistance was temporary, and because she was not a real woman — someone with whom to share power. Rather, she was a compliant, nurturing helpmate, who could be transformed into an allegory of Abundance or Nature, much like the French Revolutionary allegories to which she, as I argue in Chapter 5, gave birth. As part of Louis XIV’s garden propaganda, she shared her duties with other female allegories such as Peace, described in Laurent Morellet’s 1681 guidebook to Versailles as a mother gathering the king to her breast.35 One of these allegorical figures appeared as the title illustration to a 1705 publication of L’idylle sur la paix, a pastoral opera written by Jean Racine with music by Lully. The opera was first performed in 1685 during a royal fête hosted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s son at the château de Sceaux (Figure 2.6). The program and decoration for this event, which celebrated the truce of Regensburg, likely resembled that shown in the engraving, with pastoral motifs such as a grotto, fountains, and dancing peasants or shepherds. These motifs frame the allegorical figure, who cradles a corne d’Amalthée in her left hand and bares her right breast. The engraving provides a sense of the festival iconography at Versailles and Sceaux. A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.6 Title page to L’idylle sur la paix (1705). TS C13 v.9, Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

In making copious use of these female allegories, it seems that Louis XIV did not want to eradicate female fertility or nurture entirely. He wanted to absorb these qualities in his own person, to conceive of women and gardens as raw material for his own (male) production.36 The grande laiterie took up where these female allegories left off, as a womblike space that he could utilize to transform the red blood of war into the white milk of peace during state visits and festivals. The transformation of blood into milk echoed classical and early modern theories of generation, in which pregnant bodies were thought to make breast milk out of menstrual blood during the gestation period.37 Milk, as a symbol of peace and abundance, figured prominently in Louis XIV’s pastoral propaganda. During the 1674 fête milk products were likely served on the fourth day, when he hosted a meal for court ladies at the menagerie. As for the king’s real-life mistresses, these women helped bolster his virile persona, though they also used pastoral symbolism to convey their role DAIRY QUEENS

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at court. Foremost in this regard was Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s official mistress (maîtresse-en-titre) from 1667 until around 1680. Having seduced the king during a pastoral ballet in which he danced the role of a shepherd and she was one of his shepherdesses, Montespan continued to draw upon pastoral imagery in portraits and architectural projects to reference her natural beauty and prodigious fertility. In addition to her brood of children, Montespan’s most significant achievement in the eyes of the court was her exquisite château de Clagny, built on a piece of land adjacent to Versailles. Designed by Hardouin-Mansart and constructed at a rapid pace beginning in 1674, Clagny (destroyed in 1769) was designed to house and celebrate her children with the king, several of whom Louis XIV had legitimated the previous year. Clagny’s high-profile status was communicated through its placement and design. As one approached Versailles from Paris, the château appeared just in front and to the right of the king’s palace, which it resembled in appearance and shape.38 While Clagny was being built, courtiers and other palace visitors eagerly monitored its construction. One observer, Madame de Sévigné, compared the lush landscaping (designed by Le Nôtre) to the gardens of Armida, the pastoral heroine of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. Eventually these gardens became so extensive that, in 1675, Louis XIV was obliged to purchase the adjacent territory of Glatigny to create more space for a vegetable garden and an orchard. Glatigny quickly emerged as the productive area of Montespan’s estate, and a menagerie with a farm, a sheepfold, and a dairy was added there around 1677. No images survive of her menagerie or dairy, although the latter seems to have been less spectacular than the grande laiterie, the kind of dairy that was common on the grounds of feudal estates.39 Still, it may have functioned as a pastoral showpiece alongside the Glatigny menagerie, which, as Sévigné attests, was stocked with superior specimens of cows, sheep, and geese that courtiers had presented to the king’s mistress. Emulating Versailles and the royal menagerie on a smaller scale, Clagny and Glatigny contributed to the palace’s message of abundance and fertility. At the same time, the prominent château underscored Montespan’s importance in bearing royal children to guarantee the success of the Bourbon line. Clagny was the first of several pastoral retreats constructed around Versailles for royal women during the ancien régime, including the duchesse de Bourgogne, Marie-Antoinette, and Madame de Pompadour, whose hermitage at Versailles was built near Glatigny in 1748. Though these satellite residences may have been intended to orbit and reflect the king’s power base, they also A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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enabled their female patrons to transcend their deferential roles at court and assert their own authority and sense of self. EXILE AND FEMININE RETREAT

 During the Sun King’s reign, some royal and elite women used pastoral retreats as a form of political protest. Perhaps the best known of these protesters was Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (1627 – 1693). Also known as La Grande Mademoiselle, she was the richest heiress in France during her lifetime and a cousin of Louis XIV. Because of her involvement in the Fronde, which she commemorated in portraits that represented her dressed in military attire, she was temporarily banished from court. Between 1652 and 1657 she resided primarily in exile at her family’s château de Saint-Fargeau in remote Burgundy. Refusing to accept defeat, Montpensier resolved to create a rural retreat that would provide a satisfying, even preferable alternative to court life. She hired Louis Le Vau’s brother, François Le Vau, to rebuild her rundown château; replanted her gardens (while retaining their natural rusticity); and organized fêtes champêtres to entice courtiers and artists to leave the Sun King’s orbit and join her circle.40 Among her guests was the author Jean-Regnault de Segrais, who wrote a collection of stories for her that celebrated the simple pleasures of la vie champêtre over the indulgent entertainments of the city and the court. In one of these stories Segrais invoked L’Astrée, revealing the huge impact that this pastoral romance, with its tale of elegant shepherds in the lush Forez region of France, had on the mindset and behavior of seventeenth-century elites. “What can compare,” Segrais wrote, “to the simplicity and charms of the life the Lignon shepherds lead? Which one of us has never read L’Astrée without immediately wanting to buy a flock of sheep, take up the shepherd’s crook, and go live in the Forez?”41 In her own words, the duchesse de Montpensier described her situation not as forced exile, but as a personal choice: “If one becomes bored at court, one can go to the countryside . . . where it’s possible to build and be amused. When one is the mistress of her own desires, she is happy, because she can do as she pleases.”42 Her strategic use of the pastoral mode, which she embraced even after she was accepted back at court, was geared toward a singular purpose: to imagine a new identity for elite women that opposed their subservient role within the monarchical regime. Montpensier resented the fact that, owing

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to her wealth, title, and sex, Louis XIV perceived her as a useful commodity and hoped to marry her off to further his own ambitions. In 1663, she rejected his proposal to have her wed the king of Portugal, which resulted in another period of exile at Saint-Fargeau. Likening marriage to a form of “slavery,” around 1660 she wrote a series of letters to her friend, Madame de Motteville, in which she conjured up a pastoral realm inhabited and governed by women. In one of her letters, Montpensier envisions herself among a community of elite women dressed in rustic clothing, who live in natural surroundings and possess only a modest cottage, a garden, and a library. She describes their daily activities: I would like us to keep herds of sheep in these beautiful meadows, to have shepherds’ staffs and wide-brimmed hats, to sit down on the green grass and to dine on rustic fare like that of shepherds, and sometimes to imitate what we have read in L’Astrée though without any amorous pursuit, for that does not please me in any guise. When we are wearing shepherds’ clothing, I would not disapprove of those who milk the cows nor of those who make the cheeses and cakes, since we must eat, and I do not propose that the project for our life should be as far-fetched as those novels where they observe a perpetual fast and rigorous abstinence is practiced.43 Montpensier’s account follows the conventions of the pastoral genre in expressing a desire to escape a more complex form of existence — in this case, court life and its rigid standards of etiquette, hierarchy, and service. Unlike Louis XIV, she was opposed to unnecessary excess, and, though she did permit pleasure in her imaginary retreat, she rejected “amorous pursuit.” References to sexuality were a major aspect of the king’s pastoral representation, alluding not only to his own virility but also to the heterosexual economy of production and exchange that flourished under his rule. But for Montpensier, the pastoral genre signaled the fertility of the mind rather than the flesh. As Joan DeJean has shown, the duchess adopted the pastoral mode to protest a system in which she was valued only as a marriageable entity, a mere body that churned out heirs to guarantee royal power. She countered that elite women should be valued instead for their intellect and imagination, and for the contribution they could make to society beyond the limited opportunities afforded by marriage and motherhood. In proposing female benevolence and stewardship as the foundations of a “new feudal order,” Montpensier grounded her

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pastoral fantasy in concrete terms, foreshadowing later attempts to redirect the genre toward more socially productive ends.44 Montpensier’s writings evoke the cultural ideal of the honest, virtuous woman or honnête femme. In the second half of the seventeenth century this figure was associated with a group of aristocratic, highly educated literary women who were known, in some circles pejoratively, as les précieuses (literally “the precious ones”).45 This group, whose members included Madame de Lafayette and Madeleine de Scudéry, espoused the pastoral genre not for its aesthetics of abundance but for its sophisticated and allusive character, through which they critiqued prevailing attitudes toward elite women while demonstrating their own cultural awareness, civility, and prodigious natural talent. Rather than a territory of male domination, they reclaimed the pastoral landscape as a space of feminine desire and envisioned an alternative society based on freedom of choice, purity of sentiment, and mutual appreciation. This was the same collaborative, ethical environment that they sought to create in their salons, in opposition to the competitive, patriarchal world of the Versailles court. The précieuses and other honnêtes femmes used pastoral and natural imagery in fluid and expansive terms, highlighting their intellectual and cultural accomplishments, social and political views, and emotional needs and desires. This departed from the ways that other writers and philosophers in this era invoked nature, or a historically contingent view of nature, to regulate and delimit the status of women.46 Seventeenth-century noblewomen expressed themselves not only through pastoral literature but also through pastoral buildings, gardens, and stylized, déguisé portraits. Many of these portraits represented them in a verdant landscape, dressed in rustic attire and surrounded by flowers and fields. The painters Pierre Mignard and Claude Deruet were the most prominent practitioners of this portrait style. Deruet gave the genre a boost around 1640 when he depicted Julie d’Angennes, the daughter of the celebrated marquise de Rambouillet, as a shepherdess.47 This style of pastoral portraiture remained popular in the late seventeenth century, when it was associated with Pierre Gobert, a painter favored by the ladies of Louis XIV’s court. Around 1692 Gobert depicted one such lady, presumed to be Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse du Maine (1676 – 1753), in a garden setting (Figure 2.7). The duchesse du Maine was the granddaughter of the Grand Condé and the wife of the duc du Maine, one of Montespan’s and the king’s legitimized sons. In her portrait she wears a sumptuous, ermine-trimmed cape, a white dress rendered with lush strokes of paint, and a tight bodice whose broderie pattern recalls DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 2.7 Pierre Gobert, Portrait of the Duchesse du Maine, c. 1692. Sceaux, Collection Musée de l’Ile-de-France. Photo: Pascal Lemaître

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garden designs from the period. Holding a floral garland in one hand and more flowers on her lap, she looks like a supremely elegant version of a female allegorical figure — Peace, Abundance, or Nature — brought to life. Gobert depicts her positioned between a classical pavilion and the statue of a sphinx, whose inscrutable expression and rigid posture mirror her own. The implied connection that the artist seems to be making between his sitter and the sphinx is echoed in other representations of noblewomen from the period, including a portrait of Madame de Montespan attributed to Charles de La Fosse from around 1677, and another portrait by Gobert of the duchesse de Bourgogne (see Figure 2.15).48 Sphinxes had been popular artistic motifs since the sixteenth century, when they ornamented the gardens of Fontainebleau and the tomb of Diane de Poitiers. Piero Valeriano had interpreted them as symbols of power and human intelligence, while Cesare Ripa had linked them to cleverness and perspicacity.49 Sphinxes were also identified with the cult of Isis, the Egyptian fertility goddess and an icon of strong female leadership. Around 1670, Louis XIV had commissioned a pair of sphinx statues for the Versailles gardens that were encircled by a royal band, an emblem that, according to Morellet, signified “the force of kings.”50 But elite women were also drawn to sphinx imagery, perhaps to signal the enigmatic power of the honnête femme or to preserve a sense of mystery regarding nature and femininity, thereby preventing these attributes from being harnessed to a singular political purpose. Like much of the pastoral imagery that these noblewomen favored, their sphinx portraits remain veiled and ambiguous, signifying wisdom, authority, fecundity, or all of the above. Like Montpensier, the duchesse du Maine rejected absolutism and its unilateral deployment of kingly power, a system in which elite women were valued chiefly for their ability to expand the king’s dominion through their bodies and bloodlines. Resentful that Louis XIV had married her off to one of his naturalized sons, she retreated from Versailles and established her own countercourt at Sceaux (an estate that her husband had purchased from Colbert’s heirs) in the early eighteenth century. There, she cultivated her intellect and social skills along with her gardens. She also commissioned a menagerie pavilion from the architect Jacques de la Guépière that was built on a hill overlooking the road from Sceaux to Versailles. With its central salon and wrought iron balconies, the Sceaux menagerie recalled that of the king’s, although it was more opulently ornamented with pastoral motifs, including a reference to Vertumnus, the god of gardens, on one of its pediments.51

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And unlike Versailles, the duchess’s menagerie was demonstrably antiutilitarian. No animals were housed there, and the rooms were designated not for dairying but for salon gatherings and fashionable pastimes like drinking coffee, a new luxury beverage. The duchess’s menagerie emphasized the productive value of social intercourse and cultural exchange, along with the savvy cosmopolitan women who fostered such activities. Though milk was not a strong presence at Sceaux, it featured prominently in the duchesse de Montpensier’s pastoral poetics. Although we don’t know to what extent her literary creations imitated her real-life activities, it seems likely that dairying or at least dairy products were a part of the champêtre lifestyle that she fashioned at Saint-Fargeau. In her letters to Motteville, milk operates as a sign not just of bodily or maternal abundance but of female intellectual creativity. It may have also signified her ability to manage her estates as an industrious seigneuse. Above all, milk alluded to her triumph in eluding state control and maintaining a virginal purity. Here the liquid took on an almost spiritual significance, suggesting a connection between pastoral and religious retreat that would later be recalled in the eighteenth-century cult of the hermitage. In the wake of the Fronde, several prominent noblewomen rejected court life and took up residence at the convent of Port-Royal in Paris, where they hoped “to be distinguished by their culture, their refinement, their rejection of physical love and all sensuality, and to keep to a pure and rigorous ethical and aesthetic way of life.”52 They expressed this desire in their architectural surroundings or by adopting austere forms of dress and following an ascetic milk diet. For some, this removal was permanent; for others, it was a temporary restorative measure. Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, had a small hermitage known as the salle basse at the convent of Val-de-Grâce in Paris, which she decorated with landscape paintings that depicted female hermits by the artist Philippe de Champaigne. Like that of the vestal virgin, the image of the female hermit flourished in the eighteenth century. During the remodeling of Sceaux, the duchesse du Maine added a hidden apartment to the second floor of her château known as La Chartreuse, named after a monastery of Carthusian monks. Louis XV was supposedly captivated by this retreat, and it may have inspired Madame de Pompadour’s hermitages.53

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T H E PLEASURE DAIRY AT CHANTILLY

 Whether at Versailles, Sceaux, or Saint-Fargeau, elite women in ancien régime France used architectural space to create and experience new forms of identity. For many women, this entailed participating in a debate over their proper role in society and at court. Pleasure dairies offered a versatile arena to engage this debate, to perform or resist an image of idealized femininity. This was how the menagerie and dairy at Versailles functioned for the duchesse de Bourgogne. But before returning to this last example, we should explore how noble status was enacted in the most celebrated of all ancien régime pleasure dairies: the laiterie at Chantilly. From its construction in the late 1680s until its destruction in 1799 by Revolutionary officials, the Chantilly dairy elicited rhapsodic descriptions from numerous visitors. It also inspired the design of other pleasures dairies, including those built for Marie-Antoinette at Versailles and Rambouillet.54 As noted in the Introduction to this book, the Chantilly laiterie played a vital role in the program and symbolism of this royal estate. The building was documented and illustrated more than any other pleasure dairy before the late eighteenth century, making it a touchstone for considering how similar laiteries may have looked and operated. Though many of these illustrations were made decades after the dairy was built, they still serve to evoke its original appearance, which was carefully maintained by the Condé family in the eighteenth century as an enduring emblem of their status and legacy. The château de Chantilly, approximately twenty-five miles north of Paris, had been built in the sixteenth century for one of Francis I’s military officers. The estate rivaled Versailles in majesty and prestige. Whereas Versailles expressed Louis XIV’s desire to remake the realm in his image, Chantilly reminded the nobility of their feudal glory. During the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, this valor was embodied by the château’s larger-than-life owner and war hero, Louis II de Bourbon, the Grand Condé (1621 – 1686). (The Condés were high-ranking members of the royal house of Bourbon.) In the 1670s, after spending years fighting for and against the king, the Grand Condé retired to Chantilly. There he pursued a program of pastoral otium, aggrandizing his estate by adding gardens designed by Le Nôtre and a lavish menagerie that replaced the one destroyed during the Fronde by the king’s troops.55 The Grand Condé’s tenure at Chantilly coincided with a transitional period for the French nobility, in which the former markers of their status — DAIRY QUEENS

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land ownership and military service — were being supplanted by participation and etiquette at court. Although this process had begun in the sixteenth century, it intensified dramatically under Louis XIV. The Grand Condé thus represented a throwback to an earlier age, one that some of the nobility (especially the noblesse d’épée) felt was disappearing. At the same time, his activities at Chantilly invoked more recent ideas of estate management, or aménagement, that Olivier de Serres and other agricultural writers had urged the nobility to uphold as a way to improve the state and their own prospects.56 The principal theater of aménagement at Chantilly was the menagerie, where a pleasure dairy, designed by Hardouin-Mansart, was installed in an elaborate, multiroom pavilion commissioned by the Grand Condé and his son, Henri III Jules de Bourbon (1643 – 1709). After his father died and he inherited the title of prince de Condé in 1686, Henri-Jules took over the complex and began decorating the pavilion and its dairy. He filled the building with elegant pastoral-themed paintings and porcelain, highlighting his cultivation of the arts. The laiterie d’agrément provided the new prince de Condé with a space to demonstrate both feudal production and aristocratic consumption, an increasingly important component of elite identity. It also enabled him to emulate and compete with Versailles, as his father had done before him — and as his daughter, the duchesse du Maine, would do at Sceaux. Several of the Condé family’s supporters declared their version of la vie champêtre to be superior to Louis XIV’s. Among them was Jean-Baptiste Santeuil, who wrote a series of pastoral poems in 1684 and 1696 celebrating the “tranquil abode” of Chantilly over “the pompous charms of the court.”57 The Chantilly menagerie was north of the château, on the banks of the estate’s Grand Canal and near a small village named Vineuil. A plan of the menagerie from 1784, which appeared in a lavish album commemorating a visit to Chantilly by the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia, gives a sense of its bucolic setting and epic proportions (Figure 2.8). (The album is known as the Album du comte du Nord after the alias that the Russian duke used during his travels.) Much of the menagerie as it appears on this eighteenthcentury plan had been originally developed by the Grand Condé, who commissioned several buildings and water features and stocked them with animals including fish, birds, cows, and buffalo. Like the Versailles menagerie, these buildings were well constructed but outwardly modest. They recalled the Arcadian simplicity of Catherine de’ Medici’s farm and dairy at Saint-Maur, a property that belonged to the Condé family in the seventeenth century (see Figure 1.12). A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.8 Plan of the menagerie at Chantilly from the Album du comte du Nord, 1784. Chantilly, Musée Condé. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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As the site and its reputation expanded, the Chantilly menagerie began attracting visitors in droves. Needing a space to entertain their guests, around 1685 – 1686 the Grand Condé and his son commissioned Hardouin-Mansart to design a pavilion in collaboration with Daniel Gittard, an architect who had helped renovate the family’s property at Saint-Maur a few years earlier. Construction began in 1686, the year of the Grand Condé’s death. Comprising a central building block and two side wings, the pavilion appears on the 1784 plan just above the canal and to the right of a fountain labeled “Bassin des Maronniers.” Placing the pavilion’s service functions in the center, Hardouin-Mansart created an appartement in each wing with spacious entertainment rooms at either end. One of these rooms, in the left-hand wing, was used for the pleasure dairy, while the room on the opposite side contained a salon dedicated to the fertility goddess Isis. Both rooms were tall, with elegant vaulted ceilings, large arched windows overlooking the canal, and domed roofs. Their simple, almost austere exterior design is indicated in an engraving from a late eighteenth-century travel guide by Mérigot fils (Figure 2.9). Utilized as a venue for small gatherings, meals, and theatrical performances, the Isis salon was decorated first, beginning around 1686. Capitalizing on a fashion for Egyptian motifs, the room’s theme also invoked the agricultural and female fecundity of the site and its dairy. For advice on the salon’s decoration, Henri-Jules wrote the court dramatist Racine to ask if he knew of a precedent whereby Isis was depicted in the form of a cow.58 Racine responded that she was typically represented as a woman with a veil holding two horns of plenty over her breasts, and proposed that a more appropriate deity for a menagerie would be Apis, Isis’s husband or brother, whom the Egyptians had worshipped in the form of a bull. Racine described an Egyptian ritual honoring this bull that featured flute players, dancing children, floral-crowned priests, and people with offerings of food all processing toward a temple where the animal was housed. The prince, however, settled on Isis, paying the artists Francart and Simon 3,200 livres in 1688 to decorate the room (unfortunately, the details of their work are not specified). That same year, the Mercure galant described the salon, which the prince de Condé had debuted to the court during a fête to honor the dauphin, as “more like a temple to Isis than an ordinary building.”59 In 1703 Bon Boullogne, an Academy painter who had worked at the Versailles menagerie, received 1,000 livres for restoring the room’s decoration and adding a painting of ancient Egyptians, possibly along the lines of Racine’s description. The décor remained unchanged in the eighteenth century, when the Condé family frequently used the Isis salon and the dairy to A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.9 Mérigot fils, view of the menagerie at Chantilly from Promenades ou itinéraire des jardins de Chantilly (1791). Typ 715.88.427, Houghton Library, Harvard University

host pastoral fêtes during a royal visit, or to celebrate important family rituals like births and weddings. One of these weddings, between Henri-Jules’s grandson (then the prince de Condé) and the German princess Marie-Caroline de Hesse-Rheinfels, was described in the August 1728 edition of the Mercure de France. On the day the new bride was brought to Chantilly, she was greeted by the Condé family and villagers from Vineuil, including peasant girls dressed in white, who danced around her as she was led to the Isis salon and laiterie. Arriving at the dairy, she was offered gifts — a flower basket, a birdcage, a dairy cow, and a white lamb — and milk products, including two porcelain vases filled with fresh cream.60 The event evoked Racine’s procession except that the iconography was pastoral and the theme dynastic: its purpose was to assimilate the German princess into the Bourbon-Condé branch of the royal family and declare the alliance to be part of the order of nature. The ceremony may have also aimed to augur her fertility, a pressing issue given that her husband’s first wife had died without giving him an heir. During this event, favorable comparisons were likely drawn between Marie-Caroline and Isis, who was often represented as an exemplary wife to Osiris and an ideal mother to Horus, the Egyptian god of healing and renewal. DAIRY QUEENS

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In 1753, a similar ceremony was held at the dairy to celebrate the marriage of Marie-Caroline’s son, Louis-Joseph, to Charlotte de Rohan-Soubise. One of the attendees, the duc de Croÿ, was captivated on this occasion by the splendor of the laiterie and its new mistress, whom he later remembered as “fresher still than this place, and as white as the gorgeous ice cream we ate.” Croÿ makes an analogy between dairies and women that became more pronounced in the second half of the eighteenth century with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who described well-run dairies as emblems of feminine goodness and purity.61 The Chantilly wedding ritual indicates that this idea was prevalent long before the era of Rousseau. In addition to its rich cultural and political symbolism, the Chantilly dairy provided the Condé family with fresh, wholesome milk. Both HenriJules and his father (as well as Louis XIV) suffered from gout, a disease associated with indulgent lifestyles for which milk was recommended as a treatment. The Grand Condé’s apothecary, Barthélemy Martin, wrote one of the first treatises devoted to milk in 1684. He recommended drinking it for stomach and chest problems as well as for gout, and claimed that human breast milk was superior to all other forms, although cow’s milk was also beneficial.62 Martin’s text anticipates the neo-Hippocratic health craze of the eighteenth century, which spurred the construction of dairies and the consumption of milk. I explore this connection in detail in the next chapter in relation to the architectural patronage of Madame de Pompadour. The Chantilly pleasure dairy was decorated between 1689 and 1694. The interior is illustrated in a plan and section view from the 1784 Album du comte du Nord (Figure 2.10).63 The image also depicts four rooms on the pavilion’s right-hand side that preceded the laiterie; they were conceived as a hierarchical arrangement of spaces that complemented the pavilion’s ritualistic function and heightened the anticipation of visiting the dairy itself. The first room, cut off on the plan, was a large, square-shaped “Salon du Bouillon” that was connected to the pavilion’s central building block. Named after the bubbling fountain in its center, the salon was decorated with paintings of animals from the Fables de La Fontaine made by court artists Jean Cotelle and René-Antoine Houasse, who were simultaneously working for the king at Trianon. The room’s function was similar to that of the painting gallery at the Versailles menagerie, transitioning the visitor from the world outside to the otherworldly environment of the laiterie. The next room was small, rectangular, and unadorned; in the album it is shown to contain only a table, a milk pitcher, and a butter churn. Additional utensils, made of blue and white porcelain, are represented in the third A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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PL.'\N E'l' COl.lPES DF. 1- \ L\l'J'El\IE DE CHANTILLY •

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Figure 2.10 Plan and section views of the pleasure dairy at Chantilly from the Album du comte du Nord, 1784. Chantilly, Musée Condé. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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room, along with a pastoral painting of cows in a landscape. The porcelain utensils that appear in the album were not created until the 1760s, when LouisJoseph, prince de Condé, commissioned a new dairy service from his porcelain manufactory at Chantilly (Figure 2.11). Nevertheless, they may have been intended to replace a blue and white service that had been installed in the dairy earlier, perhaps in the late seventeenth century.64 Describing the dairy’s interior in 1701, the poet François Gacon wrote, “the eye discovers nothing but marble and porcelain.” In the 1690s it was fashionable to display blue and white porcelain, or imitations thereof, from China, Delft, or France. Louis XIV had initiated the fashion at the Trianon de Porcelaine, built in 1670.65 The dairy service from the 1760s was simple and painted with the family’s coat of arms, a motif that could have been used in an earlier service. From this third room the visitor walked down a few steps into a small rectangular vestibule, which was taken up by another fountain that flowed directly into the dairy. Judging from the album, it appears that navigating around this fountain to enter the laiterie was a delicate operation that required some finesse. The effort was repaid, however, when the visitor would enter a spacious rotunda that was by far the grandest and most sumptuous of the five

Figure 2.11 Porcelain glass cooler from the “menagerie service” created at the Chantilly porcelain factory, c. 1765. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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rooms. The Chantilly pleasure dairy offered a feast not just for the eyes but for all of the senses — hearing the trickling water of the fountains, smelling and tasting the milk products, and running one’s hand along the marble ledge that encircled the room and held the milk. Hardouin-Mansart’s design for the room was simple but elegant, with white marble walls and tall arched openings that drew the eye upward toward the dome overhead. This design was likely unchanged in the eighteenth century, since the album depicts details that are characteristic of the architect’s style, such as the nude vault and the oculi decorated with bucrania and floral garlands. (Hardouin-Mansart had used similar oculi in his 1686 design for the orangerie at Sceaux.66) The rest of the room was more ornate, with a polychrome marble floor, a red marble table, and a ledge or buffet of brèche violette marble supported by consoles. Capping off this ledge were four white marble coquille basins that were ornamented with ram’s head faucets. These basins spilled water onto the buffet below and kept the milk cool. Milk and other dairy products were stored in porcelain vases, cups, and pans that littered every surface of the room, adding to the effect of abundance. These vessels resembled stone utensils found in working laiteries, just as the room itself followed the functional requirements for dairies that de Serres had recommended: a vaulted ceiling, a ground-floor (or below-ground) setting, and plenty of water and storage. However, the dairy’s high level of luxury and refinement indicates that it was not meant to be functional in the traditional sense. Though it required a great deal of labor to maintain, the dairy’s primary “work” was cultural and symbolic rather than strictly utilitarian.67 Like other pleasure dairies, it was geared more toward consumption, leisure, and display than agricultural production. Visitors to the Chantilly laiterie consumed more than just milk products. Walking through these rooms, they received a powerful message about the Condé family’s strength and fecundity, which were shown to be as legendary as the gods and as reliable as the changing seasons. Like Louis XIV, the family used their dairy for a variety of functions: to celebrate pastoral otium as the deserved reward for work or military service; to indicate their ability to provide for those beneath them (especially the feudal servants who participated in their fêtes); to reinforce idealized norms of gender and class; and to indicate their status as enlightened patrons of the arts. The Chantilly pleasure dairy imitated but surpassed the functional design of working dairies, becoming a veritable cathedral of aristocratic distinction, beneficence, and health. It also surpassed the grande laiterie of Louis XIV, which was less extravagant and did not acquire the same reputation that DAIRY QUEENS

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the Chantilly laiterie did. The Condé family could get away with outshining the king in this case because of their privileged place within the royal hierarchy, just a few notches below Louis XIV himself. Other patrons in this period, like the king’s finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, were not so fortunate. In constructing their dairy and in using it as a venue for royal visits and fêtes, the family may have wanted to remind the court of their importance and value and to counter Louis XIV’s claim that the state (l’état) was only about him — l’état, ce n’est pas que moi. TH E DUCHESSE DE BOURgOgNE, FéNELON, AND THE REMODELINg OF THE VERSAILLES MENAgERIE

 Louis XIV toured the Chantilly laiterie and pavilion on May 15, 1695, in the company of several ladies, including Henri-Jules’s wife and daughter.68 One wonders whether this visit encouraged the king to undertake extensive renovations to the Versailles menagerie when he presented the complex three years later to Marie-Adélaïde, duchesse de Bourgogne. Hardouin-Mansart directed the renovation, and he may have been inspired by his work at Chantilly, specifically with regard to the pleasure dairy that he designed for the duchess. As at Chantilly, Hardouin-Mansart used this renovation project to experiment with new forms of design and decoration, just as the site itself was experimental in envisioning new roles for the monarchy and nobility, notably its female members. Mansart’s renovations focused on the lateral wings of the menagerie’s pavilion, where he created two appartements for the duchess, and on the animal court, where he placed her gardens and dairy. This court had been the most prominent of the menagerie’s seven animal courts and was situated just to the right of the pavilion’s entrance courtyard. Formerly known as the Cour des belles poules, it had been reserved for swans and “beautiful chickens.” The duchess’s new garden could be seen from the pavilion’s observation deck and from her new appartement on the right-hand side, which was known as the “summer” apartment. (Her “winter” apartment was on the other side.) The summer apartment comprised a suite of five intimately scaled rooms of varying shapes that were all embellished with pastoral motifs. In citing the rococo ingenuity of these rooms, Fiske Kimball singled out their wall treatments, featuring large windows and mirrors that flowed A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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rhythmically from floor to ceiling.69 The rooms’ organic design, capped by moldings carved with shell motifs and horns of plenty, befit their naturalistic setting. The organic effect was also enhanced by the grotesque painted decoration on the walls and ceilings. This decoration was executed by Claude III Audran, who received the enormous sum of 22,000 livres for his work in 1700 and 1701.70 The subject matter for these grotesques, or arabesques as they were also known, was stipulated by Hardouin-Mansart, who had initially proposed dedicating each room to a different female divinity: Juno, Minerva, Diana, Pomona, and Ceres. Louis XIV, however, had rejected the proposal as “too serious” for a young girl’s retreat, claiming instead that “childhood should be spread throughout.”71 Hardouin-Mansart submitted a revised plan for the decoration that was accepted on September 8, 1699. This time he suggested dedicating each room to a different champêtre activity. The first room combined images of pastoral divinities like Cybele, Ceres, and Pales with scenes of young shepherds and shepherdesses guarding their flocks and milkmaids dutifully making dairy products. The theme of the second room was “youthful games”; the third was courtly amusements; the fourth was music; and the fifth was cultivating gardens. Building records indicate that Audran’s delicate, weblike arabesques were multicolored and partially gilded, depicting pastoral motifs, trophées, and animals surrounded by a riot of serpentine ornament.72 Several historians have attempted to link this decoration to Audran’s unidentified sketches, including a c. 1700 ceiling design depicting hybrid birds and other creatures that seems likely to have been made for the menagerie (Figure 2.12).73 One of these creatures resembles a rooster, who appears to be winnowing grain with a pair of human arms and legs. Alongside these animals are farming tools, flowers, and plantlike tendrils that evoke the menagerie’s rustic character. In the center, Audran has sketched the face of Apollo surrounded by a sun and a zodiac, a motif that was also adopted around this time at Marly.74 Although stylistically very different, the ornamental grotesques and astrological signs recall the decoration of Catherine de’ Medici’s dairy at Fontainebleau, which some of the king’s designers could have seen before it was torn down in 1702. The arabesque decoration on the walls of the summer apartment may have loosely resembled a series of arabesque panels painted in the early 1720s by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, who collaborated with Audran on many decorative commissions. Known as the Divertissements champêtres, these nine panels originally adorned the château de Voré, a country house belonging to Louis DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 2.12 Claude Audran, arabesque ceiling design (possibly for the Versailles menagerie), c. 1700. Photo: © the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Fagon, the son of Louis XIV’s physician.75 They depict elegantly attired men and women frolicking with commedia dell’arte actors in a bucolic setting. One panel, entitled “The Burlesque Comedy,” represents a well-dressed woman milking a cow in front of a formal garden and a grotto, while a man, dressed as a court jester, wrestles a bear in the foreground (Figure 2.13). The woman milking the cow looks out playfully at the viewer with a hint of a smile on her face, and Oudry frames her figure with an elegant green curtain that enhances the overt theatrical quality of the scene. A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.13 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, “The Burlesque Comedy,” decorative panel painted for the château de Voré, early 1720s. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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Since the sixteenth century, ornamental grotesques or arabesques had served as visual analogues to the nobility’s stylized sense of self. They fulfilled the same purpose at the menagerie, while also underscoring the site’s Arcadian associations and “mixed, transformative character.”76 Like other forms of pastoral architecture, the menagerie was a hybrid environment, one that was poised midway between rusticity and refinement and provided a breeding ground for experimenting with new social and gender roles. After 1698, this experimentation centered on the remodeled animal court, where Marie-Adélaïde engaged in the same champêtre activities that were depicted on the walls of her apartments. In remodeling this court, royal designers added an ornamental garden with geometric parterres and two stone gazebos, or cabinets, at the far end (see Figure 2.2). These cabinets are the only part of the entire menagerie complex that have survived today, although they have been altered (Figure 2.14). Originally, their façades featured Ionic pilasters and pediments that were adorned with the same shell-and-cornucopia design as the moldings in the summer apartment.77 Inside each gazebo were four rocaille niches and carvings of putti in a landscape, playing games and musical instruments. The duchess’s pleasure dairy was located just on the opposite side of the garden wall from these pavilions and could be accessed via a doorway leading out of one of them. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the dairy’s decoration, but perhaps it resembled on a less grand scale the menagerie’s other buildings or the laiterie at Chantilly. Like Louis XIV’s grande laiterie, the duchess’s dairy comprised two rooms: a smaller workroom and a larger showroom with a fountain and a built-in ledge.78 The larger room was used for storing and displaying milk products, which were probably kept in porcelain or faience vessels and consumed in the nearby gazebos. Like other dairy patrons, the duchesse de Bourgogne used her laiterie for multiple purposes. First, she wanted to establish roots in the royal landscape and naturalize her status at court, just like the exotic flora and fauna that were brought to the menagerie to be acclimatized. Even though she was related to the French royal family on her mother’s side, Marie-Adélaïde was considered a foreigner by courtiers who suspected her of retaining ties to her native Savoy. The Princess Palatine commented on the girl’s attempts to redress this problem soon after her arrival at Versailles, by noting how she refused to speak to a Savoyard ambassador “for fear that the King might take it amiss and think that she is still attached to her fatherland.”79 Dairies enabled foreign-born royal women to acclimate to the French court’s interests and activities. Regardless of whether these women may have also had dairies back home, the location and symbolism of these pastoral buildings made them A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.14 Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the duchesse de Bourgogne’s garden pavilions at the Versailles menagerie, c. 1698 – 1700. Photo: by author

demonstrably French, as did their use of decorative motifs, like grotesques, that derived from elsewhere but that were given (here by Audran) a distinctly Gallic twist. In addition, pleasure dairies enabled these women to appear fertile and productive, perhaps compensating in Marie-Adélaïde’s case for her difficulties in getting pregnant. (She did not have a child until 1710, when she gave birth to the future Louis XV.) Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette experienced similar troubles with fertility, but unlike Marie-Adélaïde they built dairies after they had had their children, partly as monuments to their maternal triumph. Children were extraordinarily important to the French crown; not only did they ensure the continuation of the dynastic line, but they were also royal emblems of vitality and renewal. During Marie-Adélaïde’s first decade at Versailles, she herself served as one these emblems, along with her young husband, the duc de Bourgogne. Her garden retreat was built at a time when some courtiers began to suspect that the monarchy, by encouraging Colbertian policies of mercantilism, industrial production, and the selling of noble offices, was headed in the wrong direction and needed to revive the DAIRY QUEENS

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feudal tradition of aménagement.80 Spearheaded by the duc de Bourgogne’s tutor, the Archbishop Fénelon, this campaign was fervently adopted by Louis XIV’s new wife, Madame de Maintenon, who was also Marie-Adélaïde’s mentor at Versailles. From the early 1680s, Maintenon had encouraged a new climate of piety and restraint at Versailles that had tamed even the king. After this period Louis XIV curtailed the bombastic displays of pastoral virility and excess that had characterized the first two decades of his rule. Fénelon and his circle of dévots (a conservative faction at Versailles) professed that the court, over the course of Louis XIV’s reign, had grown sterile and corrupt. They laid the blame for this situation partly on the prominence of worldly women like the précieuses. To repair the damage, Fénelon argued that noblewomen should retreat from court life, embrace their true calling as wives and mothers, and spend their days supervising their estates, pursuing such domestic activities as running the kitchen garden and the dairy. In this way, they could save themselves and regenerate society, one household at a time. Fénelon articulated his theories in a thinly veiled political tract entitled Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse, published in 1699 but written a few years earlier for the duc de Bourgogne. In his story Fénelon describes the prosperous kingdom of Salentum, overseen by a wise ruler who recognizes that a territory’s “true strength and wealth” is measured not by luxury or the unfettered exercise of royal power, but by “the number of that people, and the produce of the lands.”81 Fénelon also describes the ruler’s virtuous daughter, Antiope, who represents the female agent of his revitalizing scheme. In the story, the hero, Telemachus, falls in love with Antiope, claiming that he is enchanted by her “modest reserve” and virtuous domesticity.82 Louis XIV’s court understood that Telemachus was meant to be a foil for the duc de Bourgogne, whereas Marie-Adélaïde was associated with Antiope. Although Fénelon’s description of this modest, retiring girl did not exactly fit the duchess’s extroverted temperament, it did provide a model of domesticated femininity that she was encouraged to promote. Fénelon had first described his model of idealized womanhood in a treatise entitled De l’éducation des filles (1687). He argued that the minds of young girls were “moist” and impressionable and that they learned best through a form of visual imprinting, whereby they were shown models of proper feminine behavior — from antiquity, the Bible, or the pastoral genre — and encouraged to emulate them.83 They could also, Fénelon claimed, learn to be good by watching one another, an idea that influenced Maintenon’s establishment of an all-girls’ boarding school at Saint-Cyr near Versailles in 1686. Designed by Hardouin-Mansart and situated near the menagerie, Saint-Cyr was reserved A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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for impoverished daughters of the ancien nobility, who were taught there to become effective estate managers just as Fénelon, one of the school’s confessors, had recommended. In 1689, Maintenon made De l’éducation des filles the school’s official textbook, replacing a book of conversations by the précieuse Madame de Scudéry. She also had students read her own writings, which condemned worldly women while preaching the pleasures of household economy and rural life. In one of her texts, Maintenon expressed a desire to teach young noblewomen “to see that they acquit themselves of their functions well, that the farming is done well, that they take care of the animals, the turkeys, and the hens.”84 Her wish was put into practice at Saint-Cyr, where domestic economy was a key part of the curriculum, and where a large farm and dairy were utilized as classrooms. Maintenon’s goal was to equip these girls for a virtuous, industrious future at the helm of a feudal estate, where they could bring honor and profit to the nobility and themselves. Her ideas helped usher in a literary period known as the “great confinement,” marked by publications that aimed to restrict elite women to attitudes and activities associated with the domestic sphere.85 This rhetoric later flourished in the writings of Rousseau, the marquis de Mirabeau, and Madame de Genlis, all of whom stressed the “natural” link between femininity and domesticity and sought to channel the pastoral to more useful ends. Though the duchesse de Bourgogne wasn’t about to retire to the provinces and run a noble estate, she did enroll at Saint-Cyr, where Maintenon attempted to make her a role model for the other girls to follow. MarieAdélaïde tried to fulfill this duty, though she didn’t always measure up to Maintenon’s exacting standards.86 However, not everything was deadly serious at Saint-Cyr; even Maintenon recognized the importance of play in reinforcing her message. Play was also an essential component of the Versailles menagerie. Jennifer Spinks has argued that the pavilion’s painted decoration, interspersed with references to pastoral productivity and the moral fables of La Fontaine, was designed to teach the duchess how to be an exemplary woman and consort to her husband. This goal was largely accomplished through play, or, as the abbé Genest (who wrote a didactic poem for MarieAdélaïde) described it in 1697, through using images and stories that were “artfully veiled” so as to “discreetly convey useful truths.”87 Perhaps even more than the pavilion’s decoration, which evokes Fénelon’s model of visual imprinting, it was the duchess’s new gardens and dairy that epitomized this artful instruction. Here Marie-Adélaïde did not simply observe but enacted Fénelon’s ideal woman for courtiers and the king, DAIRY QUEENS

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who watched her perform and were captivated by the performance. Some of them, no doubt Louis XIV, interpreted her actions as a confirmation of the continued health and glory of the monarchy he had created, and of a superior form of courtly expression and refinement that would flourish in the years to come. Others, however, may have thought that it represented a new direction for the crown, based on a revived commitment to the land and a new engagement with the domestic sphere, especially by noblewomen. Even at a young age, Marie-Adélaïde was shrewd enough to calibrate her performance to play to both sides, and to do this she relied on the open-ended, veiled symbolism of the pastoral genre as elite women had done before her. Some of the subtlety or nuance of Marie-Adélaïde’s courtly persona is conveyed in a portrait of her by Pierre Gobert from 1704 (Figure 2.15). The image departs from other portraits, by Gobert and other artists, that depict her as an innocent young girl surrounded by signs of virtue and Bourbon renewal, such as a white dress, a floral garland, or the fleur-de-lis.88 Here she appears older and wiser, gesturing toward the Grand Canal at Fontainebleau and dressed in a bright red, masculine-inspired hunting costume known as an amazone. Like the arabesques on the walls of her pavilion, there is an enigmatic, mutable quality to her appearance. On the one hand, she resembles a mirror image of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s iconic 1701 portrait of Louis XIV, and as such she seems poised to accept her role as the king’s proxy, inviting viewers to explore the artful abundance of the royal landscape. On the other hand, her gender-bending outfit and the sphinx behind her also place her in a tradition of strong, willful women who used pastoral art and architecture in broad and expansive terms — not passively to accept a role assigned to them, but to invent a new one. Though Marie-Adélaïde’s playfully domestic activities at the menagerie may have appeared apolitical, even frivolous, they helped bring her to the top of the royal hierarchy and stay there for more than a decade, even as she struggled with infertility and an intensely competitive court culture. Her situation and eventual success resonate with Catherine de’ Medici’s travails of the previous century, and in light of this comparison it is interesting to note that Gobert has depicted her standing in front of the former site of Catherine’s dairy at Fontainebleau, where the queen mother staged her own confrontation with her courtiers in the 1560s. When Marie-Adélaïde and her husband died unexpectedly of the measles in 1712, their supporters bemoaned that this signaled the end of royal reform as Fénelon had envisioned it. Yet even while they were alive, there were signs that Fénelon’s project might remain a literary and aesthetic ideal rather than a political reality. Marie-Adélaïde’s dairy performance — where A B S O LU T I S M A N D T H E S E X U A L P O L I T I C S O F PA S T O R A L R E T R E A T

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Figure 2.15 Pierre Gobert, Portrait of Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne, 1704. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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she churned butter with “white hands” that remained detached from the realities of rural labor — were well suited to a court that, for the most part, embraced agricultural reform more in art than in life. This situation stemmed partly from necessity, since Louis XIV had strengthened the court to such an extent that the livelihood of its members depended more on improving their prospects in this cultural and political arena than on improving the land that they may, or may not, have owned. As courtiers drifted farther and farther away from their feudal past, they began to cling to it with increasing artistic fervor. Perhaps in response to mounting dissent, they also turned their pastoral productions inward, a fact that the king made explicit in 1699 when he briefly closed the menagerie to the public, restricting access to courtiers.89 Even after it was reopened, the menagerie’s message of royal virtue and prosperity was largely limited to the elite, a situation that satisfied them though it later came under attack by philosophes like Diderot, who interpreted these buildings as emblems of aristocratic falseness and luxury. Yet while the court aristocracy seemed to grow ever more insular and out of touch in the eighteenth century, they were paradoxically opening their ranks to a new class of officers and non-noble financiers to sustain their extravagant lifestyle. This group of individuals, to which Pompadour belonged, was eager to shed the trappings of their social station and adopt a veneer of nobility, and they did so by creating works of pastoral art and architecture. Since many of them had neither the interest nor the opportunity to retire to the countryside, they focused their artistic energies on Versailles and Paris, blurring the boundaries of city, country, and rank, and reshaping the land around the capital into fertile terrain for innovative forms of self-expression. As gardens and garden buildings ceased to serve as stable markers of elite identity, they became spaces to imagine and perform a new kind of self, one that looked to the past while anticipating the future. It was in this protean theatrical environment that the pleasure dairy truly began to flourish.

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3

Health, Hygiene, and the Hermitages of Madame de Pompadour

What art is needed to return to nature! Jean de la Bru yère , Les caractères (1688)

Madame de Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles, autumn of 1748: Jeanne-Antoinette d’Étiolles (1721 – 1764) and Louis XV supposedly met for the first time during a masked ball held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on February 25, 1745. The king had disguised himself as an ornamental yew tree from the palace gardens, and Jeanne-Antoinette, it is believed, came as a shepherdess.1 The encounter kicked off a nearly two-decade love affair that surprised everyone with its staying power and was often communicated through a mutual love of nature and the pastoral mode. After three years together, Louis XV gave Jeanne-Antoinette, now styled as Madame de Pompadour, the impressive gift of six hectares of land just north of the palace, situated between Trianon and Madame de Montespan’s former château at Clagny. Pompadour wasted no time in commandeering her favorite architect, Jean Lassurance, to design for her a small but elegant garden retreat that would become known as her “hermitage.” She monitored every aspect of the building’s construction; according to royal building records, her approval was required before the “bon à executer” on any part of the project could be given. Begun in April 1748, the building was completed by November that year.2 Courtiers who began visiting and commenting on the hermitage that autumn were perplexed to see how modest it was. Perhaps they were used to the pomp of Versailles, or perhaps they thought that Louis XV’s bourgeois mistress would go in for something flashier. The main pavilion, which survives today in altered form, was at that time just a single story with a dining room, a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a library (Figure 3.1). After viewing the spare, unadorned façade, the maréchal de Richelieu likened the building to a “farmer’s house,” noting that it “wasn’t much to look at.” He did, however, concur with other visitors that the hermitage’s “exquisitely simple” interior was more refined, even “noble,” in its taste. Courtiers also admired the hermitage’s expansive gardens and the small menagerie near the entrance that contained a cow stable and a dairy. After touring the site in the spring of 1754, the duc de Croÿ remarked, “there is nothing so pretty” as Madame de Pompadour’s “little abode.”3 DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 3.1 Jean Lassurance, Madame de Pompadour’s Hermitage at Versailles, 1748. Photo: by author

The hermitage at Versailles was the first of numerous pastoral retreats that Pompadour built between 1748 and 1754 — including the Nouvelle ménagerie at Versailles, a joint venture between her and Louis XV; two additional hermitages near the royal palaces of Fontainebleau and Compiègne; and a new garden complex for her château at Crécy. Among their many similarities in design and program was the fact that they all had pleasure dairies, each more elaborate than the last. As with her other forms of art and architectural patronage, Pompadour used these sites to shape her identity and consolidate her position at court, as well as to entertain the king and strengthen their relationship.4 These retreats enabled her to avoid, at least temporarily, the pressures of court life and to profess a desire for a simpler and more virtuous form of existence, closer to the land like the ancien nobility she emulated. At the same time, in their status as “hermitages,” a building type whose relevance for elite women will be explored in this chapter, they also allowed her to undertake a program of self-improvement in accordance with new ideas about the dynamic relationship between nature, the body, and the self. Pompadour and her contemporaries considered pastoral architecture and pleasure dairies to be not just socially or politically recuperative, but H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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physically ameliorative as well. Although some writers had touted the health benefits of garden retreats, dairies, and milk in earlier eras, in the mideighteenth century the connection gained an entirely new urgency and significance. This development stemmed in part from the neo-Hippocratic medical revival, which stressed the profound impact that environment could have on the body and the mind. Enlightenment physicians began recommending that individuals retreat to the countryside to rest, take in fresh air and sunlight, engage in light exercise, and consume wholesome foods. At the top of their list was milk, a substance that in fresh or liquid form was primarily viewed as a medicinal remedy by the eighteenth-century European elite. Milk was especially recommended for mondain (worldly or urbane) women suffering from a range of ailments: stomach problems, fevers, exhaustion, and hysteria. Pompadour, who struggled with poor health throughout her time at court, encountered these new medical ideas through her philosophe friends and her physician, François Quesnay. Remembered today as the cofounder of Physiocracy, an economic theory that extolled land as the true source of a nation’s vitality and health, Quesnay was Pompadour’s constant companion during the years that she developed her hermitages. She attempted to put these ideas into practice at her architectural sites and in other art objects she promoted, including a new type of porcelain drinking vessel that was specifically designed for consuming fresh milk. Pompadour’s patronage helped stimulate a taste for milk and for pleasure dairies among the French elite, transforming these buildings from a relatively isolated royal structure into a full-blown architectural phenomenon by the 1770s. Pompadour’s hermitages preceded by more than a decade Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rhapsodic description of rural living, dairies, and milk in his bestselling novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Her architectural patronage was largely free of the moral imperatives or gender bias of Rousseau, who insisted that mondain women had to abandon society, move to the countryside, and perform domestic tasks like gardening, dairying, and caring for children in order to exercise their “natural” virtue. She did, however, use these sites to present herself as healthful, nurturing, and feminine, partly as a way to refute claims about her supposed degeneracy or “unnatural” dominance over the king. I trace these claims — which focused on her physical body and appearance and began shortly before she established the first hermitage in 1748 — at the beginning of this chapter, while also exploring the status of pastoral architecture in the early years of Louis XV’s reign. In her capacity as royal mistress, Pompadour participated in the court’s pastoral patronage, while also broadening the genre’s scope and significance. In the process, she expanded DAIRY QUEENS

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and transformed the role of royal mistress from a mere sexual or corporeal companion into an empathetic partner, interlocutor, and friend. By the time she had finished her last hermitage in 1754, she had honed this expression to a science and an art, demonstrating a sophisticated and knowing mastery of nature, pleasure, and self. PL A N TING THE SEED: LA MUET TE AND THE NOUvELLE MéNAGERIE

 When Madame de Pompadour became the king’s official mistress (maîtresseen-titre) in 1745, no one could have imagined that she would maintain this role for nearly twenty years, until her death in 1764. Not only was Louis XV (1710 – 1774) notoriously capricious with his sexual partners, but Pompadour was also of scandalously low birth for such a privileged royal position.5 Her father, François Poisson, came from a family of weavers; several years earlier he had been involved in a financial scandal and had been forced to leave France. She was raised by her mother’s lover, Charles-François Lenormant de Tournehem, a royal tax collector (fermier générale) who had purchased his venal post. Rumored to be her biological father, Tournehem paid for her education and introduced her to the Parisian elite through the salon of Madame de Tencin. He also arranged her marriage to his nephew, a rather pliant sort, and later promoted her as the ideal candidate for the king’s mistress. One year after she was installed at Versailles, Pompadour repaid Tournehem’s efforts by arranging for his plum appointment as director of Louis XV’s buildings, arts, and manufactures. Pompadour’s spectacular rise at court seemed to many courtiers to be an ominous sign of the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, particularly the financiers and other venal office holders who threatened to dismantle courtly traditions. The situation was especially alarming for the dévots, a conservative faction at court who, led by François Fénelon, had argued for noble reform in the late seventeenth century. Disdainful of how “this parvenu mistress [had] . . . subverted the ‘natural’ order of rank, prerogative, and taste,” they encouraged the slanderous attacks against Pompadour that began to circulate around 1747 – 1748. Aiming to tarnish her reputation as a beauty, these attacks spread rumors of her failing health, “yellow” and “spotted” skin, “insipid eyes,” and “stained teeth.”6 Among the worst of the insults were verses insinuating that she was afflicted with “fleurs blanches” — code for leucorrhea, a H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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white vaginal discharge that was symptomatic of venereal disease. Although the alleged author of the verses, the comte de Maurepas, was exiled from court in 1749, Pompadour’s image suffered permanent damage. Four decades after her death, royal biographer Jean-Louis Soulavie persisted in denouncing her: “What decrepitude! What degeneration! Although she regularly attempts to bury herself under a coat of blanc [opaque white makeup] and rouge, her vivacity is only a mask.”7 By 1748, Pompadour found herself in a precarious situation, as courtiers began calling her an arriviste, at best, and worse yet, the “royal whore.” It became critical for her to solidify and naturalize her presence at court. How did she attempt to do this? One of her tactics involved redecorating and inhabiting various royal appartements. These included the coveted former living quarters of the duc and duchesse de Penthièvre at Versailles, which Pompadour took over and transformed into her celebrated l’appartement d’en bas in late 1749. Whereas, according to Katie Scott, “little work seems to have been carried out” for Pompadour inside the palace prior to 1748, that year she began to pursue interior renovation at Versailles as a strategy “by which to survive” at court.8 As was true of earlier mistresses like Madame de Montespan, Pompadour also acquired real estate, often through royal gifts, to secure her position and make it visible to others. She did this on an unprecedented scale. During her time at court she “bought, built or leased a total of fifteen properties,” including country estates, town houses, and hermitages.9 By acquiring broad swathes of land next to these estates, she increased her wealth and status as a property holder. Even more significant than the number of residences she acquired are the uses to which she put them. At Crécy, for example, a seigneurial estate that the king bought for her in 1746, this formerly bourgeois girl from Paris reinvented herself as a beneficent noble châtelaine, creating an infirmary for village residents and funding their dowries and wedding ceremonies.10 At her estates and hermitages, Pompadour commissioned gardens and staged pastoral-themed festivals just as the monarchy and the landed nobility had done before her. The pastoral genre had been mobilized for a range of purposes in the ancien régime: to emulate people of superior social or political standing; recall an idealized past; or envision a more robust future governed by a “regenerated natural and social order.”11 In the early years Pompadour sponsored pastoral festivals, such as the intimate fête champêtre that she organized at her château of La Celle in 1748, to demonstrate her refinement and endear herself to Louis XV, a fervent devotee of the pastoral mode.12 The DAIRY QUEENS

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king’s interest in the pastoral was tied to a royal tradition of using gardens and Arcadian imagery to project an image of peace and prosperity in times of conflict, or to declare a political ideology, like absolutism, to be part of the natural order of things. The fraught circumstances of Louis XV’s reign — his ascension to the throne under intense political and financial pressure; his declaration of majority rule amid hostility to his regency (1715 – 1723) and nostalgia for the “golden age” of Louis XIV; and his involvement in two costly wars — had made pastoral expression appealing for him, both as a political tool and as an outlet for release. Louis XV also had a personal attachment to gardens and garden buildings from an early age. When he was nine years old, his regent, the duc d’Orléans, had given the young king his own country retreat, La Muette, in the Bois de Boulogne near Paris. Built in the sixteenth century as a royal hunting lodge, La Muette had more recently served as the setting for courtly pastoral fêtes, including an outdoor supper held in 1707 to honor Louis XV’s mother, the duchesse de Bourgogne. In 1716, the regent had given La Muette to his daughter, the duchesse de Berry, and placed it under the bâtiments du roi. Between 1717 and 1719 royal designers had renovated the property, adding a chapel, a dairy, a cowshed, and a gardener’s lodge.13 These additions may have been designed to reform the famously debauched Berry, by creating for her a wholesome rural environment similar to the one that had been created for her cousin, the duchesse de Bourgogne, at the Versailles menagerie. Berry died, however, before the plan could be carried out, and La Muette was given to Louis XV. Saint-Simon described it as a place where the boy king “could amuse himself and take collations [light meals],” noting that Louis was “delighted” to have his own building. Shortly after he assumed ownership a menagerie was set up for him with cows, sheep, and goats, and courtiers offered him gifts, including a prize cow and dairy utensils.14 At La Muette, Louis XV engaged in a form of pastoral play that had long been common among French royal children and was designed to signify the crown’s future prosperity and stewardship. As discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, when she was a young girl his mother, the duchesse de Bourgogne, had performed a similar role at the Versailles menagerie, conveying an image of royal virtue and domesticated femininity at a time when the monarchy was accused of profligacy and neglect of the land. The perceived need for such demonstrations intensified around the mid-eighteenth century, as dévots became more prevalent at court, as financiers like Tournehem became more influential, and as the nobility’s involvement, or lack of involvement, in agricultural matters came under intense scrutiny by Physiocrats and social reformH E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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ers like Rousseau and the marquis de Mirabeau. These developments eventually pushed the crown toward a new phase of arts patronage that combined pastoral imagery with georgic motifs, emphasizing farm labor and family values. Some of this imagery was already apparent in the 1750s, in works such as Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s The Farm, painted for the dauphin in 1750, and in statues of female farmers created for Pompadour’s dairy at Crécy (see Figures 3.16, 4.6). Louis XV’s dairy at La Muette was situated in a large, square-shaped service wing on the left side of the château.15 It comprised three rooms: a vestibule; a main room with a central table and a ledge for storing milk products; and a workroom in the back, also lined with shelves. In 1762, the dairy’s main room was used to illustrate the Encyclopédie’s entry entitled “Laiterie, Agriculture et Économie Rustique” (Figure 3.2). As evidenced by the engraving, the La Muette laiterie followed the design for working dairies as recommended in agricultural treatises: it was paved and vaulted to promote air circulation and hygiene, and it was also sunk below ground to keep the milk cool. The main difference between this royal laiterie and “ordinary” dairies, as the Encyclopédie’s caption noted, was that it was more “decorated,” suggesting its status as a showpiece for the monarchy and the elite.16 In this case, the crown may have been intending to advertise their commitment to “agriculture and rustic economy” to readers of the Encyclopédie. La Muette was where Louis XV first indulged his passion for elegant country living (la vie champêtre). It was also where he first entertained a string of mistresses. Beginning in 1733, rumors circulated that the king had begun a secret affair with the comtesse de Mailly, a privilege that he would later extend to Mailly’s two sisters. In September 1735, the marquis d’Argenson reported that Louis and the comtesse met often at La Muette, whose winding, walled allées were said to be “excellent” for such encounters.17 La Muette was the king’s preferred love nest for the next decade, and it was an important venue for the early days of his relationship with Pompadour. Louis XV’s and Pompadour’s unique bond, however, was expressed less in sexual activity — an activity that, according to d’Argenson, ceased entirely for the couple by 1750 — than it was solidified in art and architectural projects that had symbolic resonance for them both. To this end, the king initiated a remodeling campaign at La Muette in 1746 that entailed creating an apartment for his new mistress, expanding and replanting the gardens, and renovating the dairy. Additional repairs were made to the dairy in 1756, including the addition of a white marble table and the replacement of the large glass windows that appear in the Encyclopédie’s engraving. Overseen by royal DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 3.2 The Royal Dairy at La Muette from the Encyclopédie, 1762. *63 – 491 F, Houghton Library, Harvard University

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Figure 3.3 Jacques-André Portail (attributed), The Nouvelle Ménagerie at Versailles, c. 1750 – 1751. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, these repairs suggest that the laiterie continued to be utilized by the court in the 1750s.18 In August 1746, the duc de Luynes observed, “There is a lot of work going on now at La Muette . . . it seems that the king has a taste for buildings.”19 Pompadour also took note of Louis XV’s love of architecture and la vie champêtre, and she developed these interests into a shared enterprise over the next few years. In addition to her hermitages, she encouraged the creation of the Nouvelle ménagerie at Versailles beginning in 1748. Situated between her hermitage at Versailles and Louis XIV’s pastoral retreat at Trianon, the name of this complex was changed to Petit Trianon in the 1760s after a small château was added to the grounds. In its original incarnation, the Nouvelle ménagerie departed from the old menagerie at Versailles on the other side of the canal in that it contained few exotic animals and was devoted more to farming and horticulture. Touring the site in 1750, d’Argenson puzzlingly observed, “It seems to be a menagerie of utility rather than curiosity, with a large dairy, a lot of chickens, and some cows that have been brought over from Holland.” In January 1751, the duc de Croÿ visited the new menagerie with several courtiers and reported that the king had proudly shown them DAIRY QUEENS

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“the hothouses filled with rare plants and flowers, and the menagerie filled with chickens that he loved.” Croÿ claimed that it was Pompadour who had encouraged the king’s “taste” for such things.20 Construction on the Nouvelle ménagerie began in the fall of 1748, just as Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles was being completed. Overseen by Tournehem, the project proceeded at a rapid pace starting with the main menagerie building. Designed by Louis XV’s premier architecte, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, this building was a long, L-shaped structure with a dairy, a sheepfold, lodgings for a milkmaid, and a stable for eight of the Dutch cows that d’Argenson mentions.21 The menagerie building appears at the far left of a gouache drawing of 1750 – 1751 attributed to Jacques-André Portail, which depicts the king and his entourage gazing down on the new complex (Figure 3.3). In the center of the drawing is another structure by Gabriel known as the “French pavilion,” owing to the geometric, French-style bosquets that surrounded it. In the background is the pavillon frais, a small trellised pavilion that was used for dining. Portail also documents the menagerie’s lush grounds, comprising ornamental gardens, chicken coops (poulaillers), botanical specimens, and a large potager or vegetable garden. Cultivating vegetables was one of the king’s favorite hobbies. Prior to creating the Nouvelle ménagerie he would spend afternoons in the gardens of Saint-Germain near Paris, where he would load up a cart with fresh vegetables and flowers to bring back to Versailles for his courtiers to enjoy.22 As the Nouvelle ménagerie’s principal entertainment space, the French pavilion typified what Jacques-François Blondel, in his Cours d’architecture (1771 – 1777), would later describe as architecture champêtre: “pleasing in its decoration, commodious in its distribution, solid in its structure, inspired by the pastoral genre,” and having “an agreeable or rustic aspect.”23 The pavilion’s façade and balustrade were adorned with pastoral sculptural decoration including masks of the four seasons, vases overflowing with flowers, and playful groups of children (Figure 3.4). Inside was an octagonal salon with Corinthian columns and a frieze depicting farm animals, plows, straw hats, and birdcages. Four rooms splayed in windmill-fashion off the central salon; they included a kitchen for preparing light meals and two small cabinets that could be used for card games.24 The French pavilion provided an ideal venue for intimate fêtes champêtres or a place to relax after touring the gardens. By contrast, the exterior of the menagerie building was spare and unadorned, epitomizing Blondel’s definition of architecture naïve (Figure 3.5). A style that he would recommend for menageries and dairies, it was characterized by a “true,” “natural,” and “commendable simplicity.”25 Yet despite H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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Figure 3.4 Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the French Pavilion at the Nouvelle ménagerie, 1750. Photo: by author

the austerity of the façade, the building was clearly meant to be seen and admired, recalling a simpler version of Louis Le Vau’s or Jules HardouinMansart’s designs for the old Versailles menagerie. In contrast to the exterior, the interior was more refined, especially the dairy that lay in the center of the building just beyond the entrance. According to a plan drawn up by Gabriel and his team of designers, the dairy was the largest and most prominent room, recalling the La Muette laiterie with its central table, perimeter ledge, and adjacent workroom labeled “de la laiterie” (Figure 3.6). The central table, moreover, was made of sumptuous white marble; Tournehem had ordered it from Louis Trouard, the palace’s marble supplier, in October 1750.26 The dairy’s entrance was placed on axis with the French pavilion, facilitating the transport of milk products that were consumed there or at the pavillon frais, which also featured an outdoor arcade for restorative, postmeal promenades. DAIRY QUEENS

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The Nouvelle ménagerie and its buildings served an important representational function for Pompadour and Louis XV. They often brought courtiers to the site, belying the popular understanding of the couple’s pastoral retreats as having been devoted to their private use. The duc de Luynes described several trips that Pompadour took there in the company of court ladies, a pastime later embraced by Marie-Antoinette.27 For his part, Louis XV used the site to cultivate the politically expedient image of the “gardener king.” He sponsored a number of agricultural projects there, encouraging what would later become a passion among his nobility. In 1754, he invited Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, the author of a treatise on grain cultivation (Traité de la culture des terres, 1751 – 1760) and the French translator of Jethro Tull’s manual on crop rotation, to carry out experiments on the menagerie’s outlying fields. In October 1755, the Gazette de France reported that the king, who owned and operated his own plow, was studying new methods for forestalling the corruption of wheat.28 Through these activities Louis XV both exercised a sincere interest in new scientific theories of land use and exhibited this interest to others. Though Pompadour similarly supported agricultural experimentation — she had several volumes on the subject in her library, one of which, Henry Pattullo’s Essai sur l’amélioration des terres (1758), was dedicated to her — her focus was more on the dairy and its products. Between 1748 and 1754, she sponsored the creation of no fewer than five pleasure dairies that were built at the Nouvelle ménagerie, her three hermitages, and her château de Crécy. She also had dairies at several of her other residences, including two at Bellevue and one each at Saint-Ouen and Menars.29 Pompadour’s passion for this building type is indicated by the growing attention that she lavished on her dairies, which eventually developed into freestanding garden pavilions with a wealth of ornamentation and accoutrements. What was truly novel, even radical, about her patronage was the way that she understood and utilized her pastoral retreats, linking them to a new, somatic experience of nature, the countryside, and milk.

IN SIckNESS AND IN HEALTH

 In 1756, at the king’s request, royal designers took a pair of marble statues from the Versailles gardens and installed them in trellised niches at either end of the pavillon frais’s outdoor arcade. Attributed to David Bourderelle and H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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Figure 3.5 Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the dairy and menagerie building at the Nouvelle ménagerie, 1749. Photo: by author

Figure 3.6 Office of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, plan of the dairy at the Nouvelle ménagerie, 1749. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, O1 1887

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inspired by classical prototypes, they represented female allegories of Sickness (Maladie) and Health (Santé).30 Their presence at the new menagerie raises two key questions: how did the French elite understand sickness and health in the mid-eighteenth century? And how did this affect their patronage of garden retreats like this one? Exploring these questions will take us away from Pompadour’s building projects for a moment, but they will ultimately allow us to see how and why she considered them to be salubrious. The restorative benefits of gardens and country retreats were articulated as early as the second century ad by Pliny the Younger, in a letter describing villa life in Tuscany: The clearness of the sky, and the softness of the air, makes me enjoy the greatest vigor, both of body and mind. The one is kept in exercise by hunting, the other by study. Besides, my family are never in better health than here.31 Pliny’s understanding of health derived from concepts associated with the Hippocratic school of medicine. This ancient Greek tradition, introduced by Hippocrates (c. 460 – c. 377 bc) and adapted by Galen (131 – 201 ad), endorsed the healing power of nature, subscribed to a preventive form of medicine, and taught that a person’s health depended on his or her relationship to the six “non-naturals”: “air, food and drink, motion and rest, sleep and waking, retentions and evacuations, and the passions of the soul.” These elements were called “non-naturals” because they were external to the body, as opposed to the seven internal agents or “naturals,” comprising “members” (organs and arteries), “qualities” (heat and cold), and “faculties.” A prudent use of these external agents resulted in an internal balance of the four humors — in other words, good health.32 Hippocratic precepts fell out of fashion in the Middle Ages but returned during the Renaissance, when they inspired a new wave of villa construction in Italy by the Medici family, among others. This initial resurgence was relatively minor compared to the neoHippocratic “revolution” that swept Western Europe from the late seventeenth century, peaking in the mid-eighteenth century and becoming “an integral part of a new and largely secular moral order.”33 Promulgated through printed materials, from medical treatises to popular pamphlets to the Encyclopédie, and coinciding with the related philosophical movements of empiricism and sensationalism, the Hippocratic code focused attention on diet, exercise, hygiene, and social practices. Broadly speaking, it promoted a new under-

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standing of the therapeutic benefits of nature and a new awareness of the body as susceptible to a range of environmental factors, both physical and moral. These developments encouraged the construction of country houses and dairies and the consumption of milk and wholesome foods. They also revived an interest in Pliny’s letters, as indicated by the publication of Robert Castell’s The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (1728) and Jean-François Félibien des Avaux’s Plans et les descriptions de deux des plus belles maisons de campagne de Pline le consul (1699). Pompadour owned a copy of Félibien des Avaux’s translation of Pliny.34 In the mid-eighteenth century, neo-Hippocratic theories were discussed extensively in Encyclopedic entries written by the physicians Arnulfe d’Aumont, Louis de Jaucourt, and Théophile de Bordeu, whom Diderot dubbed the “modern-day Hippocrates.”35 In the 1750s, they appeared in such diverse texts as Louis de Lacaze’s Idée de l’homme physique et moral (1755); Anne-Charles Lorry’s Essai sur les alimens, pour servir de commentaire aux livres diététiques d’Hippocrate (1754; reissued 1757); and Joseph Raulin’s Traité des affections vaporeuses du sexe (1758). All of these authors were at the forefront of eighteenth-century scientific investigation and were affiliated with the Montpellier medical school or Louis XV’s court, or both. Many were also associated with the vitalist school of medicine, which drew upon Hippocratic principles but departed from its emphasis on fixed mechanical laws. Vitalists like Lacaze and Bordeu preferred to view nature as an unpredictable but also malleable force, one that acted on the body but could be acted on in turn.36 The fascination with Hippocrates was part of a larger eighteenthcentury obsession with medicine. In his Eléments de physiologie (1774 – 1780), Diderot wrote, “There are no books I read more willingly than medicine,” and Voltaire surmised that he had read as many books on the subject as Don Quixote had read on chivalry. A mania for medicine, both high and low, is readily apparent in the correspondence of cultural icons like Voltaire and Pompadour, and in the proliferation of inexpensive, portable medical books that were newly aimed at a nonprofessional audience.37 The second half of the century witnessed the rise of celebrity physicians like Théodore Tronchin, who had been Voltaire’s doctor in Geneva before being called to Paris in 1756 to inoculate the royal Orléans children from smallpox. Tronchin left his mark through the tronchine, short dresses without panniers that women could wear while walking outdoors. He was a habitué of Suzanne Necker’s Parisian salon, and his attendance underscores the appeal that medicine and science held for elite women, who regularly attended public lectures in Paris on biology, anatomy, and natural history. Aristocratic women also made up DAIRY QUEENS

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the majority of Tronchin’s clients. Along with Bordeu, he pioneered a form of “gallant medicine” (médecine galante) that catered especially to women, contributing to the gendering of such “fashionable” ailments as hysteria.38 Pompadour, whose library contained translations of the works of Hippocrates and numerous other medical texts, was an early and influential promoter of these ideas. In addition to supporting the Encyclopédie, she cohosted a salon at Versailles with François Quesnay that was held in his living quarters at the palace, located in the entresol above her own apartment. Attended by such Enlightenment luminaries as Diderot, d’Alembert, the comte de Buffon, and Jean-François Marmontel, it must have provided a heady environment for intellectual debate.39 Quesnay officially entered Pompadour’s service in the spring of 1749, although they met sometime before then. A well-respected surgeon and physician, he had served as the secretary of the Paris Academy of Surgery from 1737 to 1751. He authored several important medical tracts, including a treatise on the fevers published in 1753 that was dedicated to Pompadour. Although Quesnay subscribed to a humoral theory of the body, considered passé by most Encyclopedists, he was well versed in new trends like vitalism, and contemporaries applauded his interest in new methods of clinical observation. In the Encyclopedic entry on medicine, Jaucourt compared him to Herman Boerhaave, the best doctor “since Hippocrates.”40 Quesnay remained a fiercely loyal member of Pompadour’s household until her death in 1764. In her will, she awarded him a generous annual pension of 4,000 livres. Indeed, the close relationship between doctor and patient, as recounted in a spurious memoir attributed to one of Pompadour’s ladies in waiting (“Madame du Hausset”), has attained the status of myth. According to the memoir, Quesnay earned Pompadour’s and the king’s favor by seeing them through a medical crisis brought on by excessive sexual activity early in their relationship. Quesnay’s name appears often in this account: not only does he treat Pompadour during her frequent illnesses, but he also helps her overcome a condition that today we might call frigidity, but that is described in the text as a “cold temperament.” Pompadour’s anxiety over how this condition will affect her relationship with the king leads to desperate attempts at self-medication, including eating foods like chocolate and truffles, to “heat her up.” Quesnay counsels her against this practice and, after heeding his advice, she has this to report: Our master [Louis XV] is better pleased with me. This is since I spoke to Quesnay, without, however, telling him all. He told me, that to accomplish my end, I must try to be in good health, to digest well, and, H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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for that purpose, to take exercise. I think the Doctor is right. I feel quite a different creature.41 Alden Gordon has persuasively argued that, although there was a real woman named Madame du Haussay in Pompadour's service, the author of this text was actually Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan (1736 – 1803), the son of one of Louis XV’s court physicians. Sénac spent his childhood at Versailles and wrote the book at the end of the eighteenth century.42 Obviously this calls into question the book’s veracity: not only was Sénac impersonating one of Pompadour’s attendants, but he was writing years after the supposed events took place, in a climate hungry for salacious gossip about the ancien régime. Even so, perhaps we need not dismiss Sénac’s account as entirely fictional. After all, as the son of one of the king’s physicians, he would have been privy to some of the court’s medical history at that time. Furthermore, contemporaries such as the duc de Choiseul corroborate his claim that Louis XV was interested only in “sicknesses, deaths, and surgical operations.”43 Pompadour’s prolonged ill health and Quesnay’s treatment of her also lend credence to Sénac’s account. That she suffered from fevers, colic, palpitations, anxiety, choking seizures, and weight problems is amply documented in her letters and in several court memoirs and journals. Pompadour and Quesnay were often in each other’s company. The duc de Luynes mentions them arriving together at Versailles when the dauphin fell ill in August 1752, and royal building records indicate that Quesnay was always given an apartment next to his patient, whether the court was residing at Versailles, Fontainebleau, Compiègne, or La Muette.44 Pompadour seems to have dictated this arrangement, and she monitored Quesnay’s lodgings to the extent that, in 1753, she asked Gabriel to improve the air circulation in her physician’s chambre.45 The flowering of their friendship coincided with an intense period of building activity that saw the development of the Nouvelle ménagerie, Pompadour’s three hermitages, and her garden complex at Crécy. Quesnay likely advised her on these projects given that they engaged new theories of health and hygiene. As the cofounder of Physiocracy, Quesnay would have applauded the idea of using the land around these sites for agricultural experimentation, especially the Nouvelle ménagerie. Yet when this complex was first established in the late 1740s, Quesnay had only begun to formulate his ideas on the subject, and he didn’t start publishing Physiocratic texts until 1758. However, as someone who had spent more than two decades in a medical climate steeped in neo-Hippocratic principles, he would doubtless have praised the new DAIRY QUEENS

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menagerie for the health benefits that could be obtained through its superior air quality, open spaces, access to sunlight, and nourishing foods. Such ideas quickly took root at the French court. Describing the dauphin’s illness in August 1752, Luynes noted that his treatment included a trip to the countryside to “take the air” and a diet of fresh vegetables and chicken. That same month, Luynes reported that the king took a two-hour horseback ride in the morning, “uniquement pour faire de l’exercice,” followed by an outdoor promenade à pied.46 Louis XV’s health was of grave concern to the court, even more so after he survived a life-threatening illness at Metz in 1744. Pompadour surely had the king’s health in mind as well as her own in developing her garden retreats. The new menagerie was also associated with health through its botanical collection, which was managed by the physician and naturalist LouisGuillaume Lemonnier. Though the medicinal properties of plants had always been a chief component of botany, in the eighteenth century this connection acquired a neo-Hippocratic bent through physicians such as Boerhaave, who used the celebrated botanical gardens at Leiden in his university lectures.47 When Louis XV decided to create a botanical garden at the new menagerie, he enlisted the help of the Montpellier physician Bernard de Jussieu and Antoine Duchesne from the Jardin du roi in Paris. These two men established a world-renowned collection that adopted the classification system invented by Carl Linnaeus, one of Boerhaave’s students. By the mid1760s, the king’s botanical garden contained over 4,000 types of plants, including many medicinal species, and was the largest of its kind in Europe.48

POMPADOUR AND THE MILk cURE

 For Pompadour, the new menagerie connoted health chiefly through its emphasis on milk. The therapeutic effects of milk were touted in all of the neo-Hippocratic texts cited earlier in this chapter, by Louis XV’s physician Lacaze, for example, and at length in the Encyclopédie. These texts included treatises on specific ailments, like “the vapors,” but also included those that addressed issues of diet and lifestyle more generally. As noted, in the early modern period fresh or liquid milk was consumed far less often than it is today. It was not until the late nineteenth century, with the invention of pasteurization and the refrigerated railway car, that milk became a ubiquitous beverage in the West. Eighteenth-century Europeans largely viewed milk H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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as a medicinal remedy, and made it the cornerstone of a back-to-nature health craze. Those who promoted its consumption were aware that it had been prescribed as a health regimen in antiquity, by Hippocrates, Pythagoras, and Pliny the Elder, who may have inspired Pliny the Younger to drink milk at his Tuscan villa.49 In medieval and early modern Europe, upper- and lower-class consumers more often consumed dairy products in the form of butter or cheese. Women were more likely to use liquid milk as a cosmetic agent than as a food. Household manuals offered recipes for lightening the face or for making blanc, an opaque white makeup whose ingredients included milk from a cow, an ass, or a human. One such recipe appeared in the Recueil des curiositéz rares et nouvelles des plus admirables effets de la nature et de l’art (1674) by Nicolas Lémery, an apothecary of Louis XIV. Lémery cited the cosmetic use of milk in antiquity, while others described the ancient practice of bathing in milk. The most notorious proponent of the latter was Nero’s wife Poppaea, who was said to have traveled with five hundred asses to ensure a constant milk supply.50 In 1748 Antoine Le Camus, a Paris physician and an acquaintance of Quesnay, published a popular novel/cosmetic treatise entitled Abdeker, a book that Pompadour owned. Recounting a secret love affair between a Turkish court physician and a royal mistress named Fatima, the story was filled with cosmetic recipes and medical advice that included the following: Some amorous women bathe themselves in milk, to make their skin more smooth and delicate, and sometimes with a view of curing it of a troublesome itching . . . [It] . . . takes away the wrinkles of the skin, renders it white, and gives it a certain gloss that pleases both the senses of seeing and feeling.51 Heeding Le Camus’s advice, Pompadour may have used milk as a cosmetic agent. Certainly she had a passion for bathing; at her Versailles hermitage, she owned a marble bathtub that had belonged to Madame de Montespan.52 If she did bathe in milk there, she would have been following in the tradition of another illustrious royal mistress, Diane de Poitiers, an early devotee of neo-Hippocratic medicine, milk baths, and the outdoors. Pompadour had a fondness for white makeup, and she may have supported a new trend of using natural products in cosmetic recipes. This practice was popularized through the publication of such makeup manuals as The Toilet of Flora (1775), which featured recipes made from milk and vegetable dye (for rouge).53 Acquiring a more natural look may have been one of the ways DAIRY QUEENS

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that Pompadour defied courtiers who saw her as vulgar and artificial. From the 1750s, critics began railing against the use of white face paint, an attack that was directed at elite women though noblemen also wore it. The Encyclopédie’s entry on makeup, for instance, described this practice as not only unhealthful (which was true, given that lead was a main ingredient), but also “pernicious.” The stage actress Mlle Clairon joined the debate when she wrote a diatribe against blanc, claiming that it created an opaque facial mask whose physiognomic signs could no longer be read. These negative associations may have prompted the rumor, whispered at Versailles in 1756, that Pompadour planned to give up her rouge.54 Even more than these external measures, Pompadour wanted to generate a feeling of health from within, and to this end she seems to have consumed large quantities of milk. Texts advocating the milk cure follow the same pattern as neo-Hippocratic medicine: there were a few books published on the subject in the Renaissance, followed by more in the late seventeenth century, and a sharp increase of writings around 1750. An early example is Marie de Maupeou Fouquet’s Recueil de remèdes faciles et domestiques (1684), written by the mother of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet. Madame Fouquet, whose book dispensed medicinal recipes for home use, celebrated milk’s success in treating a range of ailments: fever, gout, bilious stomach, melancholy, and perversion. Her popular text was reprinted in 1704 and 1739 with an expanded section on milk.55 Although Enlightenment physicians debated the suitability of milk as a treatment for different individuals and situations, Friedrich Hoffmann’s Treatise of the Extraordinary Virtues and Effects of Asses Milk (1754) exemplifies the basic understanding of its health benefits in the eighteenth century.56 Hoffmann, who served as the physician to the Prussian King Friedrich I, was a friend of Boerhaave and a proponent of the neo-Hippocratic school. He argued that since humans were nourished by a milky substance in the womb and raised on breast milk, and since all food, upon entering the body, was transformed into a milky substance called chyle, milk was “manifestly proved to be the principal of all the kinds of aliment; so it may be deservedly reckoned the chief of all remedies.” Although Hoffmann preferred ass’s milk for its resemblance to human breast milk, he also recommended the milk of cows, sheep, and goats for the relief of fevers, chronic coughs, colic, and nervous disorders — the same ailments that afflicted Pompadour. Why was milk so effective? Hoffmann argued that it possessed powerful cleansing properties, functioning as a nonviolent purgative that penetrated the body’s channels, allowing fresh air to enter and perspiration to exit. It also removed H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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obstructions in the chest, lungs, and bowels, and returned the body to its proper system of “flows.” Hoffmann told readers of how a certain “gentlewoman” in his care, who had been sick for years with fevers, aches, and pains, began a course of milk treatment and, “in three days only, everything appeared wonderfully amended.” Hoffmann’s text is quoted at length in the Encyclopédie’s article on milk, written by the vitalist physician Gabriel-François Venel. Venel worked for the family of the duc d’Orléans, whose son, the duc de Chartres, had pleasure dairies constructed at Monceau and Le Raincy in the 1770s and 1780s. Although Venel preferred cow’s milk to ass’s milk, he agreed with Hoffmann that milk could be used to treat numerous ailments, including venereal diseases and fleurs blanches, for which Venel considered milk “the principal remedy.” (Fleurs blanches was the same gynecological condition that afflicted Pompadour.) Venel also touted the benefits of whey or petit lait, a by-product of the dairying process, for “hypochondriacal and hysterical illnesses.”57 These writings stimulated a craze for fresh milk among philosophes and the mondain elite, especially elite women. In 1760, the dauphine, Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, wrote her brother to say that she was restricting herself to milk for health reasons. Two years later, during one of his many illnesses, Voltaire ruefully wrote to a friend, “I’ll bet you get to drink Champagne while I am stuck drinking milk.”58 Physicians in this period also began recommending milk as part of a preventive health regimen that included eating wholesome foods like grains, seeds, and vegetables. Pompadour owned a copy of the 1762 French edition of Antonio Cocchi’s The Pythagorean Diet, of Vegetables Only, Conducive to the Preservation of Health and the Cure of Diseases (1743), which had been translated by the husband of Diderot’s lover, Madeleine de Puisieux.59 Cocchi recommended drinking milk in good health and bad, especially for readers with weight problems, consumption, nervousness, or fevers. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot all practiced the Pythagorean diet in the 1750s and 1760s. Later, it became fashionable among the Parisian elite, so much so that, by the 1780s, Louis-Sébastien Mercier could joke in the Tableau de Paris, “The rich eat much less than they used to, for one reason or another; you may see your host, at the head of his magnificent table, dismally sipping a glass of milk.”60 Evidence for Pompadour’s embrace of the milk cure appears in a letter that, according to the historian Dr. Henri-Alfred Potiquet, was written by Quesnay. Dated March 26, 1764, three weeks before her death, it surveys her medical history over the previous two decades. The letter’s author recounts that, “eighteen or twenty years ago,” Pompadour suffered from bad headaches DAIRY QUEENS

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and menstrual cramps, and was treated for these ailments with whey, or petit lait. Although these problems abated, they were soon replaced by a hacking cough, rheumatism, and stomach problems, for which ass’s milk and whey were once again prescribed. Milk was seen to be so effective in improving her condition that she began to drink it “all year round,” a practice that continued for years.61 Pompadour’s affinity for milk is also indicated by her patronage of the “milk goblet” or gobelet à lait. This was a fairly new type of porcelain drinking vessel that was being produced in the early 1750s at the royal porcelain factory of Vincennes, later moved to Sèvres (at Pompadour’s request) in 1756.62 Typically, milk goblets featured two handles and a cover to keep the milk warm, as indicated in an example produced at the Sèvres factory in 1758 – 1759 (Figure 3.7). The goblet’s design may have been inspired by that of a chocolate cup or a “posset pot,” a two-handled, covered vessel that was used to serve a medicinal concoction of hot milk and alcohol in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike the posset pot, however, or a pot à crème, the milk goblet was used for drinking milk, not serving it. It lacked a spout or a lip for pouring milk into another beverage such as tea or coffee. Beginning in 1754, Pompadour purchased milk goblets from her Parisian dealer, Lazare Duvaux. In 1755, she bought eight of them for her pleasure dairy at Compiègne. Produced at the Saint-Cloud manufactory, the Compiègne dairy goblets had two handles and were made of blue and white porcelain. Although their decoration was different, they likely resembled the Sèvres goblet in size and shape. In Pompadour’s posthumous inventory, milk goblets are also recorded in her apartments at Versailles and Fontainebleau and in her dressing room at Elysée, her Parisian residence.63 Apparently she drank milk at these venues as well as at her dairies and hermitages. Pompadour is known to have played a formative role in the development of French porcelain, especially at Sèvres.64 She fostered a taste for new and innovative vessel types and polychrome patterns that made the factory famous. Nonetheless, for her dairy at Compiègne she chose a simple, conservative blue and white design from Saint-Cloud. Perhaps she considered the Saint-Cloud goblets to be more functional than their counterparts at Sèvres and therefore more appropriate for a dairy, or perhaps she was trying to emulate the celebrated laiterie d’agrément at Chantilly, which was also decorated with a blue and white service. The Chantilly dairy had been created in the late seventeenth century, but it continued to be visited and admired by Louis XV’s court, for example during royal marriage festivities held for the prince de Condé in 1753. If Pompadour was trying to emulate the decoration of the dairy H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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Figure 3.7 Sèvres porcelain milk goblet (gobelet à lait), 1758 – 1759. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

at Chantilly, then her aesthetic preference in this case was driven more by tradition than innovation — by a desire to fit in rather than stand out.65 In 1759, the Sèvres factory began making goblets with recessed or “socketed” saucers that allowed the cups to fit more snugly into their bases. Known as the soucoupe enfoncé, this type of saucer was already being produced at Saint-Cloud. The design was motivated in part by a desire to create sturdier goblets so that they could not be knocked over by the trembling hands of an ill or aging consumer. Sometimes referred to as trembleuse cups, many of these cups featured two handles so that the restorative beverage could be served warm — or so that nervous or “hysterical” patients could attain a steady grip. All of the goblets with recessed saucers manufactured at Sèvres between 1759 and 1764 were purchased by Pompadour, providing strong evidence of her attempt to use the milk cure to counter her failing health.66 Pompadour’s patronage of these goblets, and her interest in new health remedies, inspired others to follow suit. After she began purchasing milk goblets from Duvaux, other elite patrons did the same, among them the princesse de Condé, who may have installed them in her dairy at Chantilly. Pompadour consumed milk to fortify her mind as well as her body. In 1753, Antoine Le Camus (the author of Abdeker) published a treatise entitled La médecine de l’esprit that offered a regimen for improving “the integrity DAIRY QUEENS

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of the mind . . . with the aid of salutary hygienic precepts.”67 In order for his readers to “[enjoy] the full liberty of their understanding and [make] themselves suitable for the Sciences and Fine Arts,” Le Camus wrote, they should limit themselves to “pure” and easily digestible foods and should avoid wine, coffee, tea, and chocolate. He also advised them to refrain from excessive sexual activity. Le Camus’s treatise “established him as one of the chief medical advocates of the vogue of intellectual self-improvement that apparently swept a certain segment of the French population during the 1750s and 1760s.”68 Although Le Camus did not specify the ideal venue for putting his theories into practice, in this period the countryside was widely recognized as the optimal space for such pursuits. For those who had to remain in close proximity to Paris or the court, a temporary stay in a pastoral retreat, such as the hermitage that Rousseau lived in at Montmorency near Paris between 1756 and 1757, was thought to suffice. Pompadour and her philosophe friends took Le Camus’s advice to heart and chose milk as the preferred substance for their mental enhancement regimen. Marmontel, a member of her Versailles salon, wrote of how he once “indulged the whim of living for six weeks on milk at Compiègne, when in full health. Never was my soul more calm, more peaceful, than during this regimen. My days flowed along in study . . . and, after waking in the morning to drink an ample bowl of milk from my black cow, I again closed my eyes to slumber another hour.”69 Let us now explore Pompadour’s own quest for self-improvement at her hermitages. L a femme hermite OF vERSAILLES, FONTAINEbLEAU, AND cOMPIèGNE

 Madame de Pompadour’s hermitages were inspired not only by neoHippocratic health trends, but also by a related discussion in architectural theory about the impact of buildings on physical and emotional well-being. In the dedication to his 1664 translation of Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique et moderne (1650), the British writer John Evelyn wrote, “It is from the asymmetrie of our Buildings, want of decorum and proportion in our Houses, that the irregularity of our humors and affections may be shrewdly discern’d.”70 Evelyn’s assertion that architectural design and decoration could profoundly affect, for good or ill, the minds and bodies of its inhabitants later emerged as a key topic in French architectural theory, H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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as elaborated in Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières’s Le génie de l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (1780). Inspired by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s 1754 treatise on the sensations, Le Camus described how certain architectural environments — especially sensual, “feminine” spaces like boudoirs and bathing pavilions — could serve as laboratories for reshaping the self.71 Pompadour seems to have anticipated Le Camus’s theories by more than three decades at her dairies and pastoral retreats. The question of why Pompadour’s garden retreats were called “hermitages” has never been fully addressed. She was far from the first French or royal patron to use the term: following in the tradition of Italian Renaissance rulers, Catherine de’ Medici had commissioned a hermitage in the sixteenth century at Chaillot near Paris. More recent patrons had included Queen Caroline of England, for whom William Kent designed a hermitage at Richmond in the 1730s that was rustic on the outside, but well appointed on the interior.72 In the 1740s, Louis XV’s father-in-law, Stanislas Leszczynski, had built several rustic cottages on the grounds of his ducal château of Lunéville near Nancy. These cottages were named “Les Chartreuses” after buildings inhabited by Carthusian monks. Stanislas invited his courtiers to reside in these monastic pavilions, where they were obliged to till their own gardens and cook meals in anticipation of a visit from their host, who liked to drop by unannounced. The largest of the chartreuses was reserved for Stanislas’s mistress, Madame de Boufflers, and contained a cow stable and a dairy.73 Traditionally, hermitages were small, isolated structures that enabled their primarily religious inhabitants to withdraw from the world for spiritual contemplation and scholarly study. These buildings became secularized in the early modern era and were appropriated by European rulers who wanted to escape temporarily from courtly demands, demonstrate a resistance to worldly pleasures, or undertake a program of self-mastery.74 In the eighteenth century, when more and more hermitages were built on the grounds of royal estates, they came to signify the new religions of nature and la vie champêtre. These associations were apparent in their garden setting and design, which often adopted rusticated stonework or vernacular motifs (like thatched roofs) to achieve a look of rural simplicity — foreshadowing the building type of the hamlet (hameau) that emerged in the 1770s. Their simple or coarse exteriors were typically juxtaposed with more refined, luxurious interiors that made hermitages more comfortable for their elite patrons, while also implying a witty, mondain approach to “roughing it” that noble visitors appreciated. Unlike hamlets, or Stanislas’s charterhouses, hermitages stressed privacy and introspection rather than communal living. Pompadour’s hermitages DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 3.8 Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Madame de Pompadour’s Hermitage at Fontainebleau, 1749. Photo by Jessica Fripp. Reproduced by permission

were geared more toward personal than social or political rejuvenation. Though they were quite Spartan in their exterior design, they did not attempt to evoke a connection to the land or the peasantry — as hamlets did — but remained resolutely classical in their appearance. Their clean lines, harmonious proportions, and pristine façades, as best exemplified by Gabriel’s design for her hermitage at Fontainebleau, connoted an Arcadian harmony and purity (Figure 3.8). They communicated their function in formal terms, which was to generate an ideal balance and harmony in Pompadour’s physical constitution and relationship with the king. The dairies adjoining these buildings furthered this aim by providing her and her royal companion with cleansing, nourishing milk. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Pompadour’s first hermitage was built on the outskirts of the Versailles gardens in 1748, near the future site of the Nouvelle ménagerie. It was designed by Jean Lassurance, whose father had worked with Hardouin-Mansart on the redesign of the old menagerie for the duchesse de Bourgogne. The building has been altered today, but some sense of the plain façade remains visible (see Figure 3.1). While the maréchal de Richelieu and other courtiers may have scoffed at the hermitage’s “farmhouse” appearance, they commended the interior for exhibH E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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iting a greater degree of sophistication and for what Richelieu termed an “enviable cleanness” (propreté recherché).75 Decorated with white cotton curtains, marble accents, and simple but elegant furnishings, Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles announced a lighter and more streamlined (but still luxurious) form of interior decoration that became popular in the 1760s in connection with the burgeoning aesthetic of neoclassicism. Pompadour meticulously monitored every aspect of the hermitage’s construction, and she continued to oversee its development throughout the 1750s. To furnish the library and other rooms, she ordered numerous expensive objets d’art from Lazare Duvaux. She also oversaw the creation of the gardens, maintained by Louis Crosnier with help from Claude Richard, who later worked at the Nouvelle ménagerie. In addition to a large vegetable and botanical garden, there was a separate outdoor pavilion and a naturalistic jardin anglais, a style that would soon become fashionable among the French elite. Near the gardens was a small menagerie with a dairy, a chicken coop, and a cow stable. The dairy comprised two rooms, one above the other. Although no image of the building survives, Pompadour’s 1764 inventory reveals the dairy’s contents. At that time, the ground floor contained a butter churn, a copper cauldron, and twenty-nine English terracotta milk pots, while the upstairs room had green-painted oak crates, shutters, and curtains. The top floor may have housed Crosnier’s daughter, who tended the cows, while his wife cared for the chickens.76 The lack of luxury items suggests that the dairy here may have been more utilitarian than Pompadour’s other laiteries; perhaps its milk products were consumed in the outdoor garden pavilion. Still, Pompadour proudly displayed the hermitage’s menagerie and dairy to visitors like Croÿ, and she had it prominently positioned to the left of the main entrance. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has observed how Pompadour’s ostensibly “private” retreats were just as much about demonstrating newly valorized concepts, like privacy, as they were about experiencing them.77 Similarly, Pompadour’s dairies not only provided her with milk; they also exhibited her commitment to new scientific and cultural trends. Writing to the comtesse de Lutzelbourg in February 1749, Pompadour observed, “I spend half my life [at the hermitage] . . . alone, or with the king and few others, which makes me happy.” The hermitage, she wrote, was a welcome respite from being “constantly on the road” with Louis XV, traveling from one royal residence to another.78 The site offered the couple a refuge from the formality of the palace, enabling them to indulge in domestic activities like reading, gardening, and dining in a casual setting. As at the Nouvelle ménagerie, dining was an important part of the hermitage expeDAIRY QUEENS

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rience, especially farm-fresh meals that the king liked to prepare himself. After a 1757 visit to the hermitage, Croÿ recalled a delightful supper he had enjoyed there with Pompadour and Louis XV, an occasion that was marred only by seeing Pompadour ill with colic — which, he observed, happened “fairly often.”79 In 1748, while the hermitage at Versailles was still being built, Pompadour hired Lassurance to design a second hermitage for her at Fontainebleau, where the court typically spent six weeks every fall. Perhaps because the land allotted for the building belonged not to Pompadour but to the crown, Gabriel, Louis XV’s first architect, took over the project in late 1748. He adapted Lassurance’s design, making the building square instead of rectangular and adding a potager. Tournehem approved the plan on January 8, 1749.80 Finished that September, the Fontainebleau hermitage, which survives today, was a supremely elegant cube comprising four nearly identical façades that were proto-neoclassical in their planarity and use of simple, geometric forms. For each of the façade’s semicircular tympanums, Jacques Verbeckt designed a sculptural program of the four seasons depicting cupids, goats, and flowers in a garden setting, recalling a similar design for the duchesse de Bourgogne’s garden pavilions at the Versailles menagerie. Upstairs were living quarters and, on the ground floor, a cabinet and a room devoted to dining. This room was replaced in 1754 – 1756 when Gabriel added two wings to the property, one of which contained a separate dining pavilion that was covered in green trellising and connected to the garden. The prominence accorded to dining suggests that here, too, the consumption of food, especially natural foods like vegetables and milk, was emphasized. The Fontainebleau hermitage was situated on the southwestern edge of the palace, across the road from the pine garden that had been laid out in the sixteenth century for Francis I (Figure 3.9). Set back from the road, the building was preceded by a large forecourt with stables and remises to the right and, to the left, a menagerie complex that was later attached to the dining wing. Like the menagerie at the Versailles hermitage, the Fontainebleau menagerie contained chicken coops, a dairy, and a cow stable. These elements appear in a separate, more detailed architectural rendering by Gabriel’s office that depicts the dairy (labeled “B” on the plan) nestled between the main road and a large courtyard that housed the chickens, surrounded by circular fountains and four identical patches of lawn (Figure 3.10). Accessed from this courtyard, the dairy’s main room had a ledge for storing milk products and was connected to a smaller room adjoining the cow stable. Though this was a standard layout for dairies at this time, Gabriel H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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may have been inspired by the design of the duchesse de Bourgogne’s pleasure dairy (or Louis XIV’s grande laiterie) at the old Versailles menagerie. The Versailles menagerie continued to be visited by courtiers and architects in this period. Gabriel went there in February 1751 to make an inventory of the central pavilion, though he probably also visited it earlier in his capacity as premier architecte.81 A sketch appended to Figure 3.10 depicts an elevation view of the dairy and one of the chicken coops. Both buildings have pitched roofs and resemble the hermitage in their plain, rusticated appearance. The dairy had a large glazed entrance door that brightened the room and enhanced its visibility. When the duc de Luynes toured the complex in October 1749, he commented favorably on the dairy’s well-lit interior and efficient, hygienic design.82 Such comments reinforce the dairy’s status as a showpiece for Pompadour, a place where she could invite the gaze of courtly visitors like Luynes, but also control and delimit that gaze and present herself in a particular light. Pompadour’s addiction to healthy living, and her growing passion for dairies, are evident in a third hermitage that she had built near the royal palace at Compiègne beginning in 1753. She typically spent part of each summer at Compiègne with the king, who loved to hunt in the nearby forests. Designed by Gabriel, the hermitage was situated on a piece of farmland given to her by Louis XV. It was just outside the royal domain but could be seen from the palace’s east wing, and it was connected to the royal gardens by a small bridge created for her use.83 Like Pompadour’s other pastoral retreats, the building was erected quickly. Letters exchanged between the Compiègne palace inspector, Godot, and the royal building office indicate an urgent desire to get it ready in time for a royal visit. The completion of the gardens and the dairy caused particular concern. In February 1754, Godot wrote of his intention to make sure that the vegetable garden was fully planted by that summer, so that fresh vegetables could be prepared on the arrival of the king and his mistress.84

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Figure 3.9 Plan of the Hermitage at Fontainebleau, eighteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs. Photo: Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 3.10 Office of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, plan and partial elevation of the dairy and chicken coop at the Fontainebleau Hermitage, c. 1749. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, O1 1426

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The Compiègne hermitage has been destroyed, and no elevation views survive. A plan drawn up by Gabriel’s office during a 1765 renovation reveals that it was small and rectangular, with two lateral wings and a large forecourt (Figure 3.11). The ground floor contained a vestibule, a salon, an antechamber, and a cabinet. Verbeckt decorated the interior walls with boiserie paneling, while the exterior contained pediments with Pompadour’s coat of arms.85 Gabriel wrote that he wanted the Compiègne hermitage’s “bien chargée” façade to recall antique precedents, indicating that it too may have represented an early example of neoclassical design. Perhaps the architect and his patron wanted the building’s classical appearance to evoke antique-inspired notions of health and retreat. One of the Compiègne hermitage’s wings was connected to an extensive service complex, shown at the right. The crowning glory of this complex was a large pleasure dairy that had a separate entrance off the road, a forecourt, chicken coops, and an ornamental garden decorated with fountains and bosquets (Figure 3.12). Resembling a smaller version of the hermitage or a diminutive château tucked between court and garden, the Compiègne pleasure dairy enjoyed an architectural autonomy not seen in previous examples of the building type. Completed in October 1754, the dairy’s main room was octagonal, with side shelves for milk products, an entrance vestibule, and a doorway that led into the garden. Although we don’t know how the room’s interior was decorated, we do know that it contained several pieces of the blue and white porcelain that Pompadour ordered in 1755 from Lazare Duvaux, including eight milk goblets, saucers, and eggcups (coquetiers). Their presence suggests that she spent time and entertained in this space. With its elegant design, cool surfaces, flowing water, and pungent smells, the Compiègne laiterie must have offered a “feast for the senses” akin to that described by the duc de Croÿ when he visited the Chantilly pleasure dairy in 1753 (see Chapter 2).

Opposite:

Figure 3.11 Office of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, plan of the Hermitage at Compiègne, 1765. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, O1 1410

Figure 3.12 Detail of Figure 3.11 with Madame de Pompadour’s pleasure dairy at Compiègne. Document conserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris, O1 1410

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Figure 3.13 Serin, the duchesse d’Orléans’s Hermitage at Bagnolet, c. 1735. Photo: by author

Pompadour’s pastoral retreats resemble an earlier hermitage built around 1735 for the duchesse d’Orléans at her country house, Bagnolet, near Paris (Figure 3.13). The duchess was one of the legitimized daughters of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan and the wife of Louis XV’s regent. After her husband purchased Bagnolet for her in 1719, she expanded the gardens from 60 to 200 arpents (approximately 170 acres). In the 1730s she commissioned a little-known architect named Serin to construct three fabriques, including a hermitage.86 The building’s simple but graceful façade and interior plan prefigure Pompadour’s hermitages and Gabriel’s design for the French pavilion. The interior contained rooms devoted to entertainment and pleasure, along with an entrance salon decorated with grisaille brune panels by Jean Valade. These panels depicted Arcadian landscapes with ruined buildings populated by “tempted” male and female hermits. The interior decoration of the Bagnolet hermitage, specifically the tempted hermits, reinforced the tenuous line that hermitages traversed between virtue and libertinage. Hermitages also toed a thin line between nature and artifice, given their sophisticated blend of rusticity and refinement and the obvious irony of aristocrats acting like hermits. Theatricality or ambiguity was a characteristic feature of all ancien régime pastoral architecture, DAIRY QUEENS

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including hermitages and pleasure dairies. These buildings professed purity while simultaneously inviting fantasies of its opposite, producing a tantalizing frisson that noble and urbane patrons favored. While claiming a sincere attachment to nature and the land, they also raised the possibility that this attachment might be just an aesthetic display or a sham performance. Valade was not the only artist to exploit the hermitage’s lascivious subtext. At the Salon of 1742, Boucher exhibited a painting of “Friar Luce,” a character from a Jean de La Fontaine story who used his hermitage to lure and seduce unsuspecting young women.87 Pompadour was surely aware of this erotic subtext when she commissioned her hermitages. She may have even appreciated their ironic status as buildings predicated upon the notion of ascetic withdrawal but created for the king’s mistress. Even so, I suspect that she intended her hermitages to convey pleasure and seduction of an altogether different sort. These pavilions were constructed at a pivotal moment in her relationship with the king, when their romance began to derive from pursuits of a more artistic or intellectual rather than carnal nature. Among these pursuits were the study of medicine and agriculture and a shared passion for architecture and pastoral recreation. Over time, Pompadour’s garden buildings developed into sites where alternative definitions of pleasure (agrément), and alternative definitions of the role of the royal mistress, could be explored and experienced. They helped reshape the understanding of mistresses not just as sexual companions — or as conduits for the king’s subjectivity — but as intellectual, emotional, and spiritual partners, with needs and desires of their own. If Pompadour had a role model for this project, it might have been Madame de Maintenon, whose sobriety and intellect had triumphed over the lubricious charms of Madame de Montespan to win Louis XIV’s lasting affections in the late seventeenth century. When a new edition of Maintenon’s memoirs appeared in 1756, Pompadour ordered twelve copies. She was cognizant of Louis XV’s desire to live a more chaste existence, particularly after his illness at Metz. However, she was also aware of his sexual appetites, and she allowed these appetites to be indulged by young women in another area of the Versailles gardens known as the Parc aux Cerfs.88 With the king’s erotic desires relocated and fulfilled, at her hermitages Pompadour and Louis XV could experience a more enduring form of pleasure, of the kind celebrated in a 1741 novel written by her close friend Charles-Pinot Duclos. Duclos’s novel, entitled Les confessions du comte de***, was translated into English in 1774 as The Pleasures of Retirement, Preferable to the Joys of Dissipation. The story recounts the adventures of a young libertine who is nearly done H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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in by erotic indulgences at degenerate environments like theaters, boudoirs, and petites maisons. The young man’s reformation begins, however, when a virtuous country girl instructs him in the salutary effects of la vie champêtre and “authentic” love. He tries to convince another urbanite to join him on this recuperative path, telling him, “Do not believe that I am deprived of all pleasure; I continually experience another, just as sensible and purer than all of the others: it is the charm of friendship.”89 Duclos’s own friendship with Pompadour led to his appointment as the king’s historiographer in 1750. She may have had his novel in mind when, beginning that same year, she commissioned allegorical statues representing herself as “Friendship” by JeanBaptiste Pigalle and Étienne-Maurice Falconet. One of these figures eventually replaced a statue of Amour that had stood next to a statue of Louis XV at her château de Bellevue.90 Duclos’s theme of champêtre conversion appears in small subgenre of writings about female “hermits.” An early example of this genre, the anonymous L’hermite de la cour ou le courtisan reformé of 1625, tells the story of a young courtesan who tries to free herself from a downward spiral of debauchery. In the end, she retires from court and dedicates herself to a life of austere spiritual devotion. In a later example, Madame de Lambert’s La femme hermite, the author explicitly links her heroine to the building type of the hermitage. Appearing in the 1747 edition of Lambert’s Oeuvres (which Pompadour owned), the story describes an encounter between court ladies and a beautiful young woman whom they meet in a rustic but “agreeable” hermitage.91 Though the girl seems out of place in her champêtre surroundings — as the ladies tell her, “You might have been an ornament to cities” — the hermitage turns out to have been her salvation. As an adolescent she was brought up at court but nearly done in by its corrupt ways. Eventually, she escaped to the countryside, where her natural virtue was allowed to flourish. Stories like these offered a riposte to the growing body of literature filled with negative representations of debauched, power-hungry women. Pompadour may have seized on this feminine ideal at a moment when her own reputation was being tarnished by her enemies. Lambert’s La femme hermite was published just one year before she commissioned her first hermitage, the same year that courtiers began campaigning against her in earnest. This is not to say that Pompadour was merely playing the role of the “female hermit” just as she had played the role of pastoral characters on various court stages. The hermitage and its promise of eternal happiness and rejuvenation was something that she wholeheartedly believed in and threw herself into body and soul. Pompadour’s zeal for this natural environment DAIRY QUEENS

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anticipates Rousseau’s blissful description of the hermitage at Montmorency, where he resided in the late 1750s. Rousseau found his hermitage sojourn to be extraordinarily therapeutic and stimulating, and he used it to begin drafting Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761). In this novel, Rousseau urged women to abandon the false pleasures of the city or the court and to realize their true destiny of living in harmony with nature and performing domestic activities like dairying, gardening, and nursing their children. He also encouraged women to consume virtuous foods like milk, a product that he conflated with their “natural” innocence and sweetness.92 Reform-minded philosophers and physicians were swayed by Rousseau’s moralizing message. In the last few decades of the eighteenth century, they campaigned for the forcible removal of mondain women to the countryside to counteract their supposedly weaker, more sensitive constitutions and to mold them into healthful, productive human beings. Pompadour’s hermitages also engaged a notion of “natural” femininity, but this was nature understood and expressed on her own terms — something that expanded, rather than delimited, her sense of self. Far from relegating her to the sidelines, Pompadour’s hermitages helped her remain center stage at court for more than fifteen years. They were an assertion of power enveloped in the language of retreat. TH E DAIRY AT cRécY AND “LA bELLE jARDINIèR E”

 In a portrait painted by Carle van Loo, probably around 1754 – 1755, Pompadour stands in a lush, naturalistic landscape and gazes outward at the viewer (Figure 3.14). She wears a loose-fitting beige gown draped casually over her creamy skin; dark blue ribbons accent the gown and the straw hat that rests atop her head. Her hair, adorned with blue flowers, is unpowdered and her face appears free of makeup, apart from a faint pinkish tint to her lips and cheeks. In her right hand she holds up a sprig of white jasmine, while nestling her left arm in a wicker basket brimming with carnations, roses, and buttercups. Despite her somewhat fanciful costume, she appears at ease in her surroundings, basking in the warm golden light that encircles her. Overall the painting achieves a harmony between figure and setting that is enhanced by the artist’s gently undulating brushstrokes and a complementary color palette that aligns skin with flowers, ribbons with sky, and roses with lips. H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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Although van Loo’s portrait did not have a title during Pompadour’s lifetime, an engraving made after it around 1782 was entitled “La belle jardinière.” The name may have referred, perhaps ironically, to Raphael’s painting of the Madonna and Child (also known as La belle jardinière) that was then in the French royal collections. Van Loo’s portrait has since been associated with Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles (where it may have been installed) and with the fervent devotion to nature that she espoused there.93 In the portrait, Pompadour resembles a statue of a female gardener that was created around the same time for another one of her dairies at Crécy. This was the last and most ornate of the five laiteries d’agrément that she commissioned between 1748 and 1754; I will describe it briefly before concluding this chapter with some final remarks about the iconography and significance of her pastoral patronage. The château de Crécy was purchased for Pompadour by the king in 1746, and it was said to have been her favorite property. An extensive project to remodel the gardens was initiated around 1752, including the construction of a hermitage and a dairy.94 The Crécy dairy survives today but has been altered and is now part of a private residence. Built of limestone, the dairy was vaulted and sunk into the ground to keep the milk products cool. These products were enjoyed by Pompadour and her household, and they may have also been used to treat infirm villagers at the hospital she established at Crécy around the same time. If she did supply them with milk, she may have inspired other dairy owners to perform similar acts of noblesse oblige, including Marie-Antoinette and the duc de Penthièvre, who purchased Crécy from her in 1757. After the duke acquired the estate he made repairs to Pompadour’s laiterie, and around 1775 – 1776 he built a second dairy at his château de Saint-Just that was devoted exclusively to providing milk for his retired and infirm servants.95 Soon after the Crécy dairy was completed in 1753, Pompadour’s brother, the marquis de Marigny, who had taken over the position of royal arts administrator from Tournehem in 1751, commissioned four life-sized (41/2 pieds high) statues for its interior. (A pied is a little larger than one foot.) Made from a fine gray thunderstone (pierre de tonnerre), these statues, now lost, represented female farm workers, including a milkmaid (La laitière), a butter-churner (La batteuse de berre), a farmer (La fermière), and a gardener (La jardinière). Based on drawings provided by Boucher, these figures were translated into three-dimensional form by four Royal Academy sculptors — Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, Guillaume Coustou II, and LouisClaude Vassé. The high caliber of the artists involved testifies to the imporDAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 3.14 Carle van Loo, portrait of Madame de Pompadour as “La belle jardinière,” c. 1754 – 1755. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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Figure 3.15 Porcelain biscuit after Louis-Claude Vassé’s statue The Female Gardener for the dairy at Crécy, c. 1754. Sèvres, Musée National de Céramique. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

tance of the project. Each sculptor worked quickly and was paid 2,500 livres; as soon as the statues were finished, they were installed in specially designed, seven-pied high niches in the dairy.96 They were accompanied by a rocaille fountain designed by Verbeckt that may have resembled a similar shell-shaped fountain created for the pleasure dairy at Chantilly. Beginning in 1754, the Crécy statues were transformed into smaller terracotta models that were used by the Vincennes factory to make biscuit replicas.97 These pristine white statuettes, which survive today, depict fetching young farm girls gathering flowers or churning butter in stylish costumes and coiffed hairstyles (Figure 3.15 and 3.16). Despite their elegant attire, they are shown to be actively working, and as such they represent a cross between the idealized pastoral shepherdess that Boucher had made famous — through paintings as well as porcelain figurines that had appeared from the early DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 3.16 Porcelain biscuit after Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain’s statue The Butter Churner for the dairy at Crécy, c. 1754. Sèvres, Musée National de Céramique. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

1750s — and a new kind of fresh-faced working girl who rose to prominence in the 1760s.98 Allegrain’s Butter Churner bears the closest resemblance to this fresh-faced girl as immortalized in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Village Bride, a painting commissioned by Marigny and exhibited at the Salon of 1761. Unlike Boucher’s shepherdesses, who languor in the fields while being entertained by casual male admirers, Greuze’s girl is shown within the domestic interior of her family farm, surrounded by loving family members and her husband-to-be.99 The painting expresses the same values of Physiocracy, agricultural productivity, and domesticity that pleasure dairies, along with related architectural forms like the hameau, would profess in the coming decades. Van Loo’s portrait of Pompadour as “The Beautiful Gardener” represents an image, and a worldview, in transition. On the one hand, it bears traces of Boucher’s idyllic pastorales and of the Arcadian stage roles that H E A LT H , H Y G I E N E , A N D T H E H E R M I TA G E S O F M A D A M E D E P O M PA D O U R

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Pompadour performed. On the other hand, both van Loo and his sitter seem to be striving for a greater degree of naturalism, by depicting her embedded in the landscape and not as a ravishing object of desire — as Boucher might have shown her — but as a plump, somewhat serious-looking matron, her fanciful costume notwithstanding. Van Loo depicts her body, furthermore, not as idealized or allegorical but as a fully formed corporeal reality: fleshy and weighty, both rooted to the earth and blooming with health. Van Loo seems to depict Pompadour as her “natural” self, or at least as the self that she felt she had achieved by 1754, when her hermitages and dairies had been finished and when she posed, confident and relaxed, for this portrait. The artist’s naturalism, moreover, seems culturally specific and sensitive to the ways that Pompadour embraced new ideas about nature and selfhood at her pastoral retreats. These ideas included a faith in neo-Hippocratic health regimens as physically and emotionally ameliorative, as well as a rejection of such artificial practices as wearing corsets, hair powder, and rouge. Adopting this regimen helped sustain Pompadour personally and politically, bringing her into a more intimate and nurturing relationship with the king and giving her a weapon with which to counter her enemies’ accusations of moral turpitude. One can imagine Pompadour conceiving this portrait to challenge those courtiers who accused her of having “yellow skin,” “insipid eyes,” failing health, and a dissembling “nature,” all buried underneath a mask of red and white makeup. Pompadour presents herself here as a paragon of physical, mental, and spiritual health. She raises her sprig of white flowers — a sly reference, perhaps, to the fleurs blanches from which she suffered — not as a flag of surrender, but as an act of defiance. Above all she meets her critics’ eyes with a steady, fearless gaze, daring them to regard her, and her position at court, as anything but natural. *

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It should be noted that van Loo’s portrait of Pompadour had limited exposure. Never shown at the Paris Salon, it was probably only seen by the artist and his colleagues in addition to Pompadour, Louis XV, and the courtiers who visited her private retreats. For Pompadour, this amount of exposure was sufficient — her campaign was local and personal. She was not trying to convince anyone of the health or stability of the state, only that of herself and her royal position. The audience that mattered most to her was herself and the king, and she performed well on both of those fronts. Still, one has to wonder: how would van Loo’s portrait have been received by members of the Parisian public, or art critics like Diderot, had it DAIRY QUEENS

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been displayed at the Salon? Would it, and Pompadour herself, have been viewed as natural, or artful? For elite, mondain viewers like Pompadour, part of the power and the intrigue of pastoral portraiture was that it vacillated tantalizingly between nature and artifice, eliciting a playful tension that was also seen in the half-rustic, half-refined design of hermitages, hamlets, and pleasure dairies. In the last third of the eighteenth century, aristocratic patrons eagerly embraced this hybrid mode of expression for its ability to accommodate their multifaceted desires. At the same time, such artful productions began to draw fire from critics, who condemned them (and their patrons) as frivolous and insincere, and who promoted a new aesthetic and moral order as prefigured in The Village Bride by Greuze. “Nothing was unnatural in this retreat, except the owner of it La Pompadour herself.” The comment appeared in a spurious history of Madame de Pompadour that was generated by court gossip and whose 1759 publication the monarchy tried, unsuccessfully, to stop.100 Written in reference to the hermitage at Versailles, the author declared this natural environment to be a front for an artful, feminine duplicity. It offers a preview of a phenomenon that would become much more common in the next few decades — not only the growing number of unauthorized publications that were aimed against the crown, but also the mobilization of pastoral architecture as staging grounds for increasingly volatile debates about the aristocracy’s capacity for health and reform. Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in the controversy surrounding Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles, to which we now turn.

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4

Marie-Antoinette and the Hameau Effect

Royalty has here endeavored to conceal itself from its own Eye, but the attempt is vain. A Dairy furnished with the Porcelaine of Sèvres is a semblance too splendid of rural life. Gou verneur Morris , A Diar y of the French Re volut ion ,

May 14, 1789

The Hameau at Petit Trianon, August 1785: Marie-Antoinette (1755 – 1793) spent the better part of the summer of 1785 at Petit Trianon, the garden retreat at Versailles that her husband, Louis XVI, had given her in 1774. In August, she stayed there from the first of the month until the twenty-fourth. Her attentions were focused on the Hameau, a new area in her gardens that featured eleven rustic cottages around a lake, including a mill, a barn, a “queen’s house,” and a pleasure dairy, or laiterie d’agrément (Figure 4.1). These picturesquely dilapidated, mostly thatchedroofed buildings had been designed by her architect, Richard Mique, and several were being completed that summer after two years of construction.1 Vegetable and fruit gardens surrounded each cottage, and beyond them were fields of alfalfa, oats, and buckwheat. These crops fed the animals that were housed at the nearby farm, including Swiss cows that were prized for their milk, a wholesome product that enhanced the Hameau’s image of rural simplicity, nurture, and fecundity. As the Hameau took shape, dairying became the most prominent occupation. In 1785, the queen’s designers converted two of the cottages, formerly a fishery and a bakery, into a pleasure dairy and a functional preparation dairy, or laiterie de préparation.2 (Marie-Antoinette had previously obtained her milk from a dairy that had been established at Petit Trianon years earlier for Madame de Pompadour.) Royal servants would use the Hameau’s preparation dairy, now destroyed, to fabricate ice cream, butter, and other milk products that were then brought to the pleasure dairy to be admired and consumed by the queen and her guests. Most of these guests were restricted to her inner circle of courtiers, including family members and close female friends, although the occasional foreign dignitary, such as the American statesman Gouverneur Morris, or other special visitors to the palace were also sometimes admitted. In addition, Marie-Antoinette enjoyed bringing her farm workers, local villagers, and their children to Petit Trianon on Sundays, where she would stage country dances and serve dairy products as a demonstration of noblesse oblige. In 1787 royal designers began transforming one of the Hameau’s cottages into a rustic dance hall that may also have been intended for these gatherings.3 Contrary to Gouverneur Morris’s assumption, quoted at the start of this chapter, that Marie-Antoinette was trying to “conceal” her royal identity at the Hameau, she was instead attempting to express her royal status, or DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 4.1 Richard Mique, the mill at the Hameau de Versailles, 1783 – 1787. Photo: by author

more precisely her queenship, in a novel way. She did this by combining traditional forms of feudal ritual and aristocratic display with a new aesthetics of sensibility, nature, and bienfaisance (charity or benevolence) that was being articulated and embraced by the French elite in the last third of the eighteenth century.4 The architectural phenomenon of the hameau, a garden construction that emerged in this period and was designed to evoke a rural “hamlet” or village, embodies this elegant, if ultimately tenuous, synthesis of the traditional and the new. Hamlets became popular among the aristocracy in the 1770s and 1780s because they were understood to signify an empathetic attachment to the land and its commoners, but also dominion over them. Their dual purpose was inscribed in the hameau’s design itself, which was typically rustic or vernacular on the outside but refined within to suit elite standards of comfort and exclusivity. Hamlets were favorite attractions during garden tours of noble MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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estates, and they were also used to stage peasant festivals and other manifestations of seigneurial largesse. They were the three-dimensional realization of a new kind of sentimental pastoral literature that the nobility endorsed in the second half of the eighteenth century to reassert their virtue and beneficence, at a time when members of their own class and the bourgeois public sphere were questioning the naturalness of their status and leadership.5 In the 1760s and 1770s, the marquis de Girardin (at Ermenonville) and the prince de Condé (at Chantilly) had hamlets constructed in their gardens as a way to reaffirm traditional, feudal values while also proclaiming their commitment to new ideas of agricultural and social improvement. MarieAntoinette, who visited Ermenonville in 1782, was influenced by these prototypes but enhanced the feminine character of her hamlet by adding a boudoir and two dairy buildings that evinced the same blend of elegance and rusticity as the rest of the Hameau. Both her preparation dairy and her pleasure dairy were simple and farm-like on the outside, with pebble-dashed, half-timbered walls and tiled or thatched roofs (see Figure I.1). Inside each building was a room with a central table, a ledge around the perimeter for storing and displaying milk products, and an abundant supply of water. But while the furnishings at the preparation dairy were hewn out of a plain stone, at the pleasure dairy, by contrast, they were made of sumptuous white marble, and the walls themselves were painted to look like marble. The vaulted ceiling was also resplendent with trompe l’oeil coffers and elegant marble moldings (see Figure I.2). In 1786, the pleasure dairy was outfitted with a lavish suite of dairy utensils from the queen’s own porcelain manufactory in Paris.6 Some of these utensils resembled their functional stone or tin counterparts at the preparation dairy, but for the fact that they were made of delicate white porcelain painted with naturalistic flowers and a gleaming gold rim (Figure 4.2). The queen’s pleasure dairy was a hybrid pastoral structure that combined natural, rustic simplicity with artful, neoclassical elegance and a hint of rococo élan. The building’s function was similarly manifold, allowing MarieAntoinette to demonstrate her affection for rural life in an aesthetically innovative and appropriately regal manner. The Hameau’s laiterie d’agrément was also a means by which this Austrian-born queen could assert her place in the French royal landscape, and, along with the milk products that she had transported to the palace every morning when she was not staying at Petit Trianon, it may have been intended to signify her vital contribution to the state as the monarchy’s fertile, feminine provider and helpmate.7 This was how pleasure dairies had benefited other foreign-born queens, perhaps most notably the c. 1560 dairy at Fontainebleau that had enabled Catherine de’ DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 4.2 Milk bowl from Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy at the Hameau, c. 1785 – 1786. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Medici to express her political authority and maternal identity at a particularly troubled time when some courtiers were questioning the legitimacy of her royal role. Marie-Antoinette also faced intense criticism throughout her reign, especially around 1785 when she became embroiled in the Diamond Necklace affair and other well-publicized royal scandals.8 (News of the Diamond Necklace affair, which centered on an act of greed that Marie-Antoinette was accused of committing in the royal gardens, broke in August 1785, the same month that she was residing at Petit Trianon and busying herself with the Hameau.) In addition to providing refuge from these and other crises, her hamlet and dairy may have represented an attempt to cast the queen and her gardens in a more nurturing and productive light. Given that Marie-Antoinette’s dairy has become synonymous with her frivolity and recklessness, such an attempt may seem misguided at best. However, it is important to remember that the Hameau belonged to a pastoral tradition that had its origins in the sixteenth century and that by the eighteenth century had become a widely favored form of elite expression. MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Marie-Antoinette’s agenda, then, was entirely in keeping with the culture of her time. The queen’s laiterie d’agrément was not an aberration but, to the contrary, one of numerous pleasure dairies — at least twenty or more — that were built on the grounds of royal palaces, country estates, and Parisian pleasure gardens in the 1770s and 1780s: for clients such as the duc de Chartres, Madame de Balbi, the duchesse de Bourbon, the comtesse de Provence, Madame Elisabeth, and Jean-Joseph de Laborde. These buildings were used by elite women — and occasionally men, notably financiers like Laborde — as venues to cultivate an image of virtuousness. This was principally in response to a new discourse of rural living and social reform, a discourse best articulated by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his bestselling novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau had described an idyllic country estate and garden complex in Switzerland that was presided over by a sensitive, moral, and authoritative noblewoman named Julie. Julie’s dairy is meant to embody her innate feminine “sweetness” and domesticity.9 Male and female readers, both noble and non-noble, were in thrall to Rousseau’s text, and many of them created pastoral retreats inspired by Julie’s estate and gardens. Perhaps the most ardent admirer of all was the marquis de Girardin, who persuaded Rousseau himself to live on the grounds of Ermenonville as a kind of writer-in-residence. After Rousseau died in 1778, the marquis buried him on an island in the middle of a lake in his gardens. On the banks of this lake, overlooking Rousseau’s tomb, a bench was reserved for nursing mothers, as illustrated in a 1788 travel guide to Ermenonville (Figure 4.3).10 The bench, and indeed the entire pastoral, maternal setting, represented the satisfying culmination of Rousseau’s campaign to encourage mothers to breastfeed their own children rather than hiring wet nurses. This sentiment was taken up by numerous other elite garden patrons, including Marie-Antoinette, who brought her children to the Hameau and reportedly attempted to nurse them herself.11 She seems to have been dissuaded from doing so, however, because of her royal position, suggesting that some women had a more difficult time embodying “natural,” Rousseauian femininity than others. Maternal breastfeeding, in fact, was only one of many challenges that French aristocratic women faced in their quest to emulate Rousseau’s Julie. Unlike the idealized heroines of pastoral literature, real-life elite women (and queens in particular) could not easily retire from civic life or from their social, consumerist, and courtly responsibilities — indeed when Marie-Antoinette did try to sequester herself at the Hameau, she was attacked by her own courtiers and the Parisian press for neglecting her royal duties. Worse, she was DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 4.3 Mérigot fils, the Isle of Poplars with Rousseau’s tomb and the bench for nursing mothers, from Promenade ou Itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville (1788). Typ 715.88.427, Houghton Library, Harvard University

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accused of consorting there with her female friends in lascivious ways, notably in pornographic pamphlets like The Royal Dildo of 1789, one of many scurrilous tracts that branded the queen’s gardens as a place of illicit sex rather than virtuous productivity.12 Furthermore, no matter how inspired aristocratic women may have been by a rhetoric of rural living or la vie champêtre, they had no intention of withdrawing from social life, and no wish to adopt the view of the Encyclopédie and other reformist tracts that their true glory was “to live in obscurity.”13 Instead, with the building type of the pleasure dairy, they found an ideal, juste milieu solution to their dilemma, one that permitted them to profess feminine virtue and domesticity while also retaining a selfaffirming sense of artful leisure, cultural sophistication, and theatrical display. The pleasure dairy represented an architectural analogue to the polyvalent symbolism of the pastoral literary mode, a mode that reconciled opposing categories of work and leisure, nature and artifice, and innocence and worldliness. Many members of the eighteenth-century nobility, like their ancien régime predecessors, saw in this a liberating means of expressing conflicted desires. The pleasure dairy’s pastoral character was reflected in its hybrid design and decorative style, which in the pre-Revolutionary era was typically rustic or neoclassical to evoke both a return to Arcadian origins and a new aesthetic and moral order. Notably, the placement of these buildings was not in the outer provinces but rather visibly on the edges of royal gardens or even in the heart of Paris — a phenomenon that was lampooned by the cultural critic Louis de Carmontelle, even as he designed one of these urban pleasure dairies for the duc de Chartres at Monceau. These distinct characteristics made the laiterie d’agrément of the 1770s and 1780s a late-stage example of a tradition of pastoral architecture that continued to be patronized by the high nobility but was also adopted by a newly diverse, nouveau riche clientele who wanted to associate themselves with its legitimating claims and with the Rousseauian cult of nature. The latter group of patrons helped transform the pleasure dairy from a relatively rarified royal building type into a fullblown commodity by the mid-1780s, the period when Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau was built. These architectural and economic trends, combined with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere and the institution of the press in the second half of the eighteenth century, occasioned a more pervasive interest in the phenomenon of the pleasure dairy, and not always a favorable one. Reformminded authors and critics regarded these buildings as a perverse parody of their high-minded aspirations. They had hoped to purge the pastoral of ambiguity, unfettered pleasure, and effeminacy, and steer the genre toward a DAIRY QUEENS

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more utilitarian and moralizing end, one that emphasized their values of heterosexual productivity and agricultural improvement. Instead, they believed, aristocratic women patrons like Marie-Antoinette were subverting these noble aims by constructing pleasure dairies that seemed to celebrate the feminine, the hedonistic, and the frivolous. The pastoral mode was inherently unstable, meaning different and sometimes contradictory things to different audiences. Often it was put to opposing uses. While aristocratic women regarded the pleasure dairy as an emblem of their noble virtues, critics branded the building and other forms of pastoral architecture as degenerate and licentious.14 Nowhere was this done more effectively and devastatingly than in the reception of the queen’s Hameau. To be sure, other critical factors contributed to the hostile reception of Marie-Antoinette’s gardens — their high cost, their exclusivity, and their assertion of female agency and self-sufficiency. Several historians have astutely analyzed these factors, and I elaborate on them in this chapter as well. But in attempting to fully appreciate the complicated story of the queen’s Hameau, it is important to consider the polarizing discourses that surrounded it — the often fractious debates that led some to embrace it as a triumphant regeneration of royal status, and others to see it as a harbinger of the aristocracy’s imminent collapse. We have to examine the origins, beginning around 1750, of the moralizing, “back to nature” discourse in several literary contexts — pastoral criticism, Physiocratic tracts, and medical treatises — to see how it aimed at reforming the nobility, and elite women in particular. This literary discourse was fraught with its own tensions, contradictory claims, and competing prescriptions that were difficult for such women to follow without running into trouble. Then, we have to gauge the aristocracy’s enthusiastic, if idiosyncratic, response to this rhetoric in a wide variety of architectural and garden schemes in the late eighteenth century, many of which were constructed in the French capital. This phenomenal architectural expression and the celebrations and attacks that surrounded it created what I call a “Hameau effect” — an intensification, and popularization, of a formerly discreet architectural phenomenon that seized the interest of a diverse and enthusiastic public, but also, for many, provoked their scorn. Such dissenting views were already at play in the sixteenth century when Catherine de’ Medici built her pleasure dairy, but by the time Marie-Antoinette constructed her Hameau, the debate was reaching a fever pitch.

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REFORMINg THE PASTORAl AND DOMESTICATINg ElITE WOMEN

 Pleasure dairies became increasingly common in France after 1750 for several reasons. In the previous chapter, I explored how dairies and milk were associated around the mid-eighteenth century (by Madame de Pompadour, among others) with new Enlightenment ideas of health and self-improvement. From the 1750s to the outbreak of the Revolution, this association expanded to encompass the health of the entire realm. Dairies, especially in connection with the architectural form of the hameau, also became tied to debates about agricultural and economic improvement and about reforming the pastoral mode. Quite often, debates about the form and function of pastoral literature provided a means to dispute the nobility’s character and purpose. Perhaps the most contentious issue regarding the pastoral genre was its degree of refinement, or aesthetic distance from reality. In his Discours sur la nature de l’églogue of 1688, Bernard de Fontenelle had argued in favor of screening out the “baseness” of rural life and presenting a more rose-colored view. For Fontenelle, the genre’s purpose was to represent not a realistic landscape but rather a psychological terrain of pleasures for the elite, filled with “vivid pictures of what interests us.”15 Above all, the pastoral should enable the nobility to experience a sense of calm superiority in a rapidly changing world. Though most eighteenth-century writers agreed that some level of idealization or filtering was needed, many felt that the pastoral’s embellishment had gotten out of hand and that the genre had devolved into an overly artificial, frivolous mode. In a 1743 translation of Virgil, the abbé Desfontaines remarked on how far the modern pastoral had fallen from its original state of grace and purity. His text was illustrated with an engraving by the artist Charles-Nicolas Cochin that reinforced this contrast by depicting two types of shepherds: a simpering flute-player in a stylized rococo costume, and a stockier, more muscular lad in a simple classical tunic (Figure 4.4). A woman depicted in between the two men, similarly dressed in classical costume, embraces the latter while pushing away the former, telling him in an inscription, “Young Shepherd, I hate these trilling airs. If you wish to please me, imitate your elders.”16 For Desfontaines, a major problem with the modern or rococo pastoral was its sexual ambiguity or effeminacy. His attack resonated with contemporary arguments, advanced by Rousseau and others, that the French nobility

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Figure 4.4 Charles-Nicolas Cochin, engraved illustration for Les oeuvres de Virgile (1743). Junius S. Morgan Collection, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library

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had become enervated and effeminate under the dominating sway of empty pleasures and mondain (worldly) women. As such, they had abandoned their duties of taking care of the land and the peasantry and of producing healthy children to strengthen the state. Reformers from a variety of disciplines wanted to encourage the nobility to reclaim agricultural, heterosexual, and humanitarian values, of the kind that were thought to be dominant in antiquity and in the countryside — or at least the countryside as it was represented by the georgic mode. As pastoral poetry after 1750 became more attuned to georgic motifs of farm labor and domestic bliss, the georgic enjoyed its own resurgence among the monarchy and the elite. The genre’s popularity escalated dramatically after the 1770 publication of Jacques Delille’s Les géorgiques de Virgile, a copy of which Marie-Antoinette owned and kept in her library at Petit Trianon.17 At the same time, writers and poets argued over how best to inculcate a desire for reform in their readers, while also improving the conditions of the countryside for the benefit of all. In the Encyclopédie, Marmontel proposed giving pastoral poetry a different emotional charge. As the eclogue had represented up until then only “a condition worthy of envy,” he wrote, “could it not also be the portrayal of a state worthy of pity?”18 By depicting more “truthful” peasants and agricultural laborers — as opposed to fancy, indolent shepherds — who had fallen on hard times, Marmontel argued that the eclogue could serve a moral agenda, by encouraging the elite to recognize their responsibility to help their fellow men. This new form of pastoral literature was, of course, no less idealized, since it presented the peasantry as naturally good, almost childlike in their innocence, and exceedingly deserving. But it certainly succeeded in stirring aristocratic emotions: in his memoirs, Marmontel boasted of having been asked to “retouch with care” the lackluster dedication to Madame de Pompadour in Henry Pattullo’s Essai sur l’amélioration des terres (1758), and of delivering such a heartwarming rendition of the sad, touching lives of rural laborers that he reduced Louis XV’s mistress to tears. This triumph, Marmontel added, won him the favor not only of Pompadour but also of François Quesnay, her physician and one of the founders of Physiocracy (see below).19 Jean-François de Saint-Lambert promoted a similar reform agenda in his 1769 pastoral poem Les saisons. Unlike Desfontaines, he was less interested in recovering the pastoral’s original purity than in devoting attention to the here and now. Saint-Lambert’s sentimental form of pastoral poetry, which was designed to ameliorate the plight of the rural poor while simultaneously restoring honor to the nobility, likely emerged during the years that he spent at the court of Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine. Stanislas, the exiled king of DAIRY QUEENS

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Poland and the father-in-law of Louis XV, was famous for his bienfaisance; his devotion to agricultural improvement; and the magnificent gardens that he cultivated at his ducal château, Lunéville.20 Saint-Lambert was also inspired by the emotional appeals of the Physiocrats, a group of economic theorists who declared land and agricultural prosperity to be the source of all wealth. Cofounded by Quesnay and the marquis de Mirabeau, Physiocracy (literally, “the rule of nature”) had its heyday in France in the 1760s and 1770s. It briefly enjoyed government favor through the policies of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, a great lover of pastoral poetry who translated parts of Virgil’s Georgics and the idylls of Salomon Gessner into French.21 Before Physiocracy was firmly established as an economic school, Mirabeau had outlined many of its key tenets in L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (1756). In this widely circulated treatise, reprinted as many as forty times before the end of the eighteenth century, Mirabeau urged the nobility to reclaim their proper role in society by promoting agriculture and population growth.22 He adopted a slightly different tone and focus than Marmontel or Saint-Lambert, attempting to highlight the present shortcomings of the idle aristocracy so as to push them in a new direction. Mirabeau’s end goal, however, was much the same as these other authors. Rather than seeking to abolish class hierarchy or feudal privilege, he wanted to give the landowning nobility the tools to recover their natural superiority and virtue. Chief among the nobility’s recent missteps, according to Mirabeau, was the fact that they had abandoned their rural estates and moved to cities. There, they pursued a lifestyle of superficial self-indulgence in morally suspect venues like salons and theaters. Yet even those who remained in the countryside continued to partake of useless luxuries. At their estates, they cultivated pleasure gardens — rather than using their land for farming — and they harnessed their horses to elegant carriages instead of to the plow. These activities were especially despicable because they took place in the very same environment that was supposed to offer the nobility salvation. Mirabeau reserved his most caustic comments for courtiers and mondain women. He claimed that such women were contributing to their moral decline, and destroying their health, by spending their days reading trashy novels, attending gluttonous, all-night dinner parties, and watching frivolous plays and other entertainments. After recounting a typically frenetic, dissolute day in the life of a female urban aristocrat, Mirabeau described the damage that incurred: “Stretched out in an armchair six inches from the ground, her posture almost necessarily indecent, she appears to return to bed, her shoulders draw together, her chest sinks in, her entire body sags.”23 MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Even worse than harming themselves, these women were contributing to the decline of the French population by compromising their fertility. In the unlikely event that they were able to conceive, he surmised that their ravaged bodies would produce sickly infants, who would either die or turn into degenerate adults. They also, in his opinion, made terrible mothers. Mirabeau’s vitriol was so profound that one wonders whether he thought such women could be reformed at all. Nevertheless, Mirabeau did offer a program of reform that would enable elite women to fulfill their “true” calling as wives and mothers. He outlined his program in an unpublished manuscript, now in the French national archives, entitled “De l’institution des femmes” (c. 1768).24 The text is reminiscent of François Fénelon’s treatise on female education of 1687 (discussed in Chapter 2), except that it places much greater emphasis on environment as a determining factor in an individual’s physical and emotional well-being. Mirabeau exhorts paternalistic guardians to keep young, impressionable women away from corrupt “theaters of representation” such as salons and boudoirs and to instill in them a love of domesticity and la vie champêtre. As soon as these women are betrothed to appropriate partners, he advises that they be brought to the countryside and encouraged to spend time walking around their estates, teaching themselves the basic tenets of agriculture and household management. He also recommends that they observe industrious, family-oriented peasant women and learn to direct their own “petite empire” in a similar manner. Mirabeau’s regimen is strikingly akin to that taken up by Julie in Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse. Julie’s activities, and her dietary habits, also reflect advice given to elite women by the celebrity Swiss physician Samuel Tissot, with whom Rousseau corresponded from 1762. Referred to by his contemporaries as the “JeanJacques of Medicine,” Tissot was famous for his treatises on nervous disorders, masturbation, and the health of the mondain elite. His Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde was an instant hit when it appeared in 1770, and was later reprinted in eighteen French editions. Although his treatise appealed to both sexes, Tissot wrote that it was “intended principally for the use of Ladies of Fashion.”25 He exhorted such women to stop attending the theater, salon gatherings, and dinner parties, not only because these environments encouraged bad behavior but also because they were cramped and airless, impeding circulation and movement. The architectural spaces in which these events took place exacted the same kind of physical harm as did the wearing of corsets and heavy makeup, practices that Tissot also decried. The only way

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to reverse the downward spiral was to retire to the countryside and embrace a natural lifestyle of healthful foods, fresh air, exercise, and sleeping. Safely removed from the city’s deleterious effects, elite women could devote themselves to tending gardens and raising children, which, like Rousseau, he insisted they breastfeed themselves. To reinforce this last point, Tissot described the “grievous” bodily harm that was done to fashionable ladies who refused to nurse, thus allowing breast milk to back up in their bodies and cause fever, even death.26 Like Mirabeau, Tissot encouraged mondain women to emulate the rural peasantry, who, he claimed, nursed their own children and enjoyed a healthful diet along with an ideal balance of work, rest, and family. In a rare acknowledgment of the romanticized vision of rural life that was inherent in such views, Tissot admitted that his description of rural laborers had little in common with the overworked, malnourished peasants that he encountered in the actual countryside. However, he defended himself by saying that peasants had indeed been this way in the past, and could become so again if elites would take the lead in embracing the “rule of nature.” As Anne Vila has noted, many of Tissot’s theories resembled those of the Physiocrats, notably their binary division of society into sterile and productive classes (classes stériles and classes productives).27 Tissot, like many of the reform-minded authors of his day, was more convincing in creating oppositional categories than in dismantling them. So much of his Essai is devoted to denouncing the appearance, tastes, and habits of the mondain elite, and especially aristocratic women, that it is difficult to imagine how the elite might be transformed once they adopted his rural regimen — a regimen that even he himself conceded was utopian. Though such writings were allegedly designed to bring these two classes together, they more often succeeded in solidifying stereotypes about each, and raising doubts whenever one attempted to cross over into the territory of the other. Some evidence of this suspicion is visible in a painting by Pierre-Alexandre Wille, a former student of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, which was shown at the Salon of 1779. Entitled Women from the City Going to Drink Milk in the Country, the painting (now untraced) depicts two upscale urbanites entering a sparse peasant interior to drink healthful milk as Tissot and his colleagues had recommended (Figure 4.5). One anonymous Salon critic upbraided Wille for “bringing wealth and poverty together in this way,” labeling him an artist who “paints gowns à la polonaise and rags, and imagines that he has painted nature.”28

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Figure 4.5 Pierre-Alexandre Wille, Women from the City Going to Drink Milk in the Country, Salon of 1779. Untraced. Photo: Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Perhaps responding to anxieties that country excursions were degenerating into a superficial female fad, in the 1770s and 1780s French physicians began suggesting that elite women be forcibly removed to the countryside for an extended period. Like their predecessors, these authors emphasized the damaging effects of environment on overly sensitive women. In his De l’influence des affections de l’âme dans les maladies nerveuses des femmes (1781), Edme-Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne, the physician to Marie-Antoinette’s sister-in-law, the comtesse de Provence, wrote of air quality experiments that he had conducted in Parisian venues like the theater of the Comédie Italienne. He reported that the atmosphere was “absolutely deadly” for its female audience and abetted their nervous disorders.29 Beauchêne begged these women to “follow your young husbands into the countryside,” and after spending a good amount of time there, “come back to Paris fit to provide your fellow women with an example of the exercises and occupations that suit your sex.” Addressing these young husbands directly, he urged: DAIRY QUEENS

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Build your houses a different way, change your style of life, ensure the morals and happiness of your wives by keeping them busy in a pleasant and useful manner, and by not leaving them any time to develop desires; destroy your theaters, or at least banish from them dramas, or modern tragedies; burn all of those little novels whose least faults are affectation of style, outlandish plots, and the exaggeration of feelings; tell your children to stick close to their mother: her affection for them will soon become the most intense of all her affections; such a pure feeling will never cause migraines, vapors, or melancholia.30 A 1771 treatise on nymphomania by the physician D. T. de Bienville represents an extreme case of male medical “experts” taking women to the countryside to correct their purportedly pathological behavior. (The term that Bienville uses for nymphomania is “uterine furies”; in a pornographic pamphlet published in 1791, Marie-Antoinette was accused of having the same disorder.) His treatise, a medical tract written in the guise of a suspense thriller, is filled with scintillating accounts of fallen women whom he had personally saved by bringing them to the country and placing them on a regimen of isolation, warm baths, and fresh milk. In one account, Bienville’s use of the “milk cure” is especially perverse. It involves an oversexed teenager named “Eléonore,” whom he claimed to have quarantined in a country house for several months and fed a purifying diet of white meat and milk. He also described administering injections of petit lait (whey) to her vagina, which he noted made her clitoris recede.31 As bizarre as Bienville’s text may seem, it had a following among the elite in his day. Some of his advice reappeared in books of a tamer nature, including a collection of children’s fairy tales entitled Les veillées du château (1784) by Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis. Madame de Genlis was a writer and salonnière who also served as the governess for the duc de Chartres’s children, including the future king Louis Philippe. She published influential texts on education and devised a pedagogical program for her royal charges that entailed time spent in the countryside tending gardens and making dairy products. All of her books were popular among the nobility and the bourgeoisie; the final volume of Les veillées du château sold out its initial print run of seven thousand copies in only eight days.32 The first tale in the collection, entitled “Delphine, or the Fortunate Cure,” tells the story of an aristocratic girl from Paris whose health and morals are compromised by the urban lifestyle she pursues. Consumptive and near death, she is taken by her mother to a famous doctor named Steinhaussen, MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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who brings her to his country house in Montmorency and forces her to live for eight months in his cow stable or vacherie. Steinhaussen insists that she will be healed if she breathes in the curative fumes of these animals and drinks nothing but their milk, and the story proves him right. Genlis may have modeled her fictional physician on a real-life German doctor named Seiffert, who treated the duc de Chartres’s family as well as Marie-Antoinette’s friend the princesse de Lamballe. Lamballe is even thought to have undergone the cow house treatment herself to combat her nervous condition.33 All of the authors described in these pages represented the countryside as a space of liberation but also of confinement and discipline, especially for elite women. The pastoral landscape was not just a place for the nobility to enact reform; it was a place to be reformed. Dairies played a vital role in this semantics by signaling an idealized femininity and a productive domesticity. Milk, the principal substance of la vie champêtre, added to this idealization by connoting innocence, nurture, health, and fertility. The discourse of pastoral regeneration permeated a range of literary genres in this period, from the Physiocratic tract to the georgic poem, and from the epistolary novel to the medical treatise. Written by aristocratic men and women as well as nonnoble philosophes and members of the public sphere, these texts intersected and fed off one another. They also inspired a range of architectural and landscape projects that we will now investigate. ARISTOCRATIC SENTIMENT A ND THE H AMEAU DE CHANTIllY

 In declaring that the Parisian elite and the court nobility could only save themselves by repairing to the countryside, physicians and social reformers did not take into account the losses to the aristocratic sense of self that would result from this retreat. For more than two centuries, the French aristocracy’s livelihood had depended upon their residing near the capital or the court and participating in performative rituals and acts of consumption that displayed their power and worthiness to the crown and each other.34 The number of participants in these rituals had expanded during the reign of Louis XIV, as the Sun King brought in more and more administrators to support his growing monarchical machine. By ennobling these individuals Louis XIV stirred resentment among the old nobility and the court, creating a climate of competition and backbiting that intensified over the course of eighteenth DAIRY QUEENS

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century. The ranks of the aristocracy, however, continued to expand — notably through the rise of wealthy court bankers and royal tax collectors, or fermiers généraux — and by the 1760s this group had developed into what John Shovlin has termed a “hybrid plutocratic elite.”35 Flush with cash and ambition, they were eager to continue the old traditions of aristocratic consumption and display. The newly noble in particular had little interest in retiring to the countryside once they had made their way to the top. Many reformers may have felt that the nobility’s entire raison d’être was bankrupt, and that its social role had become — or had always been — merely ornamental. Not surprisingly, elites themselves had a different take. They had faced challenges to their authority before, and for more than two hundred years they had chosen to meet these challenges in the form of ever more elaborate art and architectural displays. (The pastoral patronage of Catherine de’ Medici, that of Louis XIV, and that of Madame de Pompadour represent examples of this tendency.) As attacks to their livelihood increased after 1750, the monarchy and the nobility yet again took up this approach. This is not to say that their patronage was driven exclusively by defensive measures, or that they were not genuinely seduced by the rhetoric of rural living and pastoral reform. But they also wanted to uphold long-standing forms of power, self-expression, and sociability. And so they devised a solution: they brought the countryside to them, either on the grounds of their noble estates or in the city of Paris itself. Let us begin exploring this cultural and aesthetic development by examining two paintings and then by turning our attention to the Hameau de Chantilly, built in the 1770s. Not only does the Chantilly hamlet represent an important precursor of the queen’s Hameau, but it also enables us to see how noblemen (specifically the prince de Condé) responded to this new cultural imperative before we return to the patronage activities of royal and elite women. In 1750, as Louis XV and Pompadour were sponsoring the creation of the Nouvelle ménagerie de Versailles, Louis XV’s son, the dauphin, commissioned Jean-Baptiste Oudry to paint a picture known as The Farm (Figure 4.6). The dauphin dictated every last detail of the painting’s subject matter to Oudry, and even had the artist make a preparatory sketch while he watched.36 The result was an image of rural harmony and productivity similar to the georgic landscapes that Nicolò dell’Abate had painted around 1570, one of which likely hung in Catherine de Medici’s dairy at Fontainebleau (see Figure 1.11). At the far left of the painting, Oudry has included an idle bum who is being disdainfully observed by a woman spinning wool and another woman MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.6 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Farm, 1750. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

tending to her child. Behind this group is a rustic farm building that resembles the hamlets later erected at Versailles and Chantilly. By promoting rural labor and family values, the dauphin may have wanted to one-up the patronage activities of his father, and his father’s mistress, at the Nouvelle ménagerie. As a member of the conservative dévot faction at court, Louis XV’s son strongly objected to Pompadour’s influence. Oudry’s painting is also part of a long-standing tradition of encouraging royal heirs to promote works of pastoral art and architecture so as to signal the prosperity and promise of the next generation. In the following decade this tradition was taken up by the dauphin’s son, the future Louis XVI, who is shown symbolically plowing a field for France in a well-known engraving of 1769.37 In idealizing the countryside as a place of health, harmony, and bliss, Enlightenment reformers were asking their readers to envision themselves as figures in a pastoral poem, at least as they had defined it. The aristocracy practiced this exercise as well, both in painting and in poetry. At the Salon of 1757, Louis Joseph, prince de Condé (1736 – 1818), and his wife, née Charlotte de Rohan-Soubise, displayed a portrait of themselves as gardeners by FrançoisHubert Drouais (Figure 4.7). The painting evokes on some level the pastoral dream-world of Boucher, with whom Drouais had studied. At the same time, it departs from this idyllic mode by depicting a real-life married couple DAIRY QUEENS

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who are shown gardening rather than lounging in the fields. Drouais’s portrait depicts a royal husband and wife taking a bourgeois artistic convention (the double marital portrait) and making it their own, perhaps to celebrate their 1753 marriage or the birth of their son and heir in 1756. While the painting, with its strategically placed spade and watering can, abounds in the same kind of thinly veiled sexual symbolism that was characteristic of the pastoral genre, the couple’s sexuality is valorized because it produces children for the good of the realm. Albeit in a rococo guise, the image expresses the same values of noble commitment to the land and population growth that had been professed one year earlier in Mirabeau’s L’ami des hommes. At the Salon, Drouais’s brand of pastoral portraiture was not well received by Diderot, who compared his faces to “mask[s] made from the fine leather used in Strasbourg gloves.”38 The court nobility, however, viewed Drouais as a kindred spirit, and in the 1760s and 1770s he was favored by Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, and Marie-Antoinette. He remained the court’s favored pastoral portraitist until his death in 1775, after which Vigée Le Brun replaced him. As members of the royal house of Bourbon, the Condé family were no strangers to pastoral patronage. They were the owners of the most celebrated of all ancien régime pleasure dairies, the laiterie d’agrément at their Chantilly menagerie (see Figure 2.10). When the prince de Condé and his wife were married at Chantilly in 1753, a pastoral initiation ceremony was organized for her at the pleasure dairy, attended by family members and peasants dressed in white, who brought her farm animals and rustic implements and porcelain buckets filled with fresh milk. The ceremony, discussed in Chapter 2, was designed to proclaim not only her (hoped-for) fertility, but also that of the Bourbon line. After his wife died, the prince de Condé continued to host court fêtes and outings to his dairy and menagerie, and he ordered a new porcelain service for the dairy around 1765. In the early 1770s, he began a new project at Chantilly, an English-style garden to the east of the château.39 Responding to the current taste for a simpler, more “natural” aesthetic — even if that aesthetic was more laborious and expensive to produce — English gardens became popular in France around this time. Like other examples of the style, the prince’s jardin anglais had serpentine paths shaded by trees and shrubbery, broad lawns, clusters of rocks, and naturalistic water features. Around 1774, the prince commissioned Jean-François Le Roy to design a hamlet comprising seven half-timbered, thatched-roof cottages at the eastern end of his jardin anglais.40 These garden fabriques, which resembled the cottages built a decade later at Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau, may have been MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.7 François-Hubert Drouais, The Prince and Princesse de Condé Dressed as Gardeners, Salon of 1757. The Rothschild Collection (Rothschild Family Trust). Photo: Mike Fear © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor

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inspired by rural architecture in Normandy or the Ile-de France (or painted depictions thereof ). Surrounded by vegetable and fruit gardens, they were devoted to various functions: in addition to a dairy with a cow stable, there was a grain mill, a barn that served as a dining room, a kitchen, a billiard room, a reading room, and a salon. Five of the cottages survive today; the dairy has been destroyed (Figure 4.8). Like the preparation dairy at the Hameau de Versailles, the Hameau de Chantilly’s dairy was more utilitarian than ornate. Since the Condé family continued to use their sumptuous pleasure dairy at the nearby menagerie, they did not need to build a second one here. In deciding to construct a hamlet, the prince de Condé may have been inspired by the marquis de Girardin, whose English-style garden and hameau at Ermenonville were developed from the 1760s. Ermenonville was close to Chantilly, and the prince de Condé often visited Girardin there in the 1770s. Girardin, in turn, may have been influenced by Stanislas Leszczynski’s gardens at Lunéville, where he spent five years before settling at Ermenonville.41 Girardin probably admired the “Chartreuses,” a group of ramshackle cottages that served as temporary residences for Stanislas’s courtiers. He may have also been impressed by the agricultural experiments that the exiled Polish king was conducting at Lunéville, partly as a way to make himself useful by cultivating the image of a roi bienfaisant. The French nobility were engaging in similar demonstrations of aristocratic charity and bienfaisance at their country estates throughout the 1770s. These demonstrations often took the form of resuscitated feudal ceremonies like the “rose festival,” which Madame de Genlis had helped revive in the late 1760s. At a rose festival, prizes were awarded to chaste country girls, or rosières, and they represented a way for noble landowners to demonstrate their own virtue and natural right of rule. As Sarah Maza has shown, such paternalistic rituals were devised more for the aristocracy — as a “theatrical exercise in self-legitimation” — than for their servants.42 Aristocratic bienfaisance was also tied to the phenomenon of sensibility that took root among the elite at this time. Defined as a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings and an outpouring of sympathy for one’s fellow men, sensibility had a strong theatrical component that was easily assimilated within other traditions of aristocratic performance. This element of theatricality, however, sometimes fed concerns that such sentiments might be faked. In his 1782 novel Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos capitalized on these doubts in a scene where his reprobate libertine aristocrat, Valmont, goes to visit a destitute peasant hamlet and fakes a veneer of charitable concern just so he can appear worthy in the eyes of his latest conquest.43 MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.8 Jean-François Le Roy, the Hameau de Chantilly, c. 1774 – 1775. Photo: by author

Laclos may have been thinking about the faux-rustic hamlets that had been cropping up in aristocratic gardens in the past decade. These sentimental buildings had theatrical flourishes of their own: Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau, for instance, was decorated with painted plaster “cracks” to evoke a look of charming disrepair, and perhaps to imply (in cosmetic terms) the crown’s responsibility to intervene and assist those beneath them. Hamlets were also used for feudal ceremonies like rustic dances and banquets to which the owners’ servants were invited; the prince de Condé held several of these fêtes at his hameau in the 1770s and 1780s. During these banquets the prince and his family would sometimes cook meals for their servants, using a set of copper pots emblazoned with their noble crest. Recalling the sixteenth-century pastoral banquets and fêtes organized by Catherine de’ Medici, these rituals of inversion, in which royalty temporarily swapped places with peasants, were ultimately designed to reassert social hierarchy and aristocratic supremacy.44 Indeed the entire form of the hameau was structured as a ritual of inversion. This idea is conveyed in a plate from an album commemorating a DAIRY QUEENS

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June 1782 visit to Chantilly by the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia, who were traveling under the alias “comte and comtesse du Nord.” (Known as the Album du comte du Nord, the volume was published in 1784.) The plate depicts section views of two of the Hameau de Chantilly’s buildings, the salon and the dining room (Figure 4.9). In contrast to the salon’s dilapidated exterior, the interior (shown on the left) was ornamented with opulent chandeliers, pink boiserie paneling, and plush pink taffeta curtains and furniture. The interior of the dining room, on the right, featured trompe l’oeil painted walls that evoked a fanciful forest, with dining chairs carved from tree trunks and a dirt floor strewn with grass and flowers. Reserved for the prince and his elite guests, these interiors produced mixed emotions of surprise and recognition among those who entered them. Like the sumptuous interiors of MarieAntoinette’s pleasure dairy or the prince’s own laiterie d’agrément, they served as reminders of the nobility’s exclusive status and of the superior level of refinement and play that they felt was their birthright. Rather than diminishing the virtuous effects of the rustic buildings outside, they were designed to work in concert with them, providing their elite owners with the best of both worlds: simplicity and sophistication, nature and artifice. Academic theorists like Jacques-François Blondel, whose influential Cours d’architecture (1771 – 1777) was published while the Chantilly hamlet was being built, might have viewed these ornate pavilions as an egregious violation of the architectural doctrine of caractère, or character. Caractère stipulated that the decoration of a building’s façade should match the interior, and that it should also convey information about the building’s function and the status of the owner. Blondel dismissed buildings that did not uphold this rule as “licentious” and “dissembling.”45 Other critics might have seen the Chantilly hamlet’s exterior as a bastardization of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s concept of the primitive hut, as described in his polemical Essay on Architecture of 1753. Laugier had intended the hut to serve as a theoretical principle of architectural regeneration, based on a return to the origins of building. Elite patrons, however, transposed his concept into a fashionable garden fabrique, a development later decried by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: “Since the hut of Romulus, huts are still built; luxury perpetuates them, placing them in sumptuous gardens.”46 Aristocrats appropriated the model of the primitive hut to practice their own form of social regeneration, which they interpreted not as building from scratch but as adding new growth to an existing structure after something has been damaged or injured. It is important to reiterate, however, that pastoral building complexes like the Hameau de Chantilly were not simply used as a form of class masquerMARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.9 Plan, section, and elevation views of the salon and dining room at the Hameau de Chantilly from the Album du comte du Nord, 1784. Chantilly, Musée Condé. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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ade. They were architectural spaces set in natural environments that provided a physical and an emotional experience, in addition to an aesthetic one. The Chantilly hamlet served as a venue for important family occasions; for hosting royal or diplomatic visitors like the Russian Grand Duke and Duchess; or for entertaining friends by taking excursions to the site, often on foot, in the summer months.47 During these trips it was common to serve light, wholesome meals of vegetables, bread, and milk that came from the Hameau, adding to the overall sense of well-being that the natural setting instilled. A decade after the Chantilly hamlet was completed, the prince decided to build a working dairy farm on the grounds of his estate to offset the costs of maintaining his garden buildings, especially the menagerie. In a 1786 document concerning its creation, he stipulated that four of his best cows not be sent there but instead be reserved to produce milk for his family and guests at the menagerie’s laiterie d’agrément.48 The prince anticipated that this farm would showcase his commitment to new methods of agricultural improvement — whereas the Hameau and pleasure dairy would continue to project his identity as an aristocratic or feudal lord. The prince’s working dairy farm was one of several agricultural facilities built on royal estates in the 1780s that were later seized and expanded by the Revolutionary and Consulate governments. A report delivered to the Société d’agriculture du département de la Seine in May 1800 indicates an attempt made by agricultural societies in this era to revive the display function of these estates for a new audience of French citizens. The report concerns the proposed conservation of the royal menageries at Versailles and Rambouillet (an estate, discussed in Chapter 5, that Louis XVI had purchased in 1783). The authors, a “special commission of citizens” including the Revolutionary leader Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, argue that it was far more important for the government to conserve the menagerie at Versailles over the one at Rambouillet, since the former was closer to Paris and therefore the instructive agricultural tableau represented by the Versailles menagerie could more easily be seen by the city’s residents. Otherwise, they warned, “the political goal of the establishment would be lost; the example would no longer be under the eyes of the inhabitants of the Capital, and the example is everything when it’s a matter of destroying prejudices. In only seeking out pleasure, curious and rich men could no longer be taught; they would no longer be tempted to make établissements utiles.”49 Even more than their ancien régime predecessors, Revolutionary officials understood the potential of the nearby countryside to provide compelling political theater.

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R us in uRbe: URbAN PASTORAl IN PRE-REvOlUTIONAR Y PARIS

 Both the pleasure dairy and the hamlet at Chantilly spawned numerous imitators in addition to Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau de Versailles.50 After attending the fête held in her honor at the Chantilly hameau in 1782, the Grand Duchess of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, may have been inspired to make alterations to the garden complex and dairy that were then being created for her at the palace of Pavlovsk near Saint Petersburg. While still traveling, she wrote numerous letters home to her building director inquiring about the progress on her gardens, asking at one point when her dairy’s roof would be put in. The pleasure dairy at Pavlovsk, designed by the Scottish architect Charles Cameron in 1782, was completed in 1783. On the outside, it was a simple, rustic structure with broken stone walls and a thatched roof surrounded by lush woodlands. Inside was a supremely elegant, domed interior outfitted with white and gold milking stools.51 The dairy at Pavlovsk exemplifies the spread of this building type throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century, in Russia, England, Sweden, and present-day Germany and Belgium.52 It also illustrates the enormous appeal that pleasure dairies had for elite women, many of whom, like Maria Feodorovna, supervised or participated in their design and decoration. In the late 1770s, the prince de Condé commissioned Le Roy to design a dairy for his daughter, Louise-Adélaïde, at Vanves, their country retreat on the southern edge of Paris. At the time, she was residing at the Panthémont convent in what is today Paris’s seventh arrondissement; presumably she traveled to Vanves for brief, restorative sojourns. (Panthémont was later immortalized in the marquis de Sade’s Juliette [1797], a book that delights in exploiting the uneasy tension between virtue and vice.) As a fervent supporter of la vie champêtre, Louise-Adélaïde no doubt appreciated her dairy and may have used it for pastoral fêtes like one held in July 1773 that was later described in the Mémoires secrets. That month, she had hosted a party at Vanves for court ladies including Madame Elisabeth and the comtesse de Provence, during which she had decorated her château’s foyer to resemble a barn and had greeted her guests dressed as a dairymaid. According to the Mémoires secrets the royal women had spent the afternoon making dairy products.53 Chantilly inspired at least one other garden complex in the immediate vicinity of Paris that was built for the prince de Condé’s daughter-in-law, DAIRY QUEENS

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Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de Bourbon. In 1787, a few years after she had endured a high-profile separation from her husband, she acquired the hôtel de l’Elysée — formerly owned by Pompadour, and now the home of the French President — from Louis XVI. Before she even paid for the property, Bathilde hired Pierre-Adrien Pâris, an architect with the Menus-Plaisirs, to make embellishments to the hôtel and gardens. The most stunning addition was a jardin anglais containing a hamlet made of several thatched-roof cottages, including a dairy and a mill, that were visible from the Champs Elysées.54 Although we aren’t sure whether Pâris himself designed the Elysée hameau, he did design a fountain for these gardens. As depicted in a sketch by the artist, the fountain represented a monumental statue of a woman nursing a small infant (Figure 4.10). The female figure is seated atop a pedestal ornamented with a Medusa head, out of which a stream of water spills into a naturalistic grotto below. Pâris’s image proclaims the virtues and abundance of the duchess’s gardens to be not just natural but maternal, a symbolism that may have been enhanced by her dairy and its milk. Reminiscent of the image of the nursing mother at Ermenonville, the fountain’s statue also recalls female allegories of Nature, Charity, or Abundance that were used in garden fêtes throughout the ancien régime, and that were later co-opted for Revolutionary political festivals (see Figures 2.6, 5.18). Around the same time that Pâris designed this fountain, the sculptor Pierre Julien created a similar representation of a robust, breastfeeding woman for Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy at Rambouillet. The interior of the queen’s dairy also contained a large grotto encircling a statue of the mythological nymph Amalthea (see Figures 5.5, 5.8). The shared iconography of the Rambouillet dairy and the duchesse de Bourbon’s gardens at Elysée underscores the role that both environments were meant to play in promoting culturally valorized ideals of femininity and maternal care. The duchesse de Bourbon may have taken pains to display these values in the wake of her messy marital split, which resulted in her being separated from her children and branded a Medusa by fellow courtiers. Like her brother, the duc de Chartres, better known as “Philippe Égalité,” she later became a passionate supporter of the Revolutionary cause, and ended up donating her Parisian hôtel and grounds to the new government. Throughout the 1790s Revolutionary officials used Elysée’s gardens and hameau, which was known at that time as the “Hameau de Chantilly,” for regenerative public balls and other political fêtes.55 The duchesse de Bourbon was one of many devoted consumers of urban pastoral in pre-Revolutionary Paris. Though Paris had always evinced MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.10 Pierre-Adrien Pâris, grotto and fountain designed for the duchesse de Bourbon at the hôtel de l’Elysée in Paris, c. 1787. Photo: © Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon

traces of the countryside — particularly in the form of the hôtel particulier, which offered the “illusion of a rural setting for urban living” — beginning in the 1770s this exhibitionism intensified and spread among a more diverse range of patrons and building projects than ever before.56 The impulse cropped up in arenas both large and small, from vast pleasure gardens to new luxury fashions like the white muslin dress immortalized by Marie-Antoinette. The queen and her friends were described in Parisian journals attending parties with outrageously “rustic” hairdos like one that (as described in the June 1775 edition of the Correspondance secrète) resembled an English garden complete with “enameled prairies, silvery streams,” thatched huts, and flowers kept in vials to preserve freshness. Not to be left out, urban noblemen decked out their English-style riding coats with large, hand-painted buttons (boutons d’habit) depicting gardens they admired or had visited.57 The epicenter of the urban pastoral craze was Paris’s newly fashionable northwestern district, in what are today its eighth and ninth arrondissements. Elysée was in the vicinity, as was the Jardin de Monceau, laid out in the 1770s for the duc de Chartres. Since the Middle Ages, this part of the city, which DAIRY QUEENS

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encompassed the agricultural villages of Porcherons and Roule, had been a popular place of country retreat for the clergy, but in the pre-Revolutionary period the area underwent rapid urban growth that took the form of new roads and residences for a new clientele: bankers, artists, actresses, the court nobility, and other members of the plutocratic elite.58 A diverse mix of stillundeveloped pasture lands, elegant hôtels, and fluctuating real estate ventures, the district was an ideal venue for the pleasure dairy and other forms of pastoral architecture and festival to flourish. Among the first of the newcomers was the court financier SimonCharles Boutin, who served as treasurer of the Royal Navy. He acquired land in the area in 1768 and immediately began creating a pleasure garden named Tivoli that was modeled on Vauxhall in London.59 After Tivoli was completed, he used the property to stage lavish fêtes champêtres for his rich friends and business associates, to whom he issued tickets. A significant portion of Tivoli was devoted to bucolic pursuits; the garden featured a dairy as well as a cow stable and a menagerie. Possibly designed by Jacques-Denis Antoine, the dairy’s façade was done in a fashionable néo-grec style. Inside the building was a circular room furnished with a marble table and a fountain that mimicked the design of the pleasure dairy at Chantilly. Around 1776, the Tivoli dairy was represented next to the one at Chantilly in the first volume of Georges Le Rouge’s Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode (1776 – 1789), a garden pattern book that was targeted at both the nobility and the aspirant bourgeoisie (see Figure I.5). By presenting the two dairies as roughly equal commodities, Le Rouge undercut the Chantilly dairy’s rich historic symbolism by suggesting that anyone could acquire it — if they had the funds. Maria Feodorovna’s friend, the Baroness d’Oberkirch, made a similar comment after the two women visited M. Boutin’s dairy in 1782 and drank milk from golden vessels. “It is only a king or financier,” she reported, “who could indulge such expensive fancies.”60 Boutin’s dairy, like the rest of the urban pleasure dairies described in this chapter, does not survive. The building’s néo-grec façade may have loosely resembled that of a neoclassical dairy designed by Hubert Robert around 1790 for the immensely wealthy court banker Jean-Joseph de Laborde. Now partially in ruins (though the façade is extant), the dairy was installed in Laborde’s magnificent gardens at Méréville, his country house situated several miles south of Paris (Figure 4.11). Méréville was not Laborde’s first foray into theatrical displays of la vie champêtre. In 1769, he had commissioned JeanBaptiste Greuze to rework a drawing entitled The Beloved Mother into a family portrait depicting the urbane banker as a simple country bumpkin.61 In MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.11 Hubert Robert, façade of Jean-Joseph de Laborde’s pleasure dairy at Méréville, c. 1790. Photo: by author

Greuze’s painting Laborde is shown barging into a humble farmhouse interior to greet his wife, who is seated in the far corner of the room being smothered by the loving embraces of their children — whose numbers exceeded that of the couple’s actual progeny at the time. The interior of the dairy at Méréville was similarly designed to extol familial and maternal values. In the center of the main room was a neoclassical statue of a mother breastfeeding her infant by Julien surrounded by a grotto. Strikingly akin to the design of the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet (and created by the same artists), the interior of the Méréville dairy was still being worked on in 1794 when the Revolutionary government arrested and executed Laborde.62 Like other financiers, who were collectively among the most visible patrons of pastoral art and architecture in the pre-Revolutionary period, Laborde may have hoped that these efforts would place him in a more virtuous light, by countering increasingly hostile claims that his profession was parasitic and dissolute. The journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, for instance, had described the typical financier in his Tableau de Paris (1781 – 1788) as “a Tapeworm that enervates the body politic.”63 But in the end, these pastoral displays had little effect. In their exorbitant cost and volatile symbolDAIRY QUEENS

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ism, they may have even contributed to Laborde’s downfall, just as they did to his aristocratic colleagues who met an equal fate on the guillotine scaffold. Yet another court financier, Claude Baudard de Saint-James, created his own extravagant country retreat near Paris beginning in late 1770s. Known as the “Folie St. James,” a name that alluded to the insane amount of funds that had gone into its creation (folie can mean “madness”), Baudard de SaintJames’s retreat was in the proto-suburban community of Neuilly west of the city. The gardens were designed by François-Joseph Bélanger, who had recently built a pleasure pavilion nearby named Bagatelle for Marie-Antoinette’s brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois. With the dual aim of outspending his royal neighbor and presenting himself as an Enlightened seigneur, Baudard de Saint-James extended the property and, with the help of Bélanger, added a large vegetable garden and innovative iron and glass hothouses to the grounds, along with a neoclassical temple inside an enormous grotto for which the estate became famous.64 Underneath this grotto — and accessed via a Chinese-style kiosk and a moss-covered dirt tunnel — was a subterranean room that Luc-Vincent Thiéry described as a “gothic dairy” in a travel guide from 1787.65 An elevation view of the dairy, denoted here as a “salle fraîche,” appears in the top left corner of an engraving from J.-C. Krafft’s Plans, coupes, élévations des plus belles maisons et des hôtels construits à Paris et dans les environs of c. 1802 (Figure 4.12). The room’s domed interior had rough, pebble-dashed walls, pointed archways, columns, and a skylight that allowed light to flood the cool, dark space. In its unusual design, placement, and dark, damp approach, the dairy at the Folie St. James represented a different take on architectural and social regeneration by reenacting a return to the womb. In 1786, Vigée Le Brun painted a portrait of Baudard de Saint-James’s daughter, Marguerite, dressed in a simple but elegant peasant costume and standing half inside a rustic, primitive-looking interior. She leans against a stone slab that appears to be a well, although the rusticated wall behind her, along with her terracotta jug and “milkmaid” garb, might also reference the laiterie that her father had built around the same time. Certainly the image reinforces, while also glamorizing, the cultural ideal of natural, industrious femininity that dairies were thought to promote (Figure 4.13). Marguerite was married to the marquis de Puységur, an associate of the celebrity physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who conducted séances for the Parisian elite in the 1780s. With its connotations of healing and rebirth, the dairy at the Folie St. James may have provided an ideal venue for these occult sessions, or perhaps for Masonic rituals, given that Baudard de Saint-James, along with many MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.12 J.-C. Krafft, view of the Chinese-style kiosk and underground dairy at the Folie St. James from Plans, coupes, élévations des plus belles maisons et hôtels construits à Paris et dans les environs (c. 1802). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

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Figure 4.13 Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Marguerite Baudard de Saint-James, marquise de Puységur, 1786. The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame

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dairy patrons in this era, was a Freemason. Other laiteries may have served this function as well, notably a dairy designed before 1785 by Ledoux for the treasury official Préaudeau de Chemilly at his château de Bourneville outside of Paris. Ledoux’s dairy stood at the entrance to the Bourneville gardens and was situated inside a structure shaped like a Masonic column.66 This new crop of pleasure dairies built in or adjacent to Paris attracted a great deal more attention than the royal or courtly laiteries of previous eras. Illustrated and discussed in pattern books, journals, and travel guides, they were also seen by a broader cross-section of the Parisian public, who visited them through ticketed admission or simply encountered them while walking down the street. As members of this public became more aware of economic crises that had befallen the countryside, their anger at what they perceived to be the hypocrisy embedded in these buildings escalated. To give one example, in November 1785 the author of the Mémoires secrets described his recent trip to the royal gardens of Luxembourg, which belonged to Louis XVI’s brother, the comte de Provence. Over the past few years the comte had tried to develop these gardens as a real estate venture, but he had been prevented from doing so by church officials who owned the neighboring land. Eventually he had given up and had allowed his mistress, Madame de Balbi, to take over the gardens. The comte de Provence’s architect, Jean-François Chalgrin, had designed a hamlet for Balbi on the grounds with a white marble pleasure dairy. As the journal’s author came upon one of these “tasteful pavilions” in the “ruined” Luxembourg landscape, he commented regretfully on the wasted opportunity that these gardens represented, since the pavilion was not a sincere attempt at royal regeneration but merely a private folly for Balbi herself.67 Louis de Carmontelle, a prolific garden designer, author, and impresario who served as the director of court entertainments for the duc de Chartres, playfully satirized the cultural anxiety surrounding such “frivolous” displays of la vie champêtre in a short play or proverb that he likely wrote in the 1770s. Entitled La rosière, the play centers on a bored Parisian aristocrat named Madame de Bréville, who wants to organize a rose festival for herself and her friends at her nearby county retreat. Since her husband refuses to leave the city, she plots with her doctor to fake an attack of feminine nerves that can only be “cured” by time spent in the country and a restrictive milk diet. Pace Rousseau, who claimed that women had a natural taste for milk in La nouvelle Héloïse, Madame confesses to a female friend that she secretly hates the stuff and plans to pawn it off on her dogs once she arrives at her protosuburban retreat.68 Unbeknownst to Madame, however, her husband is wise DAIRY QUEENS

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to her scheme and decides to play a joke on her by telling her that she will convalesce not at their house near Paris but rather at their rural château in the far-flung provinces. Horrified at the thought of being “banished to the other side of the world,” she begins to get hysterical for real until her husband admits his trick and allows her to stage her rose festival on the outskirts of the city. The arch, lightly mocking tone of Carmontelle’s proverb is echoed in his gouache drawing of 1782 entitled “The Female Farmers,” or “Les fermières” (Figure 4.14). One of hundreds of rapidly sketched portraits that Carmontelle made of high-society Parisians, it depicts two noblewomen, Madame de la Houze and Mademoiselle de Longueil, on the grounds of an unidentified pastoral retreat preparing to drink from a tub of fresh milk.69 While the two women are somewhat reminiscent of the pair of milk-drinking urbanites represented by Wille (see Figure 4.5), Carmontelle makes no attempt to sentimentalize their actions or even locate them in a rural setting, apart from the notational cows in the background. On the contrary, Carmontelle’s setting is demonstrably mondain, as are the countrified costumes of his elegant female ciphers, their too-pink cheeks, and the flamboyant headdress of the woman on the right, which appears to be sprouting a garden of its own. In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag located the origins of the “camp” sensibility in eighteenth-century aesthetic forms like artificial ruins and urban pleasure gardens. Defining camp as a “love of the unnatural” and a “victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics over morality,’” Sontag argued that the point of camp was to “dethrone the serious,” or “[convert] the serious into the frivolous.”70 Carmontelle’s oeuvre seems to revel in camp, and to make from it something new and distinct from the mondain aristocratic sensibility of the past. Like the dairy patrons discussed in this chapter, Carmontelle also appropriates the language of pastoral reform for his own use. Yet in doing so, he ends up subverting not only its purifying claims but also the sincere efforts of royal women like Marie-Antoinette and the duchesse de Bourbon to adopt this reformist rhetoric to stage their own regeneration. Carmontelle dismissed such efforts as fruitless or naïve in a short treatise that accompanied engravings he made of the gardens at Monceau, which he designed for the duc de Chartres in the 1770s. He writes: We would not know how to amuse ourselves with the cares of a farm; it is a multiplicity of occupations, which affords no leisure, and those details of rural life agree badly with our tastes for society, pleasures and dissipation; one likes the description more than the practice. Do we MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.14 Louis de Carmontelle, “The Female Farmers” (Madame de la Houze and Mademoiselle de Longueil), c. 1782. Chantilly, Musée Condé. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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really believe that our Ladies, most of whom confine themselves to a Salon with shutters firmly closed, would find, when the sun comes out, charms to occupy them all day long — farm labors like directing the crops or the grape harvest, and watching animals being cared for? All of this seems charming [to these women] in Verse or in Painting, and it cannot be otherwise; for they only know rural inhabitants in an agreeable form, and the real ones resemble so little the shepherds of L’Astrée, Fontenelle, Boucher, or the Opéra, that they would easily destroy the taste that these Frenchwomen believe they have for la vie purement champêtre.71 At the Monceau garden, where many of his proverbs were staged, Carmontelle took his affection for the camp aesthetic one step further. Designed in the 1770s near Paris’s fashionable northwest district, Monceau was used by the duke and his family for brief country jaunts when they were staying at the Palais Royal, their nearby urban residence. In his treatise, Carmontelle described how he wanted to make Monceau resemble not nature but “changing scenes in an opera,” a “landscape of illusions” that would bring together “all times and all places.”72 One of the engravings gives a sense of the garden’s cosmopolitan character and overt theatricality (Figure 4.15). In the foreground, to the right of a Turkish shepherd and a flock of goats and sheep, is a well-dressed couple who gaze out over a faux-crumbling feudal château, a Dutch windmill, an Egyptian obelisk, and a folly of ruined columns, all situated within rolling hills and a meandering stream. Also at Monceau (though not visible in the image) was a rustic model farm and, behind the windmill shown in the engraving, a thatched dairy with a tiled roof. Building records indicate that the dairy’s main room was outfitted with a white marble table, marble shelves, and a prodigious amount of ivory porcelain, including gilt-handled milk pails and eight porcelain butter pails.73 Hidden below this ornate showroom was a basement workroom where the dairying was done. In her memoirs, Madame de Genlis (who, like Carmontelle, was an employee of the duc de Chartres) claims that she hired a German gardener named Ettinghausen and a milkmaid named Rose to live and work in the Monceau dairy. She recounts how the couple fell in love and created a charming spectacle of domestic bliss, inspiring all those who came to the gardens to witness it.74 Whereas Genlis’s literary output is filled with testimonials of how gardens and the countryside could incite virtue, Carmontelle’s work aims at the heart of this moralizing rhetoric — shared by middle class reformers MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.15 Louis de Carmontelle, view of the Watermill and Bridge, from Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris (1779). Typ 715.79.260 PF, Houghton Library, Harvard University

and their female aristocratic adherents — and sends it up from within. He even appears to undermine the self-legitimating efforts of the duc de Chartres to use the Monceau gardens to reassert his family’s feudal ancestry (in the form of its “ruined” château), or to detract attention from the real estate activities he was pursuing nearby, which resulted in the destruction of several real working farms and gardens.75 Carmontelle’s abnegation of these attempts again conforms to the logic of camp as Sontag has defined it: Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.76 Let us now return to Marie-Antoinette and explore the impact of these social, cultural, and aesthetic developments on the design and reception of Petit Trianon and the Hameau. DAIRY QUEENS

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NATURAl AND UNNAT URAl WOMEN AT PETIT TRI ANON

 When Marie-Antoinette was given Petit Trianon in 1774, nearly everyone thought it was a good idea at first. Even her mother, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, who disapproved of many of her daughter’s actions at the French court, wrote to her that June, “You have decided so well, with the permission of the king, in the choice of your house.” Maria Theresa followed up this praise, however, with her customary caution, telling her daughter to use her retreat wisely; to not spend too much money embellishing it; and to avoid indulging her tendencies for “laziness and dissipation, the sole enemy that you have to fear.”77 As Maria Theresa knew well, these were far from her daughter’s only enemies. Even before she was crowned queen, Marie-Antoinette faced attacks from all sides: from courtiers, family members, and the court of public opinion, which, as Keith Michael Baker has shown, became a significant factor in French political life in the 1770s.78 Many of these attacks involved issues that other royal women had struggled with in previous eras, including their foreignness and their difficulties with fertility. In Marie-Antoinette’s case, she was native to France’s bitter rival, Austria, and she did not give birth to a child until 1778 (a full eight years after she had arrived at court) or a dauphin until 1781. As her predecessors had done before her, Marie-Antoinette sought to mitigate these attacks partly by creating a pastoral environment that expressed her rootedness in the royal landscape and emphasized a fertility of the land if not the body. Like many of her contemporaries, Marie-Antoinette chose to create a naturalistic English-style garden next to Petit Trianon rather than the rigidly formal jardin français for which the Versailles gardens were known. Richard Mique, who served as Intendant et controleur général des bâtiments de la reine, laid out this garden for her beginning in 1776. (Mique had some experience in this area since, prior to coming to Versailles, he had assisted in the design of Stanislas’s garden complex at Lunéville.) Marie-Antoinette meticulously monitored every aspect of the garden’s creation; Mique had to construct fourteen different maquettes of her grotto, for example, before she decided on a design.79 The result was an extensive jardin anglais with abundant trees and shrubs, serpentine pathways, and streams that appear on a plan of Petit Trianon drawn up by Mique between 1783 and 1786 (Figure 4.16). MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.16 Richard Mique, plan of Petit Trianon with the jardin anglais and the Hameau, 1783 – 1786. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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Mique’s plan indicates that the jardin anglais was positioned between the main residence — shown at the bottom left with the Nouvelle ménagerie’s dairy and French pavilion next to it — and the Hameau at the right. The Hameau appears as a group of small cottages clustered around a large, amoebashaped lake. The Hameau’s pleasure dairy and preparation dairy, which were right next to each other, are shown farther to the left than the other buildings, with the pleasure dairy nestled at the edge of the lake (see Figure I.1). Beyond these two structures are the Hameau’s agricultural fields, and above them the farm, comprising two L-shaped structures with an entrance off the Avenue de Cheverloup. Before Marie-Antoinette developed her Hameau, she utilized her gardens for a variety of activities, from acclimatizing new and exotic species of trees to hosting lavish fêtes champêtres. For a party held in September 1777, royal designers created for her a full-scale mock-up of a village fair, where she invited Parisian shopkeepers to set up booths and served her own lemonade at a tavern run by court ladies. Such performances were reminiscent of the rustic fashions that the queen was sporting at the time like the “pouf à la jardinière,” a fancy headdress that mimicked a vegetable garden complete with “an artichoke, a carrot, some radishes, and a head of cabbage.”80 Promoting fashion was another way that elite women could be “productive,” although by thrusting them into the public arena it could also invite censure. When Marie-Antoinette finally became pregnant in 1778, she hosted another fête champêtre in her gardens to celebrate her success. Described in the June 1778 edition of the Correspondance secrète, this event was more toned down than her previous parties and emphasized allegorical displays of fecundity, bienfaisance, and maternal tenderness.81 It anticipated themes that she would later highlight at the Hameau. Like Madame de Pompadour, Marie-Antoinette favored these gardens for their restorative health benefits and easy access to milk. When she had an attack of the measles in 1779 and had to be sequestered from the king, she spent her first lengthy sojourn at Petit Trianon, taking walks in the gardens and maintaining a strict diet of ass’s milk. She also consumed dairy products there for pleasure; in July 1777, the Correspondance secrète reported that while on a trip to Trianon the queen ate so much “fromage à la glace” that she gave herself a stomachache.82 As noted earlier, before she built her own dairies at the Hameau, Marie-Antoinette obtained fresh milk from the dairy next to Petit Trianon that had been built for Pompadour in the late 1740s (see Figures 3.3, 3.5, and 3.6).

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Marie-Antoinette liked to entertain close female friends at Petit Trianon. In September 1775, the Mémoires secrets reported that she “only receives there certain ladies in her suite, without any men.” In referring to the site as “Petit Trianon or Petit Vienna,” the journal’s author implied that some readers had already begun to perceive these gardens as foreign, even hostile. The queen’s proclivity for bringing along “only two or three women” was repeated in a 1777 letter to Maria Theresa from the Austrian ambassador, Mercy-Argenteau, who closely monitored Marie-Antoinette’s every move at Versailles and reported back to the Empress.83 This habit raised a red flag from the press and from Marie-Antoinette’s mother, who worried that her daughter’s behavior prevented her from performing her wifely duties and producing an heir. Such anxieties were exacerbated by the fact that Louis XVI was only allowed to visit Petit Trianon by invitation and never spent the night, whereas after 1779 the queen often stayed there for a week or more. Shockingly for some, Marie-Antoinette also issued her own regulations at Petit Trianon that were pointedly “By Order of the Queen,” and she kept her gardens locked, unlike the rest of the palace, which was “open to all members of the public.”84 For her part, at least in the first decade of her reign, Marie-Antoinette did not seem to have viewed any of this as a problem. She likely considered Petit Trianon to be the embodiment of Julie’s garden retreat as described by Rousseau, which was also “always carefully locked” and managed solely under the direction of its mistress.85 Moreover, Petit Trianon’s female community was a close reflection of Julie’s Gynaeceum, where the women and children were kept apart from the men as nature intended. (The Gynaeceum was also where Julie’s dairy was located.) Marie-Antoinette’s favorite female guests included her sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, as well as the princesse de Lamballe, Yolande de Polignac, and Polignac’s daughter, the duchesse de Guiche. The queen ensured that these women would remain in her company by giving them top positions in her household; Polignac, to the surprise and disdain of many courtiers, was appointed royal governess in 1782.86 In carrying out this practice, Marie-Antoinette defied the standard pecking order at Versailles, in which the highest-ranking nobility were given the most coveted positions. Instead, she followed the new rule of sensibility, whereby individuals were united through mutual affection rather than social convention. Marie-Antoinette and her friends staged plays at the theater that Mique constructed for her near the jardin anglais in 1778 – 1780. She had a special fondness for pastoral operettas and sentimental comedies, and in the early 1780s she organized revivals of Rousseau’s The Village Soothsayer (1752), MichelDAIRY QUEENS

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Jean Sedaine’s The King and the Farmer (1762), and Louis Anseaume’s The Two Hunters and the Milkmaid (1763). For this last production she played the title role of the milkmaid, Perrette, which entailed her dressing up in peasant garb and, at one point, singing out this mildly provocative verse: “Here she is, the little milkmaid, who wants to buy her milk?” 87 The Petit Trianon circle also enjoyed posing for champêtre portraits by Marie-Antoinette’s favorite painter, Vigée Le Brun, which capture the intimate character of her gardens.88 These portraits depict the queen, her friends, and Vigée Le Brun herself dressed in simple, country attire, with loose, unpowdered hair and minimal makeup. All of the images are similar to one another, and they all seek to establish a close relationship with the viewer, specifically through eyes and hand gestures, the sitters’ proximity to the picture plane, and the absence of other elements within the frame. One of the most compelling examples is the artist’s sensitive pastel rendering of the duchesse de Guiche from 1784 (Figure 4.17).89 Here the effect of intimacy is enhanced by the oval shape and Vigée Le Brun’s masterful use of the pastel medium, which conjures soft, chalky highlights, delicate strokes, and varied textures that invite the viewer to come closer and experience its pleasures. Wearing a slightly déshabillé milkmaid’s costume and fingering a transparent scarf, Polignac’s daughter tilts her head, leans forward, and gazes at the viewer as if about to reveal a secret. While encapsulating the mood (and la mode) of Petit Trianon, the duchess’s portrait also conveys some of the precariousness of the pastoral genre. Read one way, she evokes the coquettish Perrette; read another, she is a sensible young woman awakening to the charms of the Rousseauian worldview. While Vigée Le Brun to some extent plays with this tension, for the most part she seems to emphasize virtue and innocence over worldly experience. As such, her portrait is a rejoinder to comparable but far more sexually provocative images like Greuze’s The Milkmaid of c. 1780 – 1784.90 Even so, some viewers still read sex into Vigée Le Brun’s Petit Trianon portraits, especially the infamous portrait of Marie-Antoinette — sometimes referred to as the queen’s “milkmaid” portrait, or her portrait en chemise — that was shown at the Salon of 1783 (Figure 4.18). Vigée Le Brun depicts MarieAntoinette alone in an almost bare interior, dressed in an unstructured white gown and holding up a rose that she has presumably just plucked from her garden. Nothing in the portrait denotes the sitter’s royal status — unlike other images of ancien régime queens, as Mary Sheriff has noted, there is no reference to the king — and nothing separates the viewer from her close-up bodily presence and direct gaze. Marie-Antoinette loved this portrait and ordered MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.17 Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of the Duchesse de Guiche, 1784. Private Collection

copies of it for her female relatives, describing it in a 1786 letter as the most “resembling” of all the images of her that had been made.91 At the Salon it hung next to paintings of other royal and elite women dressed in similarly rustic attire, including the comtesse de Provence. Marie-Antoinette may have imagined that her portrait would be received favorably at the Salon — or, at least, she could not have anticipated the outcry that ensued. After all, she had been praised before for wearing DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 4.18 Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Marie-Antoinette “en chemise,” 1783. Photo: © Hessische Hausstiftung, Germany

similarly simple outfits, and the image represented her as the epitome of the new natural woman, freed of corsets and makeup and preoccupied with domestic duties like gardening and flower arranging.92 Salon audiences, however, vehemently rejected the picture, and Vigée Le Brun was forced to replace it with another one that depicted the queen in formal court dress. One of the public’s chief complaints about the portrait, according to the Mémoires secrets, was that it depicted “distinguished persons wearing garments reserved MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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for the intimacy of the palace” — suggesting that the natural woman persona was better donned in private, or perhaps not at all for royal women who were never truly free from public scrutiny.93 An even more controversial issue regarding the image was that it seemed so obviously the queen’s choice to present herself in this way; as the Mémoires secrets surmised, surely it was her decision, and not Vigée Le Brun’s, to have the portrait exhibited at the Salon. Like the garden retreat to which it was related, Marie-Antoinette’s image proclaimed an independence that French queens were not supposed to have, given the strictures of the Salic law (which prevented them from ruling alone) and the monarchy’s predominantly patriarchal image. Todd Larkin has argued that, in addition to these concerns, the Salon public would have connected Marie-Antoinette’s portrait to similar images of royal mistresses, like Pompadour or Madame du Barry, that were intended for more private contexts (see Figure 3.14).94 The connection would not have been a stretch, since Petit Trianon was well known for having been created or inhabited by these women. Making this association even more problematic was the fact that Louis XVI did not take a mistress, an important royal duty in that it prevented the queen, whose chief responsibility was to bear children, from wielding too much power. Rumored to have bewitched her husband sexually, Marie-Antoinette was simultaneously accused of ignoring him in favor of engaging in wanton, unproductive sex acts with her female friends at Petit Trianon. Although the pornographic pamphlets published against MarieAntoinette had appeared as early as 1774, they paradoxically intensified after she gave birth to a dauphin in 1781. Many of these libels originated from abroad but circulated throughout France despite the crown’s efforts to stop them: 534 copies of one of them, for example, were destroyed at the Bastille in 1783.95 Seizing on the instability of the pastoral mode, these pamphlets subverted her efforts to fashion her gardens as virtuous, productive, and maternal. One of them, The Royal Dildo (1789; cited in the introduction to this chapter) described an affair between a thinly veiled Marie-Antoinette and Polignac or Lamballe, and featured a metaphor about the queen’s vagina as a dried-out “rose in the middle of a garden bed” that needed “watering.” To be sure, such rumors were aggravated by Marie-Antoinette’s attempts to keep unwanted visitors out of her gardens and to subvert the system of courtly (and patriarchal) surveillance. But they were also worsened by her attempts to offer up her “natural” femininity to public view. Reports about the high cost of her gardens were a significant factor in the queen’s declining reputation. Even Marie-Antoinette herself would later DAIRY QUEENS

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admit, during her Revolutionary trial when she was repeatedly questioned about Petit Trianon, that the expenditure of royal funds was “perhaps more than I would have desired.”96 However, it is important to remember that although they were considerable, these funds did not exceed or even match what previous monarchs had spent on their gardens, and they were comparable to or less than what other royal family members were spending at the time. Another negative factor was her foreignness, which extended not only to Petit Trianon — whose gardens were variously labeled English, Swiss, Viennese, Chinese, and German — but also to her fashion choices.97 She was accused of being unpatriotic, of attempting to ruin the state financially, and of enervating and effeminizing the crown. These charges especially alarmed Louis XVI’s building minister and arts administrator, the comte d’Angiviller. As Sheriff has shown, d’Angiviller had hoped to use the Salon of 1783 to launch a new campaign of didactic, state-sponsored history painting and to reassert masculine royal values in projects like his Grands hommes series.98 His efforts were impeded, however, by the fact that women artists and women subjects like Marie-Antoinette garnered the lion’s share of attention at that year’s Salon. The frustration that d’Angiviller experienced at the Salon matched the trouble that he was having in the Versailles gardens, which were also supposed to be under his jurisdiction. Soon after Louis XVI had been crowned king, d’Angiviller had announced an extensive project to replant the palace’s formal gardens along the fabled lines set by Le Nôtre, thereby reaffirming the power and the glory of the French monarchy. Here again, however, he was stymied by Marie-Antoinette, whose “private” gardens received a great deal more public attention.99 Furthermore, the queen resisted his attempts to regulate the development of Petit Trianon by creating her own separate building department headed up by Mique. This infuriated d’Angiviller, who sparred with Mique in the late 1770s over whether the queen’s gardens should be brought back under his office or whether they would remain with the bâtiments de la reine. Mique won the battle and, for the next decade, conveniently neglected to inform d’Angiviller about his activities at Petit Trianon, resulting in a series of written reprimands. In October 1782, d’Angiviller chastised Mique for laying out a fruit and vegetable garden without his permission.100 D’Angiviller’s authority was further threatened in May 1784, when Louis XVI wrote to ask him to honor the “wishes of the Queen” by locking the gates to one of the palace gardens (the jardin du Grande Maître) so that it could be reserved for the royal children. Louis XVI informed d’Angiviller that the MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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queen felt these gardens had “become too public.”101 D’Angiviller must have feared that Marie-Antoinette’s taste and desires would eventually fill every square foot of Versailles, as they already seemed to have done at the Salon. As I argue in the next chapter, this anxiety eventually led d’Angiviller to shift attention to the royal estate at Rambouillet, where he set out to accomplish what he was unable to do at Versailles, both aesthetically and politically.

TH E MIlkMAID QUEEN OF vERSAIllES

 Construction on Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau began the same year that her portrait en chemise had its disastrous Salon debut. Like Vigée Le Brun’s picture, the Hameau exuded feminine authority and refined simplicity. While the queen’s retreat incorporated elements from the hamlets and gardens of Chantilly and Ermenonville — like the Marlborough Tower attached to the pleasure dairy, which resembled Ermenonville’s Tour Gabrielle — it departed from them as well. The interiors of the Hameau’s cottages, even the pleasure dairy, were less ornate than the ones at Chantilly. Instead of the prince de Condé’s salon, Marie-Antoinette had a boudoir, a space associated with women, privacy, and intimacy.102 The Hameau’s exuberant femininity extended to the more than one thousand blue and white faience flowerpots, emblazoned with the queen’s monogram, that lined the pathways and stairs. Above all it was embodied in her dairies. Given Marie-Antoinette’s legendary status as the milkmaid queen, it is perhaps surprising to learn that dairies were not originally part of the Hameau’s site plan. They were only added there in 1785, the year that MarieAntoinette began to emphasize her maternal identity to an even greater extent than she had before. She did this in part with the help of male “image consultants” like the king of Sweden, who commissioned a portrait of her promenading with her children at Petit Trianon, and d’Angiviller, who in September 1785 asked Vigée Le Brun to paint a portrait of the queen inside the palace flanked by her royal brood, perhaps as a corrective to Marie-Antoinette’s solo representation at the Salon two years earlier (see Figure 5.14). In 1785 the queen told Rose Bertin that she wanted to reduce her fashion expenses, and she continued to cut costs significantly, as much as 900,000 livres in 1787.103 That year she also stopped staging expensive plays at her Petit Trianon theater and began practicing a more domesticated form of la vie champêtre that centered on the Hameau. DAIRY QUEENS

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In addition to the cottages, Mique designed a small farm for the Hameau that was built between 1784 and 1787. The farm was later destroyed, but a partial reconstruction indicates that the buildings had the same look as the cottages, with pebble-dashed walls, half-timbering, and thatched roofs (Figure 4.19). The complex housed the queen’s head farmer, Valy Bussard, and his family, as well as the Swiss cows and other animals that were procured for the site. There was also a barn and a room for making cheese. MarieAntoinette exchanged numerous letters with Bussard over the purchase of the animals, indicating that she was interested in their productive capacities and in their appearance. For example, in reference to a billy goat that Bussard acquired for the Hameau in 1786 to replace another goat that was found to be sterile, the queen stipulated that the animal be “white” and “not mean.”104 After the farm was completed, the barn at the Hameau proper was no longer needed, and in 1787 royal designers began converting it into a rustic dance hall. As previously noted, this hall may have been designed to provide a venue for the dances that Marie-Antoinette organized for her servants elsewhere in the gardens as a demonstration of bienfaisance. As an additional charitable gesture she fed her workers milk when they were sick, especially whey or petit lait, a byproduct of the dairying process.105 Marie-Antoinette’s estate management activities echo those of Catherine de’ Medici in the sixteenth century. Both women took pains to associate their identity as mothers, caretakers, and fertile providers with the program and symbolism of their farms. Though neither queen seems to have done any of the farm labor on her own, both of them enjoyed and took credit for the prosperity and efficiency of their pastoral retreats.106 The milk products that Bussard and his assistants made at the Hameau were still referred to as the crèmes de la Reine, and the entire complex was viewed as an extension of her body, just as the state was seen as an extension of the body of the king. Perhaps this was the Hameau’s true threat: that it introduced a powerful, selfgoverning female body into the royal landscape — where women were not supposed to take center stage — and suggested that women could be their own mistresses without the intervention of their husbands, advisors, relatives, or physicians. Indeed, the entire palace complex at Versailles was becoming something of an architectural matriarchy in this period. While Louis XVI was off hunting in the forests of Rambouillet, royal women were busy constructing pastoral retreats that encircled the palace on all sides. Not far from Petit Trianon, the Mesdames were refurbishing Pompadour’s hermitage for their use, and they also hired Mique to design a hamlet for them at Bellevue.107 MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.19 Richard Mique, the farm at the Hameau de Versailles, 1784 – 1787 (partial reconstruction). Photo: by author

To the left of the main entrance at Versailles was an expansive garden complex built for the comte de Provence’s mistress, Madame de Balbi, and on the opposite side of the road leading up to the palace was another garden retreat created for his wife by Chalgrin. Built around 1784 in the rural community of Montreuil, the comtesse de Provence’s retreat featured a neoclassical music pavilion (which survives today) and a rustic hamlet with eleven cottages and a marble pleasure dairy.108 These cottages were situated in an English garden next to a large plot of land for growing fruits and vegetables, which the comtesse would bring back to the palace for courtiers to consume. Childless and ignored at court and by her husband, she used her pastoral retreat as an escape and an alternative means to make herself useful, within a royal economy of production in which not having children invited humiliation and ridicule. Also at Montreuil was a house given to Polignac and, next to it, an estate and garden that belonged to Louis XVI’s younger sister, Madame Elisabeth.109 Throughout the 1780s she spent nearly every afternoon at her estate botanizing or taking lessons in drawing and embroidery. Elisabeth also built a dairy and hired a Swiss farmer and his family to run it. Her dairy, now destroyed, was a plain, one-room structure with adjacent stalls for four DAIRY QUEENS

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animals. The interior was outfitted with a central table, a perimeter ledge, and six wooden chaises à la capucine, named after the ascetic order of Capuchin monks.110 Whenever possible, Elisabeth brought milk from her dairy to orphans residing in a nearby church. Years later, during the Bourbon restoration, the artist Fleury Richard painted an image of her engaged in this charitable act (Figure 4.20). Entitled Madame Elisabeth of France Distributing Milk, the image depicts her standing in a cloister bathed in sunlight, framed by a Gothic archway and a white umbrella. A cluster of worshipful orphans surrounds her, while to the right a woman pours fresh milk into a bowl. Fleury Richard’s painting was displayed at the Salon of 1817, in a climate more sympathetic to — though perhaps no less mythologizing of — the ancien régime and its women. From his lodgings at the Hameau’s farm, Bussard carried milk to the preparation dairy to be processed and then transported to the laiterie d’agrément. The operation suggests a pastoral purification ritual whose final stage is represented in a portrait by Adolf Ulrich Wertmüller from 1787 (Figure 4.21). The painting depicts Madame Adélaïde Aughié, the sister of Marie-Antoinette’s lady in waiting, Madame Campan, standing in the pleasure dairy and scooping milk from an overflowing terracotta bowl into a blue and white Wedgwood pitcher. In her right hand she holds up a delicate bowl that is overflowing with bright white drops of milk — drops that evoke the troubling excess of the queen’s body that the Hameau magnified rather than contained. Though not an accurate rendering, Wertmüller’s painting gives some indication of the fact that the queen’s pleasure dairy was plainer in the mid1780s than it appears today. The gilded ram’s head fountains and white marble basins, seen in Figure I.2, were not added until the Restoration. Similarly, the ornately carved central table, stamped with an “L,” did not appear until the First Empire, when the dairy was put back into operation for Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise. As Annick Heitzmann has documented, the Hameau’s pleasure dairy in its original 1785 manifestation had a bare ceiling, no fountains, and plain white walls, and looked not all that different from the laiterie de préparation.111 Deeming the interior too simple or not distinctive enough, royal designers repainted the pleasure dairy’s walls shortly thereafter (in 1786 or 1787) to simulate white marble, while at the same time creating the trompe l’oeil coffered ceiling with a patch of faux blue sky in the center. Heitzmann theorizes that these neoclassical flourishes may have been inspired by the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, a project conceived by MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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Figure 4.20 Fleury Richard, Madame Elisabeth of France Distributing Milk, Salon of 1817. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

d’Angiviller in 1785 and built from 1786 to 1787. She cautions, however, that the exact chronology of these buildings and their decoration is difficult to trace, since our knowledge of them is based on work orders that were not always drawn up at the same time the work was done. Still, it is tempting to propose that d’Angiviller — a more zealous supporter of this austere brand of neoclassicism than Marie-Antoinette herself — persuaded her to adopt a hint of it here, at the same time that he was fashioning a full-scale neoclassical environment for her at Rambouillet. Certainly d’Angiviller had more confidence than she did in the possibilities that neoclassicism afforded for royal and aesthetic renewal. Royal regeneration may have been a concept that the queen herself — especially after 1785, and especially as it pertained to her — had begun to doubt. Perhaps her decision to retreat even further into a world of her own making at the Hameau after that year stemmed from a deep-down awareness of anything she did as an exercise in futility. One thing Marie-Antoinette was not ambivalent about was her attachment to the Hameau and its products. When she was not staying at Petit DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 4.21 Adolf Ulrich Wertmüller, Portrait of Madame Aughié (in the pleasure dairy at the Hameau), 1787. Photo: © the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Trianon, she had fresh butter and cream delivered to her every morning at the palace. During the first phase of the Revolution, when the royal family resided part-time at Saint-Cloud, a few of the Hameau’s cows were transported to a dairy that the queen, in an effort to curtail expenses, had leased (rather than built) near the Saint-Cloud château.112 Even when she was imprisoned in the Tuileries, Marie-Antoinette had Bussard load up a cart with milk products from her dairy and bring them to Paris, implying the extent to which the Hameau, or her memory of it, sustained her during this difficult time. It was among the last of her ill-fated expenditures. MARIE-ANTOINET TE AND THE HAMEAU EFFECT

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5

Regenerating the Monarchy: The Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet

Milk is cosmetic, it joins, covers, restores. Roland BaRthes , “Wine and Milk” (1957)

The Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, June 26, 1787: It was a gorgeous summer day, with little hint of the political storm ahead. Marie-Antoinette had reluctantly agreed to accompany Louis XVI on an outing to Rambouillet, an estate about fifteen miles from Versailles that he had purchased, using his private funds, in July 1783. Louis XVI, who loved to hunt in Rambouillet’s game-rich forests, was disappointed that his wife did not share his enthusiasm for the estate — upon seeing it a few years back, Marie-Antoinette had dismissed it as a “gothic toad pond” — and he had decided to do something about this.1 That afternoon, he led her to a secluded area beyond the château’s main grounds, which they accessed either on foot or via a canal. At the far end of this canal was a pathway that led to an iron entrance gate, flanked by two round service pavilions (Figure 5.1). Several yards beyond these pavilions was a surprise that Louis XVI had in store for his wife, one that, he hoped, would entice her to return to Rambouillet: an exquisite new pleasure dairy, whose façade was inscribed with the words “Laiterie de la Reine.” Wanting to prolong the surprise a bit longer, he had instructed servants to camouflage the building with a thick screen of foliage. After passing through the entrance gate, the king commanded these men to draw back the branches. Like the lifting of a theater curtain, the Queen’s Dairy was revealed (Figure 5.2). Though this oft-repeated story might be apocryphal — we know that MarieAntoinette visited Rambouillet that day, but not how or when she might have encountered her new dairy — the building itself is very real. It constitutes the best surviving example of the ancien régime building type of the pleasure dairy, or laiterie d’agrément.2 Unlike other pleasure dairies discussed in this book, however, the Rambouillet dairy was built without its patron’s input. Not only did Marie-Antoinette not participate in the design or decoration, but the entire project was kept a secret from her by those who directed its commission, specifically Louis XVI’s building director and arts administrator, Charles-Claude de Flahaut de la Billarderie, comte d’Angiviller (1730 – 1809). What follows in this chapter is a detailed exploration of the Rambouillet dairy and its surroundings, which included a menagerie, an experimental garden, and a farm devoted to the crossbreeding of sheep, with the DAIRY QUEENS

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aim of improving the quality of French wool. With its austerely elegant neoclassical façade, Arcadian marble sculptures, and Etruscan-style furniture and porcelain, the Queen’s Dairy took the building type of the pleasure dairy to a new level by embodying a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art.” At the same time, it drew upon a long-standing tradition of using these buildings for political purposes that had originated in the sixteenth century with Catherine de’ Medici, in a way that both echoed and departed from Catherine’s dairy at Fontainebleau. Another unique aspect of the Laiterie de la Reine, one that presents a challenge for historians, is that the construction was not fully documented in the royal building records — possibly because the king acquired Rambouillet with his own funds (à titre privé), thus keeping it outside of the royal domain (domaine de la couronne). And while it was being built, the Rambouillet dairy was not mentioned in the Mémoires secrets or other journals that reported on the crown’s activities at the estate. Although the secrecy surrounding the construction is often attributed to the dairy’s status as a surprise gift to the queen, Selma Schwartz has offered another explanation. On October 16, 1786, d’Angiviller, who had been in charge of overseeing operations at Sèvres and other royal manufactories since 1779, wrote a letter to the Sèvres director asking him to employ a new kind of archaeologically inspired, “Etruscan” design for the porcelain service that the factory was then creating for the dairy. D’Angiviller further stipulated that the design be kept a secret from the public before the service was finished. This, he surmised, would stimulate consumer interest, helping to restore fame and fortune to the factory — and enabling them to compete with European competitors like Josiah Wedgwood — once the objects were unveiled.3 Additional items overseen by d’Angiviller and created for the dairy, such as an Etruscan suite of furniture designed by Hubert Robert, were also stylistically innovative. It seems likely, therefore, that Louis XVI’s arts administrator envisioned the entire project as a “spec house,” aimed at securing the approval not only of the queen but also of the European purchasing elite. D’Angiviller’s correspondence with the Sèvres director, which is filled with meticulous instructions on how to carry out the dairy commission, indicates the level at which d’Angiviller micromanaged the building’s design and decoration. As I noted in the previous chapter, the relative autonomy that he enjoyed over the creation of the Rambouillet dairy and gardens may have compensated for his inability to control the development of the gardens at Versailles. As Susan Taylor-Leduc has shown, d’Angiviller’s ambitious campaign to replant the formal gardens at Versailles, thereby reaffirming this R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.1 The Menagerie and Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet (1785 – 1787), seen from the entrance gate. Photo: by author

landscape as a symbol of monarchical power, was thwarted by the creation of Marie-Antoinette’s English-style garden and Hameau, which challenged the administrator’s authority and limited his attempts to refashion this space as politically relevant — at least on his terms.4 The aggravation that d’Angiviller experienced as a result of the queen’s intervention in the royal landscape is evidenced by a series of angry letters that he wrote in the late 1770s and early 1780s to her architect, Richard Mique. Louis XVI’s purchase of Rambouillet in 1783, and d’Angiviller’s appointment as governor of the estate in January 1784, seem to have provided the director with a new territory to realize his ambitions. In analyzing d’Angiviller’s totalizing scheme for the Rambouillet laiterie, I hope to offer another explanation for the project’s secrecy: namely, that the dairy and its gardens, menagerie, and sheep farm were not built with the real figure of Marie-Antoinette in mind, but instead represented a male

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Figure 5.2 Jacques-Jean Thévenin and Hubert Robert, the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, 1785 – 1787. Photo: by author

fantasy of regenerated monarchy and domesticated femininity in which the queen had no place. I wish to complicate the issue of Marie-Antoinette’s involvement (or lack of involvement) at Rambouillet, and to explore how she, the dairy’s ostensible “patron,” was both everywhere and nowhere in the commission. Everywhere, in that it was her taste for pastoral architecture and pleasure dairies that gave the project shape, and that furthermore shaped the direction of royal architectural activity during Louis XVI’s reign, given that her hamlet and the remodeling of the Rambouillet estate were the only major building campaigns completed in this era. And nowhere, in that the Rambouillet dairy projected an idealized image of royal regeneration that ultimately required a casting out of the queen’s body to maintain a political fiction of health and stability — a fiction that originated on the eve of the Revolution and persisted afterward.

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THE QUEEN’S DAIRY: A RCHITECTURE AND LANDSCApE

 Louis XVI purchased Rambouillet from his cousin, the duc de Penthièvre, for the exorbitant sum of sixteen million livres.5 Presumably the king did not buy Rambouillet for the château, portions of which dated back to the fourteenth century. With its cold, turreted, fortress-like air, the main residence had not changed significantly since King Francis I had died there in 1547, the most significant event to have taken place at the estate. By acquiring Rambouillet, Louis XVI and d’Angiviller may have hoped to capitalize on its legendary association with this most august of sixteenth-century monarchs. At the same time, they may have desired a relatively blank architectural canvas that could be made over in the monarchy’s image, just as Louis XIV and his building director, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had done a century earlier with Versailles. But what form would that new image take? Marie-Antoinette was not far off the mark in dismissing Rambouillet as “gothic” and out of fashion. In November 1783, the Mémoires secrets reported that d’Angiviller had conceived a grand plan for updating and remodeling the démodé estate. Initially, this plan had entailed constructing a massive new residence and service buildings that would exemplify, in architectural terms, the same neoclassical style that d’Angiviller was promoting in other media. Perhaps the best-known example of this style is Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, a painting that had originated as a royal commission in 1784. Despite d’Angiviller’s desire to rebuild from the ground up, the king (according to the Mémoires secrets) decided that such an extensive campaign would be unwise, given the monarchy’s financial troubles and growing reputation for profligacy.6 D’Angiviller was forced to content himself with minor renovations to the château, as well as the construction of a large stable complex and a governor’s house, his own. He was also put in charge of expanding the gardens and adding new garden buildings. Louis XVI apparently worked with d’Angiviller on these endeavors and was especially interested in the details of the landscape. On November 27, 1784, the Mémoires secrets reported that the king was “occupied with improvements and embellishments” at Rambouillet, and that he himself had designed “petits cabinets de verdure” in the gardens that were “all varied, with each individual one composed of fruit trees of the same species.”7

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Though Rambouillet’s previous owner, the duc de Penthièvre, had done little to the château, he had developed a portion of the landscape. In the late 1770s, he had commissioned a fashionable jardin anglais for his daughterin-law, the princesse de Lamballe. The garden contained a Chinese-style kiosk, a hermitage, and a thatched cottage or chaumière that was constructed around 1779. The architects Claude-Martin Goupy and Jean-Baptiste Paindebled had carried out this work to the east of the château’s formal, Frenchstyle gardens and canal, which had been laid out in the early eighteenth century. The duc de Penthièvre left these formal gardens intact.8 The princesse de Lamballe’s chaumière, which survives today, anticipated the faux-rustic style of the Versailles Hameau that was built for her friend, Marie-Antoinette, beginning in 1783. Known as the Chaumière des coquillages or Shell Cottage, it featured a picturesque, ramshackle façade whose pebble-dashed walls were studded with ox bones in homage to a Norman or a Breton vernacular tradition. Like similar garden buildings erected in the pre-Revolutionary era, the chaumière’s exterior may have been intended to reaffirm the Penthièvre family’s connection to the land by evoking their seigneurial fief in Brittany.9 The interior, however, confirmed their appreciation for mondain luxury and leisure. The walls of the main room, or salon, were covered with an intricate shell mosaic that gave the cottage its name. This room was used for intimate court gatherings, and adjacent to it was a dressing room that was accessed via a door hidden in one of the salon’s shellencrusted panels. Ornamented with rococo-painted arabesques and Pompeianstyle wall frescoes, the dressing room housed two automata who, armed with rouge pots and perfume bottles, attended to the princess and her guests. When d’Angiviller took over the Rambouillet gardens in 1784, he set out to create an entirely new program and aesthetic. His vision was attuned more to production than pleasure, to the neoclassical over the rococo or the rustic, and to French rather than English traditions. Soon after he was appointed governor, he hired Hubert Robert to design an experimental garden near the jardin anglais for the purpose of acclimatizing exotic trees and other foreign specimens. Robert had previously assisted d’Angiviller on the director’s campaign to update the formal gardens at Versailles. Around 1780, he had created the Bosquet des bains d’Apollon, an area in the Versailles gardens whose focus was a large, naturalistic grotto surrounding a Louis XIV – era sculpture of Apollo attended by nymphs.10 Robert’s successful completion of this project, and his ability to work well with d’Angiviller, had led to his appointment as the king’s chief garden designer in 1784.

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At Rambouillet, Robert fashioned a space where royal botanists and gardeners could introduce into French soil species of flora that had been gathered by the king’s representatives from such far-flung places as America, China, North Africa, and the Indies.11 The experimental garden satisfied not only a rationalist obsession with scientific collecting but also a fantasy of creating a microcosm of the known world that had been the driving force behind Louis de Carmontelle’s designs for the gardens of Monceau. In addition, the Rambouillet garden signified French trading alliances, naval power, and colonial interests, perhaps to compensate for the monarchy having recently been stripped of some of its colonial possessions. Several species at Rambouillet were imported from territories that France had had to cede to England after the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 1763), and thus may have represented a dream of recuperation, an expression of “actual loss and imaginative recovery.”12 D’Angiviller was intimately involved in these acclimatization efforts and in agricultural experiments that were conducted at the farm he established at Rambouillet around 1785. Two years earlier, he had joined the Paris Agricultural Society, which came under the king’s protection in 1788.13 Among the many royal horticultural projects he supervised was the dispatch of a botanist, André Michaux, to the United States in 1785 “to collect,” as d’Angiviller wrote in a letter to an associate, “in this foreign climate trees and plants with which, I hope, we can attempt to enrich France.”14 D’Angiviller’s correspondence throughout the 1780s is filled with botanical and agricultural related matters. In October 1786, he wrote to the duc de Béthune-Charost, a fellow member of the Society, thanking him for sending Chinese melon seeds “which I will sow and cultivate carefully at Rambouillet.” D’Angiviller also sought to advertise these useful initiatives — or, as he termed it, to make them available for “public instruction” — by publishing their results through the royal printing press. In this way, he also linked them to the support and stewardship of the king. Having served as Louis XVI’s tutor when the king was a young boy, d’Angiviller remained fiercely loyal to him. He was always careful to credit Louis for any and all attempts to “enrich” the nation, whether or not the king was directly involved. A significant part of the experiments at Rambouillet concerned the naturalization of foreign species of animals, including partridges that Michaux sent from America and merino sheep that were imported from Spain in 1786. These animals were kept either on one side of Robert’s experimental garden — where the farm with its sheepfold, or bergerie, was established — or on the other side, where the menagerie and dairy were built. Although Robert DAIRY QUEENS

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seems to have drawn up the garden’s site plan and provided the principal design for the buildings, the official architect for the project was Jacques-Jean Thévenin, who held the title of architecte ordinaire du domaine de Rambouillet. Thévenin also built the new stables and the governor’s house at Rambouillet.15 A few years earlier, he had assisted Robert in constructing the Versailles Bosquet, a project that seems to have inspired, to some extent, the grotto inside the Laiterie de la Reine (see below). Robert was serving as a consultant on numerous building projects at this time — including Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau, Madame Elisabeth’s country house at Montreuil, and the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde’s gardens at Méréville — but he came back to Rambouillet periodically to check up on Thévenin’s progress.16 The menagerie at Rambouillet was laid out in a fan shape, with the Queen’s Dairy taking center stage (see Figure 5.1). The dairy’s prominence underscores the growing importance given to this building type in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Prior to this period, pleasure dairies at Chantilly and Versailles were not housed within their own separate pavilions, but were incorporated into larger menagerie buildings that contained additional facilities. Throughout the ancien régime, royal menageries had been used for the gathering and display of foreign and domestic animals, signifying power and international alliances or conquests. The fact that pleasure dairies built for royal women, such as the laiterie created for the duchesse de Bourgogne at the Versailles menagerie around 1698, were often attached to these building complexes reinforces the extent to which their female inhabitants were transformed into objects of spectacle or display (see Chapter 2). Like the menagerie’s animals, many of these women were “exotic” or foreign-born, and some, including the Austrian (“l’Autrichienne”)17 Marie-Antoinette and the Savoyard duchesse de Bourgogne, came from enemy territory, adding to the perceived need to keep them under surveillance. The Rambouillet menagerie and its dairy were conceived in 1785 and built from 1786 to 1787.18 The site was approximately three hundred meters from the château, in between the jardin anglais and Robert’s experimental garden. It was located at the end of one arm of the estate’s grand canal, which meant that visitors arriving to the site by boat were directed to walk straight ahead to the entrance gate and then advance through the funnel-like design. Reminiscent of the structured layout of the formal French garden, the emphasis on controlled movement ran counter to Marie-Antoinette’s preferred style of the jardin anglais, where buildings were disposed more casually in the landscape and were approached as if by chance or choice. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.3 The preparation dairy at Rambouillet, 1785 – 1787. Photo: by author

Arriving at the menagerie’s iron gate, one could, and still can, see two narrow rectangular buildings that flanked the pleasure dairy and were disposed in a “V” shape on either side of the entrance. Both structures were capped by two round pavilions made of beige stucco with red brick detailing (see Figure 5.1). They recalled the turreted design of the Rambouillet château or a dovecote built for a feudal seigneur. The pavilion on the left contained a reception room known as the salon du roi, where Louis XVI and his attendants could rest after a long day hunting in the forest. The room was decorated with trompe l’oeil grisaille paintings of the four seasons by PiatJoseph Sauvage. They depicted young cupids frolicking in the countryside and engaging in farm-related activities like making wine, building fires, and harvesting wheat. Beyond this room were open-air pens that contained a hothouse and a chicken coop.19 There were additional pens in the building on the right-hand side, which also housed a small stable. The site’s resident ménagère, Madame Dupuis, lived on the ground floor of this pavilion, opposite the salon du roi. Below Dupuis’s living quarters and hidden in the basement was a functional preparation dairy, or laiterie de préparation (Figure 5.3). Like other examples of its type, the preparation dairy contained a central stone worktable and a stone ledge supported by consoles that recalled similar but more luxurious furnishings in the laiterie d’agrément. The room provided a space for DAIRY QUEENS

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Madame Dupuis and her assistants to fabricate dairy products that were then transported to the Laiterie de la Reine to be displayed and consumed. According to archival records, these mostly female assistants included a milkmaid that d’Angiviller had found and brought over from Brittany, a region celebrated for its dairy products.20 The women were responsible for milking the eight Swiss dairy cows that were transported back and forth between the dairy and the farm, where they were mated with a bull to replenish their supply. (All of the Swiss cows had names; the bull was known as “Le Bienfaisant,” an appropriately kingly moniker.) The Rambouillet milkmaids were permitted to sell a portion of their wares to supplement their incomes. Their biggest client was d’Angiviller’s wife, who had butter, eggs, and cheese from the dairy sent to her at Versailles when she was not in residence at Rambouillet. The utilitarian look of the menagerie’s round pavilions contrasted with the dairy’s restrained but supremely elegant design. The Laiterie de la Reine was set back from these pavilions, separated from them by a fountain and framed by lush plantings on both sides. The gleaming white sandstone façade epitomized late eighteenth-century neoclassicism with its simple geometric shapes, surface planarity, and minimal decoration (see Figure 5.2). The dairy’s entrance was marked by two banded Tuscan columns supporting an entablature — inscribed with the words “Laiterie de la Reine” — and a semicircular tympanum decorated with a marble medallion of a cow nursing her calf. Though the use of the “masculine” Tuscan order on the façade may seem out of place for such a “feminine” building, the Tuscan order also signaled a return to architecture’s origins, an appropriate motif for a dairy devoted to Arcadian pastimes and to milk, a substance associated with the early stages of existence. Furthermore, the building’s slightly pitted, unfinished walls and stark geometry were designed to give it an almost primitive, tabula rasa effect, one that the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée would later recommend for instilling powerful, primal emotions in the viewer.21 The dairy’s interior, though less restrained than the exterior, was not as flamboyant as it appears today, having undergone a renovation in the early nineteenth century at Napoleon’s request (Figure 5.4).22 Napoleon’s architects, Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, added the polychrome marble table and floor that now decorate the entrance rotunda. Originally this floor had been white, giving the room a pristine, monochromatic effect. The dairy comprised two rooms; the first a rotunda with an intricately coffered ceiling, a central table (originally of mahogany), a marble ledge supported by consoles, and niches carved into the white stone walls. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Opposite:

Figure 5.4 Jacques-Jean Thévenin and Hubert Robert, interior view of the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet. Château de Rambouillet. Photo: Lauros/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 5.5 View of the grotto and the statue of Amalthea by Pierre Julien in the Queen’s Dairy. Château de Rambouillet. Photo: Lauros/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library

The second room was a rectangular salle de fraîcheur or “cooling room,” whose design evoked a Roman cella. Like the rotunda, this room had no windows, but the barrel-vaulted ceiling contained a skylight that flooded the interior with natural light, a technique that d’Angiviller had recently employed to light the new exhibition galleries of the Louvre.23 There were fountains on the floor to maintain hygiene and coolness, and a grotto at the far end, originally covered with ivy (Figure 5.5). At once primal and modern, picturesque and sublime, the dairy’s grotto dominated the back of the room and seemed to grow out of the walls. Inside the grotto was a marble statue of a nude woman with a she-goat. She represented the mythological nymph Amalthea, who had nursed the infant Jupiter with goat’s milk while he was separated from his mother to avoid the murderous rampage of his father, Saturn. Amalthea’s presence in the Rambouillet dairy has led some scholars to connect the building to a nymphaeum, a small sanctuary that, in classical R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.6 Anton Wachsmann after Friedrich Gilly, The Dairy at Le Raincy, 1799. Research Library, The Gerry Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (88-S489)

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times, was dedicated to nymphs.24 Amalthea had also been used as an important symbol of political regeneration in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French royal festivals, and she may have appeared in the decorative program of Catherine de’ Medici’s dairy at Fontainebleau, as I discuss in Chapter 1. There were other examples of pleasure dairies built at this time in a neoclassical style. Around 1790, Robert designed for Jean-Joseph de Laborde a similar laiterie whose interior was still being decorated (by Pierre Julien, who also decorated the Rambouillet dairy) when Laborde was arrested and executed (see Figure 4.11). In 1785 Louis XVI’s cousin, the duc de Chartres (better known as “Philippe Égalité”), commissioned a dairy that was part of a vast English-style garden complex at his château, Le Raincy, northeast of Paris. A committed Anglophile, the duke hired the Scottish gardener Thomas Blaikie to oversee the project, which included the construction of an “English village” and a dairy attached to an orangerie.25 The dairy’s exterior resembled the pavilions of the Rambouillet menagerie, with white plaster walls, red brick quoins, and a tiled roof. The interior, by contrast, was much more ornate; it was illustrated in a 1799 German periodical that featured a description of Le Raincy by the architect Friedrich Gilly, who had visited the estate two years earlier (Figure 5.6).26 According to the text and accompanying engraving, Gilly seems to have been especially taken with the dairy’s neoclassical interior, which had changed little in the decade since it was built. He remarked favorably on the room’s “light yellow, marbled plaster” walls; marble flagstone floor; and mahogany table, whose “gleaming” marble surface was littered with antiqueinspired porcelain. The engraving depicts these elements along with classical fountains, caryatids holding milk jugs, and large glass windows decorated with fanlights that offered picturesque views of the jardin anglais. In his memoirs, Blaikie described Le Raincy as “almost an English colony,” and indeed Gilly’s image reinforces this connection by recalling an Adam-esque interior in a British country estate. The duc de Chartres even commissioned a set of Wedgwood ware for his dairy, made of high-quality pottery with a lavender blue glaze, an apple green band, and a cream-colored edge.27 Though the image of the Le Raincy laiterie helps us visualize how the furniture and porcelain at the Queen’s Dairy would have been arranged, it also represents a form of British neoclassicism that d’Angiviller emphatically wanted to overturn in his own decorative scheme. He hoped that the Rambouillet dairy, once the designs were unveiled to the public, would put a stop to the rampant Anglomania that was then colonizing France and give birth to a new national style. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.7 Charles Percier, section view of the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet (with changes proposed by Napoleon), c. 1805. Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY

The interior of the Rambouillet dairy is depicted in a section view by Percier from around 1805, which indicates modifications proposed by Napoleon at that time (Figure 5.7). Some of these changes were implemented, like the Empire-style table and floor. But Napoleon had also suggested carving his own initials into the walls and ceiling; adding an inscription highlighting his military triumphs below the frieze in the cooling room; and placing statues of heroic male nudes in niches that had formerly been occupied by vases filled with milk. If these additions had been carried out, not only would they have constituted a masculine intervention in this space, but they would also have altered the building’s signification, introducing a martial theme and transforming an expression of pastoral leisure (otium) into one of male patriotic duty (negotium).

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A R CADIAN SCULpTURES BY pIERRE JULIEN

 The Rambouillet dairy’s interior was decorated with a sculptural program of mythological and pastoral themes by Pierre Julien, a protégé of d’Angiviller. Julien had risen from humble beginnings to become an Academy professor and a Prix de Rome winner, and he had spent four years in Rome (1768 – 1772), where he met and befriended Hubert Robert.28 At the Salon of 1779, Julien’s Dying Gladiator attracted the attention of d’Angiviller, who had spent the past five years devising a grand scheme to reform and revitalize French aesthetics. The essential tenets of the royal administrator’s campaign were the promotion of history painting, the return to moralizing subject matter, and the institutionalization of a neoclassical style. The major sculptural project that d’Angiviller conceived in this period was known as the Grands hommes, or “Great Men.” Launched in 1774, it entailed freestanding statues of great, historic French men who, while disparate in their backgrounds, were joined in their service to the crown. Four new statues were proposed each year; among their subjects were military heroes and advisers like Henri IV’s Sully, philosophers like René Descartes, and writers like François Fénelon. The idea was inspired by the Academic éloge, which from 1759 had awarded biennial prizes to the eulogy that best honored a great Frenchman from the past.29 In 1782, d’Angiviller commissioned Julien to create a statue of Jean de la Fontaine that was shown to great acclaim at the Salon of 1785. Julien also made a statue of Nicolas Poussin that was exhibited at the Salon of 1789. With the “Great Men,” d’Angiviller hoped to purge the Salon of the lascivious nymphets and cavorting satyrs of François Boucher and ClaudeMichel Clodion, two rococo artists whose “effeminizing” influence had long held sway at the Academy.30 He planned instead to fill the exhibition space with classically inspired statues of national heroes, who, he felt, would inspire more honorable sentiments than their debauched counterparts and encourage a sense of patriotism and civic duty. Not only were women conspicuously absent from d’Angiviller’s project, but he may have hoped that the series would deflect attention away from the portraits of royal and aristocratic women that had dominated the Salon of 1783 (see Figure 4.18). D’Angiviller’s campaign of aesthetic revitalization offered women, as both artists and subjects, little more than a subsidiary role. A hint of their marginalization is evoked in David’s Oath of the Horatii, where the wives of the male heroes are swept to the side and rendered in muted pastel hues of blue, pink, and yellow.31 R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.8 Pierre Julien, A Mother Nursing Her Child, 1786 – 1787. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: © Musée du Louvre/Pierre Philibert

In a less public venue than the Salon, d’Angiviller was simultaneously occupied with decorating the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet. In the summer of 1785, he contacted Julien (through Robert) and offered him the commission for the dairy. Julien wrote to accept on November 29, 1785.32 The sculptor pledged to begin work immediately, by making studies that he confirmed would be “dictated by the surety of your [d’Angiviller’s] taste.” True to his word, Julien finished the designs by September 1786. Assisted by two of his colleagues from the Academy, Claude Dejoux and Jean-Joseph Foucou, he completed the marble sculptures in June 1787, just in time for the royal visit. The entire project consisted of six medallions, two large friezes, and a freestanding statue that were all neoclassical in form and subject matter. While DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 5.9 Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, Abundance, c. 1783. Château de Compiègne. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

the bas-relief friezes and medallions were intended to evoke antique sarcophagi and roundels, the statue recalled classical precedents like the Medici Venus, which Julien later claimed he studied while preparing a similar statue for the dairy at Méréville.33 One of Julien’s marble medallions was placed on the dairy’s façade — the figure of the mother cow nursing her calf. Four others were inserted into the rotunda’s semicircular niches. They represented classically attired women engaged in farming and dairying activities: milking cows, churning butter, shearing sheep, and distributing salt. Over the doorway in the dairy’s second room hung the largest of the six medallions, depicting a robust woman nursing an infant while feeding a ewe that is also nursing her lamb (Figure 5.8). The subject matter conveys the dairy’s fertility and abundance — and its R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.10 Pierre Julien, Jupiter Raised by the Corybantes (center section), 1786 – 1787. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: © Musée du Louvre/Pierre Philibert

main product, milk — while also drawing connections between humans and animals and celebrating the “natural” maternal instincts of both. Julien’s nursing mother resembles an allegorical figure that appears in another medallion made around 1783 for Louis XVI’s newly remodeled chambre at Compiègne. Attributed to the artist Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, it represents Abundance, or Peace Bringing Back Abundance (Figure 5.9). At Compiègne the figure was placed opposite an allegory of Liberty and may have referred to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.34 The similarity between the two medallions suggests a political link for the Rambouillet dairy, while also underscoring the close correspondence between royal decorative projects at the time. Carefully overseen by d’Angiviller, they displayed a unified message of unity, regeneration, and reform. Julien’s two friezes, both over three meters in length, were installed on the walls of the dairy’s cooling room. Their subjects were the mythological stories of Apollo, Shepherd of Admetus and Jupiter Raised by the Corybantes. The first frieze represented the myth of Apollo being forced by Jupiter to spend one year laboring as a shepherd for King Admetus. This had been Apollo’s punishment for killing the Cyclopes, an act that had avenged Jupiter’s own killing of Apollo’s son, Aesculapius. The myth on the second frieze derived from Ovid and was related to the nymph Amalthea. It involved the infant Jupiter being hidden by his mother among the Corybantes to escape his DAIRY QUEENS

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father, Saturn, who had hoped to kill Jupiter and prevent his son’s succession. A view of the center section of this frieze indicates that Julien depicted the Corybantes making noise with musical instruments to mask the baby’s cries from his father (Figure 5.10). Jupiter himself appears in the foreground, sucking the teat of a goat. Just behind him, one can discern the grotto or cave in which the Corybantes hid the young god. Julien’s pièce de resistance was his statue of Amalthea in the center of the grotto (see Figure 5.5). According to Book V of Ovid’s Fasti (reprinted in France between 1783 and 1788, with illustrations by Charles-Nicolas Cochin), Amalthea supplied milk to Jupiter while he was estranged from his mother and lived with the Corybantes.35 She did this with the help of a she-goat, whom Julien shows drinking water at the young woman’s feet. In addition to appearing in the decoration of royal palaces and festivals, the story of Jupiter and Amalthea was a popular subject for French artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the 1630s, Poussin painted at least two versions of the myth, both of which were inspired by a print after Giulio Romano’s The Nurture of Jupiter (see Figure 1.10). Jupiter and Amalthea also appeared in the 1780s as part of the decoration for the elaborate “Louis XVI service” that Sèvres was creating for the king.36 The iconography and layout of Julien’s sculptural program seems to have been devised by Hubert Robert. On March 21, 1786, Julien wrote to inform d’Angiviller that he had received Robert’s sketch for the “figure” and its “niche,” most likely a reference to Amalthea and her grotto. As Michael Preston Worley has noted, the letter implies that Robert conceived the program and Julien translated his vision into sculptural form. This collaboration was consistent with the role that Robert had played in the design of the building, and it suggests d’Angiviller’s confidence in Robert’s taste and intellect.37 It is tempting to speculate that Robert’s choice of Jupiter and Amalthea was inspired by Poussin, who was himself inspired by Giulio Romano. In the 1770s, one of Poussin’s paintings of the Amalthea myth, now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, had been part of the renowned collection of the financier Blondel de Gagny in Paris. Poussin’s painting of Jupiter and Amalthea, along with the rest of the collection, had attracted a great deal of attention when it was auctioned off in 1776.38 Additionally, as the guardian of the Louvre collections since 1784, Robert could have seen the print after Giulio Romano’s The Nurture of Jupiter or even a preparatory drawing for this painting that was owned by the crown.39 Julien’s frieze resembles these precedents in certain respects, notably in the two figures who hold the goat steady while the child suckles underneath (although in Julien’s design both R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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of these figures are women; in the Poussin/Giulio versions, one of them is a man). Whether or not there was a direct connection, it is likely that the artists of the Rambouillet dairy were aware of the subject’s prestigious pedigree and were attempting to forge links with the past, not unlike d’Angiviller and Louis XVI. Robert is known to have mined Poussin’s work for inspiration throughout his career. Drawing upon these precedents would have furthered d’Angiviller’s aims for the dairy to be a nurturing vessel for the rebirth of French art. And what better way to begin this revitalization than by paying homage to Poussin, the “French Raphael”? Based on Amalthea’s placement inside the grotto of the Rambouillet laiterie, it seems that the building was intended to evoke not just any nymphaeum, but the legendary cave in which Jupiter was hidden. In ancient times, a shrine that invoked this myth was known as an amaltheum; Cicero describes such a site, used as a restorative retreat for passersby, in his hometown of Arpinum. As Worley has written, “In a manner of speaking, the original mythical cave of Amalthea should be regarded as the ‘first’ dairy where the king of the gods was nurtured.”40 Given the analogy between dairies and nurturing female bodies that was operative throughout the ancien régime — and evocatively depicted in the medallion by Julien — Amalthea’s cave might be regarded not only as a dairy but also as a breast or a womb. Several aspects of the Rambouillet dairy’s interior render it distinctly breastlike or uterine. Beyond the association with milk, the dairy’s smoothly rounded proportions (in the rotunda), flowing fountains, and lack of windows elicit a feeling of sensual, nurturing enclosure, reminiscent of the womb or the polymorphous pleasures of infancy. And the vaginal grotto, with its rivulets of water and encircling tendrils of ivy, gives off the impression of a body in the process of gestating or growing. Furthermore, the dairy’s layout — situated at the end of a long canal, and approached through a narrow opening that gives out onto a uterineshaped landscape of fountains and lush gardens — might also be described as reenacting a return to the womb. The Rambouillet dairy did not just suggest a return to origins on a classical or an Arcadian level; it also proclaimed those origins to be expressly maternal. References to maternal care and nurture pervade the building, from the breastfeeding cow on the façade to the breastfeeding mother in the cooling room. Julien’s other roundels similarly depict women exhibiting maternal or domestic tendencies, for example in the care and attention that they lavish on young animals while performing duties like sheep-shearing and distributing salt. References to female nurture also crop up dramatically in the Sèvres porcelain service created for the dairy, disDAIRY QUEENS

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cussed below. In its form and function, the Rambouillet dairy represented a return to maternal origins, while at the same time it heralded a rebirth.

E TR U SCAN FURNITURE AND DECORATIvE AR TS

 D’Angiviller, for his part, wanted to use the Rambouillet dairy to breathe new life into French arts and manufactures. His desire to do so is evident in the scrupulous attention that he gave the Sèvres porcelain commission, a project that Schwartz has examined in detail.41 The Rambouillet service was the only complete dairy service made by the Sèvres manufactory in the eighteenth century. Marie-Antoinette had used her own porcelain manufactory in Paris, known as the “Queen’s Factory,” for the dairy ware at her Versailles Hameau. This was not the first time, however, that Sèvres had created objects devoted to milk storage or consumption. In the 1750s, Pompadour had encouraged the factory to develop a new type of drinking vessel, known as the “milk goblet,” that she used to drink milk for her health (see Figure 3.7). But whereas these objects had drawn upon existing shapes and had been ornamented either in a rococo or Chinoiserie style, d’Angiviller wanted the Rambouillet service to inaugurate a radically new approach to French porcelain design. Specifically, he wanted their form and decoration to imitate that of ancient vessels excavated at Herculaneum and Pompeii. D’Angiviller also hoped that the Rambouillet service would spur Sèvres to adopt new production techniques. All of these changes, he believed, would enable the royal factory to rival Wedgwood’s more commercially successful operation in England, as well as to crush the new Parisian manufactories, like the Queen’s Factory, that were posing a threat to Sèvres’s dominance.42 As for Wedgwood, a pioneer of porcelain production and marketing who recognized early on that “consumption will be great for dairies,” d’Angiviller was inspired in more ways than one by his British rival. D’Angiviller adopted not only Wedgwood’s technique of using “secrecy” to drum up consumer curiosity, but also that of associating certain designs with high-profile elite women (as Wedgwood had done with his Queen’s Ware), and of adapting classical prototypes for modern use.43 Prior to the mid-1780s, Sèvres had succeeded in winning brand loyalty from the upper echelons of the aristocracy, due to strong early support from Louis XV and Pompadour. However, the intricate potpourri holders and other soft-paste objects that the factory produced, using a painstaking process of firing, decoration, and gilding, renR E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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dered them inordinately expensive, and as a result they could be afforded only by the very few. D’Angiviller hoped to rectify this situation and make Sèvres number one throughout Europe in quantity and quality of commissions. One of his chief strategies was to adopt the new technique of hard-paste production that had been made possible in France by the discovery of kaolin in 1768. The Rambouillet dairy objects were all made of hard-paste porcelain, which meant that, in addition to their social, political, and aesthetic value, they were more durable, cheaper, and easier to produce than soft-paste. In the letter that he wrote to Antoine Régnier, the Sèvres factory director, in October 1786, d’Angiviller persuaded Régnier to accept the new, Etruscan style that he wanted for the Rambouillet dairy service. “I know that you have not yet aquired the 'Etruscan taste' (‘le goût étrusque’),” d’Angiviller wrote, “and that [in proposing it] I may seem a little barbaric to you, but we will all eventually have to adapt to it.”44 (D’Angiviller’s use of the term “étrusque” was technically a misnomer, since the objects unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum that he wanted the Rambouillet service to imitate were actually Greco-Roman in origin.) D’Angiviller’s admiration for this style was shared by two men whom he had appointed to high-level positions at the factory, the Swiss scientist Jean-Jacques Hettlinger and the artist Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, Sèvres’s co-artistic director from 1785. Known as Lagrenée le jeune, Lagrenée was another one of d’Angiviller’s protégés. He had fraternized with Robert and Julien in Rome in the 1760s before returning to Paris to take part in d’Angiviller’s reform campaign by painting one of six historical subjects that the director had commissioned for the Salon of 1777. At Sèvres, Lagrenée was placed in charge of the neoclassical ornament that would be used to decorate the dairy service, a job that he hoped, as he wrote in a letter to d’Angiviller in October 1785, would “contribute to the reform of taste.” He was assisted in this endeavor by Robert, who had been asked by d’Angiviller to supervise yet another aspect of the Rambouillet Gesamtkunstwerk.45 In order to familiarize factory employees with the vases, cups, and other objects taken from Pompeii and Herculaneum, d’Angiviller purchased in 1786 a four-volume book of engravings that depicted the antiquities collection of William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples. Originally published in 1766 – 1767 by Pierre d’Hancarville, the book was entitled Antiquités étrusques, grecques, et romaines. In 1785, d’Angiviller also acquired a 525-piece collection of antiquities that had belonged to Dominique Vivant-Denon, an affiliate of the French embassy in Naples.46 D’Angiviller eventually planned to display these objects in the new museum that he was creating at the Louvre. But until the galleries were ready, he stored the collection at Sèvres so that it DAIRY QUEENS

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would be “useful” for the factory’s designers, as he wrote to Hettlinger in 1786. Alexandre Brongniart, who became the director of Sèvres in 1800, recalled several years later that d’Angiviller had specifically intended for the collection “to serve as models of pure, simple forms and to change, by example, the wrong direction given to porcelain forms under the preceding reign.”47 As for the d’Hancarville engravings, their appeal for d’Angiviller may have stemmed from their commercial potential. Unlike previous publications of antiquities, the sumptuous illustrations of vases and other forms were accompanied by schematic renderings and measurements that facilitated their replication. From the late 1760s Wedgwood had relied on the d’Hancarville volumes to create his own neoclassical designs. The original order for the Rambouillet dairy service comprised one hundred and eight pieces. Perhaps for financial reasons, that number was later reduced to sixty-five. The finished pieces were delivered to the Queen’s Dairy on two occasions: May 25, 1787 — shortly before the court’s visit that June — and May 15, 1788. Many of the objects were devoted to consumption, including several milk cups and saucers. But there were also vessels designed for pouring, cooling, and settling milk, as well as vases and containers for butter, sugar, and cheese. And there were two “rustic”-style porcelain milk buckets that had been painted and fired to simulate blond wood, decorated with faux caning and ram’s heads at the top.48 The shapes of these vessels were based on classical Greek prototypes like the skyphos, recalled in the dairy’s gobelet “à anses étrusques,” or “à anses relevées.” However, the imitation was not exact, neither in the Rambouillet drinking cups nor in the vases, which were inspired by an amalgamation of various objects in the Denon collection rather than one specific example.49 Lagrenée’s style of ornament similarly emulated antique vase decoration without directly copying it. His design for a goblet à anses étrusques, for example, combined classical motifs like palmettes and geometric patterning with arabesque scrollwork and a touch of rococo refinement, resulting in a hybrid style of decoration that was typical of early neoclassicism (Figure 5.11). Freedom of interpretation also extended to the colors that were used to decorate the service. Instead of more archaeologically exact shades of red, black, and ochre, royal designers painted these objects with pastel hues of yellow, blue, and purple against a white ground, all of which were hallmarks of the Sèvres factory formula. (To some extent, the colors that resulted after these objects were fired were determined by technological factors, but not entirely.) Perhaps the most striking example of this loose interpretation of classical models can be seen in Lagrenée’s design for the dairy’s jattes tétons, or R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.11 Jean-Jacques Lagrenée and Sèvres workshop, design for the Rambouillet dairy service, 1786 – 1788. Sèvres, Archives de la Manufacture. Photo: Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Art Library

“breast cups” (Figure 5.12). While these cups bear a tenuous resemblance to the ancient Greek mastos, which was shaped like a woman’s breast and used to consume wine during Dionysiac drinking rituals, they also suggest a libidinal drift away from archaeological accuracy and restraint that can be seen in other examples of the Rambouillet service. This drift is most evocatively captured in the cup’s flesh-colored body and pert pink nipple, which signaled a return of the repressed in recalling one of Sèvres’s signature colors: rose Pompadour. With no handles, the breast cup had to be removed carefully from its tripod base and cradled in both hands by the milk drinker, adding to the “reality effect.” Since the late 1780s, the Rambouillet breast cup has taken on a life of its own far beyond its original function. In the nineteenth century, the cup incited the Goncourt brothers’ heavily eroticized, feminized obsession with the eighteenth century and the ancien régime, stimulated by fantasies of “drinking from porcelain cups molded from the breasts of Marie-Antoinette.”50 The Rambouillet jatte téton was illustrated in the Goncourts’ Histoire de MarieAntoinette (1858), a book that helped launch the revival and mythology of the milkmaid queen and the rococo. Indeed the rumor that Marie-Antoinette’s own breast supplied the model for the cup is so seductive that it survives today, even though she could not possibly have done so for many reasons, including her lack of prior knowledge about the Rambouillet dairy commission. DAIRY QUEENS

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In his own efforts to promote restraint, d’Angiviller pushed to eliminate gilding from the Rambouillet service. The idea was first proposed by Hettlinger, but d’Angiviller enthusiastically welcomed it.51 The elimination of costly gilding likely also appealed to Louis XVI, who had begun taking measures — however cosmetic they may have been — to redress the crown’s reputation for wasteful luxury. In the remodeling of his chambre at Compiègne, for example, the king had stipulated that the walls remain “simple” and white, “without any gilding.” Around 1785 – 1786, he proposed the same clean look for his new petits appartements at Fontainebleau, allowing three rooms to be gilded, “mais tout le reste en blanc.”52 Both requests were honored by d’Angiviller, who also carried out the king’s wishes in urging designers to rein in their expenses. D’Angiviller had some trouble, however, with Pierre Rousseau, who in 1786 had been charged with decorating MarieAntoinette’s boudoir at Fontainebleau (creating an extremely luxe, Pompeian style that opposed d’Angiviller’s more austere neoclassical vision). On April 18, 1787, d’Angiviller fired off an irate letter to Rousseau accusing him of conspiring with the office of royal furniture and decoration to produce gilded furnishings “for no apparent reason.” He also berated Rousseau for designing a jardin anglais for the house of the Fontainebleau palace comptroller, needlessly and “at the king’s expense.”53 D’Angiviller preferred the look of the Fontainebleau palace’s simple new dining room, which was hung with neoclassical paintings by Robert that depicted Roman ruins in France, among them the Maison Carré in Nîmes.54 Robert’s paintings were exhibited at the Salon of 1787, where it was noted that Louis XVI had commissioned them for Fontainebleau. We might interpret the monarchy’s motivations for these decorative campaigns to be twofold. First, Louis XVI’s preference for plain white walls suggests the desire to create a tabula rasa effect, one that would whitewash the excesses of his predecessors. But the project also represents an idealized vision of France’s past and ties to ancient Rome, in the form of Robert’s ruins. Louis XVI and his administrators may have been trying not so much to erase history as to channel the right history, whether the era of King Francis I (the creator of Fontainebleau) or a glorified classical past. These dual ambitions are also present in the design of the Rambouillet laiterie. In addition to the dairy’s architecture, sculpture, and porcelain, references to classical prototypes appear in a set of mahogany furniture designed by Robert and executed by Georges Jacob. Delivered to the Queen’s Dairy on May 29, 1787, the set comprised fourteen chairs (four with arms), six “milking” stools, and five tables: one larger table for the rotunda and four smaller tables R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.12 Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, “breast cup” (jatte téton) for the Rambouillet dairy, 1786 – 1788. Sèvres, Musée National de Céramique. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

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for the cooling room. On July 7, 1787, Jacob went to Rambouillet to adjust these chairs for visitors.55 Modeled after bronze furniture from Herculaneum, the chairs and stools were originally outfitted with “Etruscan” red cushions. A surviving armchair indicates a similar fusion of classical motifs, including palmettes, lozenges, and ram’s heads that had previously been used in HardouinMansart’s c. 1690 design for the pleasure dairy at Chantilly (Figure 5.13). The absence of gilding makes these furnishings appear plain, even “rustic,” especially when compared with the elegant Louis Seize – style pieces for which Jacob is better known. However, their copious use of rare and expensive mahogany meant that they were just as costly to produce as their gilded counterparts, if not more so. There is an obvious contradiction in the crown’s attempts to exhibit frugality or restraint by building an expensive new suite of palace appartements or a lavish pleasure dairy. This strategy, however, was often employed by ancien régime monarchs, who were caught in a double bind of needing constantly to display their power and magnificence while also advocating a “tightening of the belt” at the first sign of fiscal and other crises. In the 1770s and 1780s this problem especially plagued the queen, on whom many marchands-merciers depended for their livelihood, and who was encouraged to keep consuming at the same time that she was roundly vilified, in the Parisian press and elsewhere, for doing so. Marie-Antoinette bore the brunt of attacks on royal wastefulness throughout this period even though she was often outpaced in her spending by other royal family members, including Louis XVI’s brothers Artois and Provence. Her gardens at Petit Trianon became a notorious site of finger pointing that loomed large during her October 1793 trial, when their cost became a major issue.56 Given this controversy, and the fact that the Rambouillet dairy was ostensibly made for the queen, how are we to understand its message of regeneration and reform in this light? “LA FRANCE MALADE”

 The Queen’s Dairy embodied healthfulness in its association with milk and neo-Hippocratic theories of medicine. As discussed earlier in this book, milk was viewed as a physically and morally salubrious substance in the eighteenth century and was associated with a regenerative campaign of country living aimed at aristocrats and mondain women. By the mid-1780s, milk’s health benefits were widely touted in medical treatises and in popular texts like Louis-

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Figure 5.13 Georges Jacob, armchair for the Rambouillet dairy, 1787. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. D’Angiviller’s own curiosity about the subject is revealed in a letter that the physician Félix Vicq-d’Azyr sent to him in September 1786, which discusses an essay prize, sponsored by the monarchy, on “the nature of women’s, cow’s, goat’s, ass’s, sheep’s and camel’s milk.”57 In one of the designs for the Rambouillet service, now in the Sèvres archives, Lagrenée reinforced the connection between milk and good health by decorating a basin with intertwined snakes symbolizing either Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, or Aesculapius’ daughter Hygieia, the goddess of health and hygiene. In the second half of the eighteenth century, aristocratic women across Europe responded to new health trends by drinking fresh milk and by promoting medical themes in their arts patronage. After Louis XVI had been inoculated against smallpox, Marie-Antoinette devised one of her famous headdresses, or “poufs,” to celebrate the event, featuring a serpent (a nod to DAIRY QUEENS

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Aesculapius) entwined around an olive tree.58 At the British Royal Academy exhibition of 1782, Joshua Reynolds displayed a portrait that he had made of Mrs. Peter Beckford, a society figure who was also a famous consumptive. The artist depicted her in a neoclassical garden pavilion, making a sacrifice to Hygieia in front of a ceremonial urn encircled by a snake.59 Reynolds’s pavilion paid homage to an ancient structure known as an Asclepieion, a temple of healing that was devoted to the worship of the god or his daughter. The Rambouillet dairy may have been intended to invoke an Asclepieion in addition to an amaltheum. Unlike Reynolds’s portrait, the Laiterie de la Reine did not proclaim the health or wellness of a single individual. Instead it offered a holistic vision of the monarchy and the entire state apparatus as robust and regenerated. This was done, I believe, in response to the growing number of attacks in the periodical press and elsewhere that suggested otherwise. Whereas previous analyses of the Queen’s Dairy have resisted giving the building a political interpretation, I would argue that it was deeply embroiled in the social and political controversies of the immediate past, present, and future. One of these controversies involved a widespread suspicion of the monarchy’s degeneration, an idea that was often expressed through metaphors of illness and disease. On September 15, 1787, the journal Correspondance secrète reported on an unauthorized engraving then circulating through the streets of Paris: A sketch is being sold secretly with this inscription: “La France Malade.” France, in effect, is represented dying. On a table, we see eight palettes of blood that have just been taken from her by M. de Calonne. The Queen holds out a plate to receive the ninth palette, but suddenly Monsieur [the comte de Provence, Louis XVI’s brother] arrives with a compress and pushes her aside to bandage the wound.60 The engraving, entitled “France is Ill” (“La France malade”), represented a female allegory of France being bled by Calonne, the reviled exfinance minister. His perceived crony, Marie-Antoinette, recently dubbed “Madame Déficit” by the press, is shown beside him greedily reaching for more blood, while the comte de Provence, envisioned as the potential savior of the monarchy, attempts to push her out of the way and staunch the bleeding. While enacting the metaphor of a bleeding economy, the image’s implication was not just financial. Rather, it joined a chorus of voices labeling the crown — or certain members of the crown — as bloodsucking and diseased, and declaring France to be in desperate need of medical attention. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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French high society, especially the ruling class of nobility and courtiers, was also envisioned in this era to be dissolute and unwell. Most of these attacks were directed at aristocratic women. In medical treatises, didactic novels, and Physiocratic texts, they were accused of fueling their own degradation by spending too much time in the city in cramped, unhealthy spaces like theaters, and of ruining their minds and bodies by reading novels and eating rich foods.61 Worse yet, such women were seen to pass this degeneration on to their children, either by setting a bad example or by rendering their bodies infertile or unfit to produce healthy citizens. In the unlikely event that these women did get pregnant, medical tracts such as Lascazes de Compayre’s Dangers of Swaddling and Breast Milk (1778) warned them that their lifestyles and habits, like the wearing of tight-laced corsets, would lead them to miscarry. At best, they would give birth to sickly children, whose weak constitutions would enervate, rather than revitalize, the French state. Eighteenth-century fears about France’s declining population focused not just on the number but also on the quality of its citizens.62 Should these sickly children survive the crucial first days of life, Lascazes de Compayre darkly predicted that their mother’s selfish predilection for wrapping them in swaddling clothes — which enabled her to go out on the town, while leaving her baby immobile and unattended — would deform and even kill these infants, just as their mother’s corset had imperiled her own health. The link between corsets and swaddling clothes, made here and in the writings of the celebrity Swiss physician Samuel Tissot (a friend and correspondent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), was only one of the many ways that women in this period were infantilized. Frenchwomen were given a great deal of advice about how to alter their lifestyles and contribute to the health of the state. Much of this advice entailed spending time in the countryside and learning how to be more domestic, including caring for and breastfeeding their children. Several historians have examined the massive eighteenth-century campaign — supported by doctors as well as artists, politicians, and writers like Rousseau — to encourage women to breastfeed their children rather than employ wet nurses.63 This campaign centered on the belief that physical and moral attributes and tendencies could be passed on to children through breast milk. Appealing to a woman’s “natural” sensibility, Enlightenment reformers warned them that ignorant, mercenary, or sickly wet nurses could destroy a child’s health and a family’s pedigree, and they often analogized this decline to animal or plant degeneration. The author of the entry entitled “Paternal Love” in the Encyclopédie, for instance, described wet-nursing as a dangerously unnatural DAIRY QUEENS

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act, since “the most delicious fruit in soil that suits it scarcely fails to degenerate if it is transported to another.”64 Proponents of this campaign exhorted women, and especially the mondain elite, to save themselves, their children, and “La France” by abandoning their harmful ways and adopting the virtues of maternity and domesticity. This included staying at home, far away from pernicious public venues like theaters, and taking up practices like breastfeeding that would guarantee their happiness and allow them to realize their true potential. Women who refused to do this not only risked the livelihood of their children but also endangered their own health through the threat of milk fever, an illness thought to be caused by breast milk backing up into the system. Some doctors, among them Tissot, claimed that unused milk festered within the body, causing cancer and death. The Queen’s Dairy espoused an idealized vision of a regenerated society through healthful milk and the depiction of feminine virtues like domesticity, maternal care, and breastfeeding. These values were especially apparent in Julien’s roundel sculptures, which conflated images of cows nursing their calves with young women caring for animals with mothers nursing their infants while attending to additional children (see Figure 5.8). Around 1792, Julien was hired to create a freestanding sculpture similar to his Rambouillet medallion of a nursing mother for Laborde’s dairy at Méréville. (The sculpture was intended to be placed in a grotto in the center of the Méréville dairy, echoing Amalthea’s placement at Rambouillet.) In a letter to Laborde, Julien described this sculpture as a mother breastfeeding her infant while giving milk to an older child, “all done with the greatest naturalism.”65 In their installation at Rambouillet, Julien’s medallions represented an evolutionary progress narrative of domesticated femininity, in which such acts, as carried out first by cows (on the façade), then by teenage farm girls (in the rotunda), and finally by mature mothers (in the cooling room), were deemed part of the order of nature. MOTHER’S MILk AND THE MYTH OF AMALTH EA, C. 1789

 Maternity and domesticated femininity were values that the monarchy promoted in the mid-1780s as part of its reform campaign. Unsurprisingly, it was the queen herself whom the crown most often tried to link to these ideR E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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als. Marie-Antoinette played her own part in 1784, when she joined a charity that provided aid to indigent mothers. Known as the Société de Charité Maternelle, it had been founded by the wife of a royal financier.66 Prior to Marie-Antoinette’s joining this society, a campaign had been waged by court affiliates to salvage her declining reputation among the public by presenting her as a good, nurturing mother. The project aimed to redress attacks that labeled her an indifferent parent, a reckless gambler, a dissolute spender, and a lesbian, all activities associated with her garden retreat at Petit Trianon. Libels against the queen had appeared in pornographic pamphlets (some of which were supported by her own courtiers) as early as 1774, but these had become more prevalent by 1783, the year that her portrait en chemise by Vigée Le Brun had to be removed from the Salon (see Figure 4.18). In June 1785, the Correspondance secrète reported on the public’s cool reception of Marie-Antoinette during a recent trip to Paris and noted an alarming increase in the number of publications against her. “These couplets, songs, and satires have circulated and done appalling damage, by teaching the people to lose respect for one who was formerly the object of their veneration and their love.”67 At the Salon that summer, Marie-Antoinette’s friend, the Swedish king Gustav III, exhibited a portrait of the queen that he had commissioned from the artist Adolf Ulrich Wertmüller. Designed to show off her maternal virtues, the portrait depicted her promenading in the Petit Trianon gardens with her children rather than with the female friends whose presence there had aroused suspicion. For her part, Marie-Antoinette felt that Wertmüller had made her look dowdy and disliked the picture. Unfortunately, it appeared at the Salon in the midst of the Diamond Necklace scandal, in which she was accused of using the Versailles gardens to stage secret meetings that had resulted in her acquiring an obscenely extravagant necklace.68 To counter this fresh wave of attacks, in September 1785 d’Angiviller commissioned a new portrait of the queen by Vigée Le Brun, around the same time that he contacted Julien about the Rambouillet sculpture commission. Shown at the Salon of 1787, Vigée Le Brun’s painting represented a majestically attired queen seated not in her sullied gardens but safely inside the palace, surrounded by her brood of children (Figure 5.14). Joseph Baillio has proposed that Vigée Le Brun intended to associate Marie-Antoinette with the virtuous Roman heroine Cornelia, who had famously declared her children to be her only “jewels.” Baillio points out the similarity between the painting’s royal cradle and a jewel case and suggests that this association would have been politically astute, given the queen’s involvement in the Diamond DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 5.14 Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Marie-Antoinette with Her Children, Salon of 1787. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Necklace affair.69 The attempt, however, seems to have failed. Because Vigée Le Brun was late in finishing the painting, the Salon opened that year with an empty frame in place of the queen’s portrait. While the wall was still blank, a member of the Salon public purportedly walked up to it and scribbled the words, “Here is the deficit!”70 If the gardens of Versailles had been “ruined” as a site of royal regeneration by rumors of Marie-Antoinette’s activities there, I believe that R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Rambouillet offered a possibility of recuperation, and that d’Angiviller used it as such. As the architectural equivalent to Vigée Le Brun’s portrait, the Queen’s Dairy attempted to fulfill the dual semiotic burdens of representing MarieAntoinette as a good mother and of reinforcing confidence in the monarchy and dynastic line. As I noted in this chapter’s introduction, d’Angiviller had been inhibited, by Marie-Antoinette and by Mique, from realizing his vision of monarchical power and prestige in the formal gardens of Versailles. His intense frustration regarding this situation, which began in the 1770s, grew more heated in the following decade. In a letter to his subordinates dated June 26, 1788, d’Angiviller reminded them of the need to prevent “useless expenditures” at Petit Trianon, which he claimed were dictated by a dubious “taste.” One way to do this, he claimed, was to monitor more closely contracts that were drawn up for the gardeners who worked there, as well as to settle existing debts, “so that at the same time I can maintain the gardens in a state of decency.”71 An emphasis on utility — or a lack thereof — is a major theme in d’Angiviller’s official correspondence from the 1780s, especially when the topic is gardens. Dismissing the queen’s improvements to Petit Trianon as “useless,” he says much the same thing about renovations that the Mesdames (Louis XV’s unmarried daughters) made to Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles, improvements that these women charged to the royal treasury. Even Pompadour herself, who had been dead for more than two decades, did not escape d’Angiviller’s wrath, but was condemned in a letter that he wrote in 1788 for having “so uselessly” decorated the façade of her Fontainebleau hermitage with green trellising.72 (D’Angiviller supported tearing down this decoration when the building was converted into the hôtel du Gouvernement.) Yet aside from trying to regulate the escalating costs for these projects, there was little that d’Angiviller could do to prevent their realization. At Rambouillet, however, an estate that was officially outside of the royal domain and reserved not for the queen but for — as d’Angiviller himself put it — “le patrimoine,”73 he was given much greater latitude to implement his vision of rebirth and reform. A central element in this revitalizing vision was the Rambouillet laiterie, a building that, despite the name, was much more d’Angiviller’s dairy than the queen’s own. He also attempted to realize his vision at the royal sheep farm or bergerie, a project that he conceived at Rambouillet concurrent with the dairy’s construction. The bergerie was an experimental farm used for crossbreeding French sheep with Spanish merinos to improve the quality of French wool. Louis XIV’s building administrator, Colbert, had tried to carry DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 5.15 Jacques-Jean Thévenin, the Royal Sheep Farm at Rambouillet, 1786 – 1787. Photo: by author

out a similar experiment a century earlier, and d’Angiviller (who modeled himself after Colbert in certain respects) wanted to succeed where his predecessor had failed. Like Colbert, he wished to promote French arts and manufactures and improve its products for foreign and domestic use.74 At the same time, he hoped to revivify French agriculture through the estate’s experimental garden, recalling the efforts of yet another royal minister, the duc de Sully. At Rambouillet, all the members of d’Angiviller’s personal pantheon of “Great Men” were assembled. In the summer of 1786, d’Angiviller supervised the importation of more than three hundred merinos from the Spanish Pyrenees to Rambouillet. He also commissioned Thévenin to build the royal sheep farm on the opposite side of Robert’s garden from the Laiterie de la Reine (Figure 5.15).75 Well aware of recent economic crises that had stricken the nation, among them food shortages and crop failures, d’Angiviller must have hoped that these agricultural and breeding measures would offer some real financial redress. But he also recognized their political potential, specifically their association with the ideas of utility, regeneration, and perfectibility that emerged out of official monarchical rhetoric before they became catchphrases of the Revolution. Indeed the word “regeneration,” so synonymous with the Revolutionary project by 1793, was first associated with Louis XVI, who was still referred to in 1789 as France’s “regenerator.”76 As for the impact that d’Angiviller imagined his work at Rambouillet might have on the public’s perception of the crown, it is difficult to say. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Figure 5.16 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of Madame Mitoire with Her Children (miniature on ivory after the artist’s original pastel), 1783. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

By 1787, the monarchy’s financial and political crises had reached such a fever pitch that the court had begun to scale back severely on travel and festivities. If he had hoped for a large-scale unveiling of his pet project, circumstances would likely have prevented him from doing so. Still, d’Angiviller did attempt to broadcast, “for public instruction,” agricultural experiments at the farm, and his crossbreeding efforts were reported by the Mémoires secrets and in books and articles published by Alexandre-Henri Tessier and LouisJean-Marie Daubenton, who supervised operations at the farm.77 Judging from his correspondence with the Sèvres employees, he also believed that the porcelain service would bring Rambouillet renown. In August 1787, d’Angiviller wrote a letter to Julien in which he consoled the artist for not having been allowed to exhibit his statue of Amalthea at the Salon that summer (the sculpture had had to stay at Rambouillet for the royal visit that June). While d’Angiviller regretted that Julien had not had time to make a plaster model to show in its stead, he reminded Julien that he had succeeded in winning “what should interest you even more,” the praise DAIRY QUEENS

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of the king and the court.78 The comment implies that though d’Angiviller did want to advertise his message of royal renewal beyond the confines of Rambouillet, he still considered the king’s gaze to be paramount and was perhaps defensive about the growing importance of this new (and not always supportive) Parisian public.79 D’Angiviller assured Julien, however, that no one would pass by Rambouillet without wanting to see the dairy and its sculptures, implying that he did foresee the estate playing some sort of larger role in the future, perhaps helping to reshape public opinion in a more positive direction. But beyond the question of the laiterie’s literal audience, it is equally important to consider the building from a psychological perspective. By this I mean to say that the Queen’s Dairy may have served, for d’Angiviller and the crown, not so much as a piece of actual propaganda as an idealized imago of health and wholeness that was created to stave off fears of division or collapse. For the rhetoric of regeneration — particularly as it pertained to royal and aristocratic women — was much more rife with contradiction than has been supposed. Far from rejecting this rhetoric, elite women eagerly embraced the ideals of maternity and domesticity in the 1780s. They commissioned and showcased, for example, images of themselves breastfeeding their children, including Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s pastel portrait of Madame Mitoire, on view at the Salon of 1783 (Figure 5.16).80 Confronted with such elegant and effusive maternal displays, reform-minded authors began to reverse course and suggest that perhaps this practice was not so natural after all, but simply another fad that these well-dressed women had appropriated — a “mode de la mamelle,” in the sarcastic words of Madame de Genlis.81 Such comments dovetailed with the insults leveled at Vigée Le Brun’s portraits of MarieAntoinette and her female friends at Petit Trianon, whose attempts to cultivate a more “natural” appearance backfired, leading to further claims that they were denatured and corrupt. Most eighteenth-century reformers seemed to prefer their domestic goddesses to remain fictional creatures than be embodied by real women in art or in the flesh. The ideology of domesticated femininity was deeply ambivalent in its attitude toward elite women. Much of the scholarship on the breastfeeding campaign does not acknowledge the extent to which writings by Rousseau, Tissot, Mirabeau, and others contradict themselves with regard to this social group. On the one hand, these eighteenth-century authors portray such women as hopelessly degenerate, with a natural proclivity toward vice that is without cure. On the other hand, they paint an idealized picture of a virtuous, selfless, and healthful mother, and seem to infer that, by simply offering up R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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her breast, an aristocratic woman could miraculously transform herself from the epitome of vice into a paragon of virtue. How did they imagine such a paradox to be reconciled? They did not, it seems, give the matter much thought. Lascazes de Compayre was one of the few authors who did weigh this dilemma. Ultimately, he concluded that aristocratic mothers and their damaged bodies were just as harmful to young infants as wet nurses, and that the only socially responsible solution was to feed an infant with animal milk.82 As for elite women themselves, it is telling to observe the degree to which those who did try and embrace this rhetoric, like Suzanne Necker, nearly always met with ridicule or shame rather than satisfaction or praise.83 This may have been because they were trying to embody a male fantasy of “good” femininity that, precisely because it was a fantasy, could never be met in reality. Either way, it offered yet another bind in which women found themselves at the time — both entreated to breastfeed and declared unfit to do so. Marie-Antoinette was expected to live up to a dominant fantasy of virtuous and dutiful femininity that was associated, in her case, with the historically problematic image of French queens (see the discussion of the Salic law in Chapter 1). It was an image that — because she was a foreigner, because she exerted her own status and desires, and because she was a flesh-andblood woman — she was never able to embody successfully. While this problem may have been especially difficult for her, it was an issue with which all ancien régime queens struggled. Rather than serving as a spokeswoman for rebirth or reform, Marie-Antoinette became the poster child for degeneration in the late 1780s and in the early years of the Revolution. The specter of disintegration also haunted the crown, which was seen to be controlled by a corrupt aristocracy and a regime falling at a rate comparable to the Roman Empire. No matter how hard the monarchy tried to graft itself onto an earlier, Arcadian past, it seemed to many that history was not in its favor. In anonymous Revolutionary caricatures of the early 1790s, the “degenerate” Marie-Antoinette is depicted as an Austrian hen or a hybrid monster, whose crossbreeding with the king had deformed, rather than repaired, the French state (Figure 5.17). A similar idea emerged in Revolutionary-era pamphlets, including the Description of the Royal Menagerie of Living Animals (which reported on the royal family’s movements in their “pen” at the Tuileries), and in Jean-Louis Soulavie’s royal biography of 1802, entitled Historical and Political Memoirs of the Reign of Louis XVI from His Marriage to His Death. Soulavie’s book was intended as a diatribe against the policy of intermarriage among a limited number of Catholic royal families in Europe. Through this practice, Soulavie claimed, the Bourbon monarchy had diluted the DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 5.17 Anonymous, “The Two Make But One,” Revolutionary caricature, c. 1791. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes

heroic blood of King Henri IV, by “[confining] its connubial intercourse to those of Medicis, Austria, Savoy, and Bourbon.” As a result, “it could not but degenerate from the virtue of its ancestors, the original founders of its power.” In attributing royal degeneration to unnatural marital alliances, Soulavie compared this process to animal and vegetable degeneration: “Domestic animals would degenerate in less than an age, if the breed were not crossed.”84 His references to the Medici family and to Austria leave no doubt as to whom he blamed for this degeneration: the wicked French queens Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette. In the 1790s, the Revolutionary government tried to forestall this degeneration by transforming the royal estates of Rambouillet, Chantilly, and Le Raincy into national schools of agriculture, where they continued the experiments that d’Angiviller had pioneered. This included maintaining the new (and celebrated) Rambouillet merinos, which are still today considered the purest of their breed and are displayed throughout France at agricultural festivals and sheep-shearing competitions. In the year II (1794/1795), the Committee of Public Safety decided to select one formerly royal estate where they would create a “detached colony” of these sheep, along with other animals found on émigré or “condemned” properties seized by the government. In R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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July 1794, they selected Le Raincy for this purpose, and gathered there superior genetic specimens of cows, goats, and sheep that had been “brought down by ignorance and despotism” but that now seemed “appropriate to regenerate.”85 They housed these animals in the dairy and stable that had formerly belonged to Philippe Égalité, who had been executed the previous November. Even before the outbreak of the Revolution, the Rambouillet dairy and sheep farm were envisioned as corrective environments, where fears about royal and queenly degeneration could be alleviated or contained. At Rambouillet, Marie-Antoinette’s “spoiled” body could be purified and molded into the wholesome product that the social and political order wanted it to be. But for many, the dairy’s message of reformed femininity was too little, too late. Even d’Angiviller seems to have envisioned the Queen’s Dairy not as a space for Marie-Antoinette’s recovery but for a different form of regeneration altogether — that of the state or patrimoine. It is possible, in this light, to interpret the dairy’s iconography as symbolizing the queen’s body excised from that of the monarchy and the king, just as the infant Jupiter had been separated from his mother in the classical myth. The Queen’s Dairy enacted a fantasy not of Marie-Antoinette’s purification but of Louis XVI’s salvation and autonomous male rebirth. Here the bodies of real women were absent — purged from the dairy’s pristine white surface — or recalled only in fragments such as the uterine grotto or the porcelain breast cup. Marie-Antoinette, condemned as the “goddess” of Petit Trianon during her Revolutionary trial, was not the dominant woman at Rambouillet.86 She was supplanted by Amalthea, Jupiter’s obedient, surrogate mother. Amalthea was not a real woman but an abstract allegory of female purity and virtue — not Marie-Antoinette, but Marianne.87 To conclude, let us return to the issue of the queen’s involvement at Rambouillet. In literal terms, Marie-Antoinette only seems to have visited the laiterie once, in June 1787. The August 1788 edition of the Mémoires secrets reported that she continued to spend all her time at Petit Trianon, while the king made frequent hunting trips to Rambouillet. The real “star” of the Rambouillet dairy was Amalthea, the nymph who had nursed Jupiter with goat’s milk. One can imagine d’Angiviller’s desire to associate the king with this foundational royal myth, to separate him from his mother (or his wife) and hide him in a cave to undergo rebirth. This fantasy, however, was troubled by Louis XVI’s own failure to separate from the body of his queen, who became the repository for the collective nightmare of abject excess engendered by the ancien régime — with pink nipples that were used for erotic titillation rather than for nursing, and a body that drained blood from the nation DAIRY QUEENS

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Figure 5.18 I. S. Helman after Charles Monnet, The Fountain of Regeneration over the Ruins of the Bastille, 1793. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes

instead of providing it with nourishing milk. Although her pristine white dresses and aesthetic promotion of motherhood provided much of the representational language of the 1790s, there was ultimately no space for MarieAntoinette within the paradoxical universalism espoused by the Revolution. That vision is more accurately represented in a 1795 engraving by JacquesLouis Perée entitled “The Regenerated Man.”88 Julien’s sculpture of Amalthea failed to attach itself to the queen. Yet when separated from its tainted surroundings — as the statue would be in 1803, when it was moved to the floor of the French Senate one year before Napoleon’s Code Civil restricted legal rights for women — it provided a vision for a newly regenerated France that was represented by powerful female allegories but founded upon the banishing of powerful women. Amalthea gave birth to statues like the female Fountain of Regeneration, which appeared at the Revolutionary Festival of Unity in August 1793 (Figure 5.18). During this festival, male citizens were invited to approach the statue’s spouting breasts and drink symbolic “milk” from a cup that bore an uncanny relationship to the breast cup of the queen. Two months later, Marie-Antoinette was guillotined. R E G E N E R A T I N G T H E M O N A R C H Y: T H E Q U E E N ’ S D A I R Y A T R A M B O U I L L E T

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Epilogue

Figure E.1 Sophie Binet (painter) and Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Vandé (gilder), Sèvres milk cup and saucer based on a mold from the Rambouillet dairy service, c. 1795. Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts décoratifs, Paris/Jean Tholance. All rights reserved

Walking through an exhibition on Napoleonic art in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in the winter of 2008, I came upon a curious object (Figure E.1). It was displayed in a vitrine containing several objects from the French Revolutionary period, which together exemplified that era’s restless search for a visual and material language to embody new social and political ideals. The object in question was an “Etruscan” milk cup that had been produced around 1795 at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, but whose shape derived from a mold created a decade earlier for Marie-Antoinette’s Rambouillet dairy service. Whereas the Rambouillet milk cups had been decorated with antiqueinspired ornament, wild grasses and flowers, and farm animals such as cows, goats, and sheep, this cup featured a field of gold dots against a green background, a band of cornflowers and roses, and a profusion of republican motifs: E P I LO G U E

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a Phrygian cap, a mason’s level, and, on the saucer, a liberty palm and fasces.1 With little more than a few strokes of paint, this formerly royal drinking vessel — part of a larger architectural ensemble that, as I argued in the previous chapter, represented a last-ditch attempt at monarchical regeneration in the waning years of the ancien régime — had been transformed into an emblem of Revolutionary abundance, strength, and health. The c. 1795 milk cup, which may have belonged to Jean-François Reubell, one of the founding heads of the Directory government (1795 – 1799), illustrates not only the ongoing Revolutionary appropriation and transmutation of Bourbon art and symbolism, but also the endless capacity for reinvention that made pleasure dairies and their accoutrements such a compelling art form for the patrons discussed in this book.2 After the Revolution, dairies continued to serve as vital arenas of personal and political expression for the next two centuries. They also continued to be associated primarily, though not exclusively, with high-profile women. While Napoleon dabbled with redecorating the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet by adding a polychrome marble floor and an Empire-style table, it was his first wife, Josephine, who really embraced the political and economic potential of this building type. Around 1803 – 1804 she developed a dairy complex and a sheep farm at Malmaison, the couple’s estate outside of Paris that she was later granted in their 1809 divorce settlement. Josephine’s dairy, designed by Jean-Marie Morel, was simpler and more utilitarian than its immediate predecessors at Rambouillet or Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles. Nevertheless, to decorate the interior, Josephine requested in 1803 that Pierre Julien’s marble plaques and medallions depicting Arcadian myths, female farmers, and breastfeeding mothers be removed from the Rambouillet dairy and reinstalled in her laiterie at Malmaison.3 Julien’s statue of the nymph Amalthea, which had stood in the center of the dairy at Rambouillet, was transported that same year to ornament the floor of Napoleon’s Senate. In their new homes, the meaning of Julien’s sculptures shifted to suggest that their new owners were the true and natural inheritors of a revived golden age, and that it was these individuals who could set out to achieve what the Bourbon monarchy had failed to deliver. To be sure, Josephine’s interest in pleasure dairies, like her penchant for white muslin dresses, was driven in part by pastoral fashions that had flourished during Louis XVI’s reign and persisted during the Empire period. (Indeed, the perennial popularity of such fashions continues to this day, as evidenced by Chanel’s fall 2009 Paris runway show, which featured a mock-up of Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau flanked by models dressed in “rustic” designs DAIRY QUEENS

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and homespun fabrics parading down hay-strewn catwalks.)4 Josephine’s sister-in-law, Caroline Murat, joined her in this fascination with la vie champêtre by commissioning Pierre Fontaine to design a neoclassical dairy for her country retreat at Neuilly in 1804.5 Both the Neuilly dairy and the laiterie at Malmaison expressed nostalgia for the ancien régime and a desire to preserve historical memory that intensified in later years. Such a desire is also evidenced by the restoration and reuse of the Hameau’s pleasure dairy by Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise, and later by the Empress Eugénie, who had her own pronounced Marie-Antoinette obsession. But while these projects indulged personal fantasies, they were also politically motivated, especially Josephine’s dairy in the wake of her divorce. Replaced by a younger and more fertile wife because she had been unable to provide Napoleon with an heir, Josephine needed an alternate way to demonstrate her value and commitment to the realm. She did so by publicizing her agricultural efforts at Malmaison and by expanding her bergerie — whose breed of merinos derived from same breed that had been created at Rambouillet in the 1780s — from approximately 130 animals in 1807 to more than 2,000 by 1812.6 Visitors who came to Malmaison to tour the estate’s bucolic grounds were first brought to Morel’s dairy, where they were served a glass of healthful milk, and then to the sheep farm, where they witnessed copious amounts of wool being produced to outfit Napoleon’s soldiers with uniforms. Despite her status as a divorcée, which might in other circumstances have led to her being ostracized by her contemporaries, Josephine derived a satisfying blend of pleasure, profit, sociability, and self-worth from her farming activities. Moreover, she was publicly praised for her endeavors by the politician and author Alexandre de Laborde, who wrote of her bergerie, “It is extremely gratifying to see persons in power giving the example of a kind of industry, so beneficial to the state.”7 Like other “dairy queens” before her, part of Josephine’s success depended on her ability to express her power in socially acceptable and virtuous rather than mercenary or threatening ways. It was a strategy of representation that well served other enterprising, nineteenth-century domestic goddesses like Isabella Beeton, an icon of Victorian consumer capitalism who described her own dairying practices in her bestselling Book of Household Management of 1861.8 Adopting a veneer of retiring, feminine domesticity helped Beeton and her legion of successors, from Marjorie Child Husted (the creator of the all-American housewife persona “Betty Crocker”) to Martha Stewart, gain entry into corporate and financial arenas dominated by men. Even Hillary Clinton, who one might think would need no such veneer, was E P I LO G U E

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obliged during her husband’s first presidential campaign to submit a recipe for chocolate chip cookies to Family Circle magazine after she claimed that she didn’t just want to “stay home and bake cookies” when he was elected Governor of Arkansas.9 But in spite of such efforts (and in echoes of the misogynist criticism leveled at Catherine de’ Medici and Marie-Antoinette), many have resented the “aggressive” rise to power of influential public women like Clinton and Stewart, excessively celebrating the former’s failed presidential bid in 2008 or the latter’s public demise after she was convicted of insider trading in 2004. For her part, Stewart continued to use her domestic identity as a comfort and a shield during this difficult period. In a press conference held in September 2004, just before starting her prison sentence, Stewart declared that while she would miss spending the holidays at home with her dogs, horses, and chickens — housed in a luxurious “Palais de Poulet” on her Connecticut farm — she hoped to be back at her estate by early March “to plant a new spring garden.” The reporter Dan Ackman, who covered the conference for Forbes.com, responded to her statement with this retort: There is small chance of that happening. Attending prison isn’t like booking a week at a spa. It generally takes about sixty days for the prison officials to find a bed for a new inmate. Perhaps she will be out by May, in time for the start of wedding season, or to deliver Martha Stewart Living’s first quarter results.10 In the nineteenth century, as dairies and their laborers became tied to the Industrial Revolution and a burgeoning agribusiness, they also served as metaphors for a simpler, more natural form of existence. This mode of representation was often appropriated by industrialists themselves, including the dairy entrepreneur William Harley (whose city-wide Glasgow dairy was built in 1802), to mask or justify their commercial ventures. It continues to be utilized today in advertising campaigns and cultural figures like “Alice in Dairyland,” a young woman chosen annually from a crop of “wholesome,” small-town beauty queens to represent the Wisconsin dairy industry.11 Recalling to some extent the ancien régime rose girls who preceded her, Alice exemplifies the extent to which such prelapsarian agricultural values have long been coded feminine. This gendered association, which assumes an essentialist link between women, nature, and an earlier period of human development that is both idealized and viewed as inferior, also crops up in nineteenth-century novels like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) — where the milkmaid Tess embodies a lost connection to the earth — DAIRY QUEENS

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and in nostalgic pastoral paintings of Norman milkmaids by the French artists Julien Dupré and Jean-François Millet.12 Like their ancien régime predecessors, nineteenth-century dairies could be both regressive and modern. In 1858, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, whose status as a foreign-born consort made his own political role difficult to navigate, commissioned an extravagant Royal Dairy in Windsor Home Park. Designed in a Victorian Gothic style by John Thomas with Albert’s collaboration, the dairy’s interior was elegantly outfitted with Minton tiles and porcelain bowls filled with milk supplied by Jersey cows.13 In sponsoring this project, Albert not only furthered a long-standing tradition of aristocratic estate management, he also contributed to the formation of a recognizably British aesthetic and to Victorian industrial manufacturing, just as he had done a few years earlier at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the comte d’Angiviller, Albert keenly understood the artistic, commercial, and political potential of pleasure dairies. His endorsement of a nationalist style of architecture (in this case, Victorian Gothic) and of British rural values would later emerge in the patronage of his descendants, most recently Prince Charles, who in the late 1980s sponsored the creation of Poundbury, an Olde English town or “hamlet” in Dorset.14 A concern for national morality, health, and social welfare underlay the creation of numerous American landscape projects in the second half of the nineteenth century, including New York City’s Central Park. In 1869 – 1870, a few years before the dawn of the progressive era, the architect Calvert Vaux designed a dairy for this picturesque landscape that resembled a cross between a Swiss chalet and a Gothic church. Vaux built his dairy at the end of a one-mile-long road that was used to transport needy, working-class mothers and children from downtown Manhattan into the park’s restorative pastoral grounds.15 This practice was intended to redress harm caused by the city’s overcrowded living quarters and by a greedy, unregulated dairy industry that fed New York residents and their children an unsafe product. Positioned right in the center of what would soon become the world’s capital of finance and commerce, the Central Park Dairy both mitigated and amplified anxieties about rapid, unprecedented urban change and its potentially deleterious effects. In the twentieth century, as the U.S. dairy industry continued to churn out enormous profits, fresh or liquid milk became synonymous with American values and good health. In the mid-1950s, the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, tried to import this model into his own country, to release France from what he felt was its damaging dependence on wine and reclaim dairying as a source of national pride. To reinforce his political E P I LO G U E

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Figure E.2 Pierre Mendès-France as a guest on Meet the Press, November 21, 1954. Courtesy of the Library of Congress and Meet the Press/NBC

message, Mendès-France sipped milk during his speeches, and he famously drank milk and touted its benefits during a November 21, 1954, appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press (Figure E.2). Mendès-France’s promotion of this “patriotic” beverage resembled earlier attempts to nationalize milk, including journal articles published during the Napoleonic war years by the food writer Grimod de la Reynière. In one of these articles, which appeared in the periodical L’épicurien français (1808 – 1816), Grimod had sought to placate his readers’ fears about food shortages and trade embargoes by claiming, “as long as they [i.e. the French provinces] furnish the mère-patrie with milk, her

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Figure E.3 Josephine Baker in her dairy at the château de Les Milandes, France, probably early 1950s. Private Collection

children will be robust and alert and bold. Let us leave sweets to the children, tea to the English and spices to palace people.”16 Ironically, MendèsFrance’s patriotic proclamations led some of his compatriots to ridicule him or accuse him of being in cahoots with the American dairy industry. In his 1957 essay “Wine and Milk,” Roland Barthes poked fun at the prime minister’s habit of drinking milk “as Popeye eats spinach,” asserting in the same paragraph that milk, perhaps because of its uncomfortably American or feminine associations, “remains an exotic substance; it is wine which is part of the nation.”17

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In the same year that Mendès-France spoke on U.S. television, France’s most famous naturalized citizen, the Missouri-born entertainer Josephine Baker, left Paris and retired to her fifteenth-century château at Les Milandes in the rural Dordogne.18 Raised in poverty, Baker had enjoyed a phenomenally successful career on the French stage, and she continued her performance at Les Milandes, where she assumed the roles of industrious estate manager and benevolent mother. While attempting to transform Les Milandes into a spectacle of pastoral productivity, she also adopted a “Rainbow Tribe” of twelve orphans from multiethnic backgrounds as a utopian experiment in social harmony. (By coincidence, Marie-Antoinette was also rumored to have adopted twelve peasant families and to have brought them to her Versailles hamlet for a similar purpose. Josephine, who referred to Les Milandes as her “little hamlet,” slept there in a bed that she claimed had belonged to the ill-fated French queen.19) Like Marie-Antoinette, Baker had a fondness for animals and dairies, and she established a model farm at her château, which provided her with another venue to perform for the more than 500,000 tourists who visited Les Milandes between 1954 and 1959. For the dairy attached to this farm, Josephine stipulated that each cow be given her own stall, and that their names be spelled out in blue neon so that they would feel more like “stars” and therefore produce more milk.20 A photograph of Baker, probably taken in the early 1950s, depicts her in a pristine white shirt and full makeup milking one of these cows, with an expression of pure yet canny delight on her face (Figure E.3). In the photograph, Baker declares herself to be the heiress to the tradition of pastoral “camp” as embraced by the eighteenth-century landscape designer Louis de Carmontelle (see Chapter 4 and Figure 4.14). In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag likened the camp impulse, whose origins she located in eighteenth-century forms like picturesque gardens, to “a vision of the world in terms of style,” a mode of “see[ing] everything in quotation marks.”21 Baker’s campy dairy, along with her other cultural productions — her very life, in fact — persistently blurred the boundaries between nature and artifice, reality and performance. Like the ancien régime women who preceded her, Baker remains an ambiguous and controversial figure, someone who is both celebrated for subverting essential stereotypes of race and femininity and critiqued for mocking or furthering those stereotypes at the same time. In our own era of media saturation and tabloid camp, the potential for performance in dairies and other pastoral art forms seems entirely familiar, if not a bit banal. We immediately recognize Marie-Antoinette in Paris Hilton’s DAIRY QUEENS

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bumbling attempts to milk a cow in her popular “reality” TV series, The Simple Life (2003 – 2007), just as we see Louis XVI plowing a field in George W. Bush’s well-publicized efforts to clear brush on his farm in Crawford, Texas. At the other end of the political spectrum, Michelle Obama’s mediasavvy vegetable garden, planted on the White House lawn in the summer of 2009, is not immune from the charge of political theater, providing fodder for the administration’s critics just as Barack Obama’s penchant for “fancy” arugula was mocked during the 2008 presidential campaign.22 In the August 24, 2003 edition of the New York Times, an article entitled “For 150,000, a Neo-Classical You” described the work of the American painter James Childs, who makes his living (or did before the financial crash) painting wealthy financiers and CEOs as landed gentry in front of their McMansions and manicured lawns. Indeed, far from dying out in our contemporary age, the pastoral genre continues to thrive in a wide range of political and cultural theaters, offering rich terrain for self-expression, tragedy, and farce.

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Notes All translations from the French are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. INTRODUCTION

1. Analogies can be drawn between the kind of elite “work” enacted in pleasure dairies and that described by Mimi Hellman in “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth­ Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, no. 4 (summer 1999): 415 – 445. 2 An important exception is Johannes Langner, “L’architecture pastorale sous Louis XVI,” Art de France, 3 (1963): 170 – 186. Langner provides a chronol­ ogy for the laiterie d’agrément and lists sources that have been foundational for my own research. However, most of his analysis concerns pleasure dairies built during the reign of Louis XVI, and he focuses on Marie­Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet, a pattern repeated in later scholarship. See Carolin C. Young, “Marie­Antoinette’s Dairy at Ram­ bouillet,” The Magazine Antiques, 158, no. 4 (October 2000): 542 – 553; and numer­ ous articles by Annick Heitzmann (cited in Chapters 4 and 5) that recon­ struct the history of the Hameau and Rambouillet dairies. Additional sources related to the decoration and furnishing of the Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet are cited in Chapter 5. Pleasure dairies also make an appearance in survey books on eighteenth­century French gardens and garden buildings, among them Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Eleanor P. DeLorme, Garden Pavilions and the Eighteenth-Century French Court

(Woodbridge, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1996). 3 Although the subject matter of Dairy Queens is unique, my methodological approach is informed by recent studies that have explored the interrelationship among ancien régime architectural space, landscape design, identity formation, and sociopolitical expression, among them Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1997); and Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550 – 1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002). See also Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, ed. Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010). 4 Meredith Martin, “Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20, no. 3 (spring 2008): 357 – 384. 5 Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault, L’agriculture et maison rustique (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1564); Olivier de Serres, Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris: I. Métayer, 1600). In English, the word “dairy” comes from dey-ey, and refers to the place “in which the dey, or woman servant, made milk into butter and cheese.” Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scrib­ ner, 1984; revised 2004), p. 12.

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6 I discuss the maternal breastfeeding campaign and its link to pleasure dairies in Chapter 5. 7 These competitions, which took place in August 1770, July 1774, January 1779, and June 1782, are listed in Jean­Marie Pérouse de Montclos, “Les Prix de Rome”: Concours de l’Académie royale d’architecture au XVIIIe siècle; inventaire général des monuments et des richesses artistiques de la France (Paris: Berger­ Levrault/École nationale supérieure des Beaux­Arts, 1984). 8 The literature on the pastoral genre is too vast to be cited comprehensively here, but a few sources that have been especially useful to me are William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Lon­ don: Chatto and Windus, 1935); Anna­ bel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999). For the visual arts, see Luba Freedman, “The Pastoral Theme in the Visual Arts of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1983); and The Pastoral Landscape, ed. John Dixon Hunt (Washing­ ton, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992). For the French pastoral literary tradition, see La Pastorale française: De Rémi Belleau à Victor Hugo, ed. Alain Niderst (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1991). 9 Empson defines the pastoral as “the pro­ cess of putting the complex into the simple” (53). Puttenham’s description, taken from The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is quoted in The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, ed. Bryan Loughrey (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 35. 10 The poem and the banquet are described in Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm­ Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics

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on the Queen’s Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainbleau (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007). This book builds on scholarly work that examines how early modern queens and other elite women sought to fash­ ion an independent identity through works of art and architecture. Studies related to Catherine de’ Medici, Madame de Pompadour, and Marie­ Antoinette are cited in individual chap­ ters. See also Geraldine A. Johnson, “Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle,” Art History, 16, no. 3 (1993): 447 – 469; Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (Univer­ sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Helen Hills (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003); Women, Art, and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003); and Queenship in Europe 1660 – 1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Woburn Abbey, see Martin, “Inte­ riors and Interiority,” and for the Turk­ ish dairy at Beloeil, see Charles­Joseph, prince de Ligne, Coup d’Oeil sur Beloeil et sur une grande partie des jardins de l’Europe (1795 edition), trans. and ed. Basil Guy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 79. Jan Pieper, “The Arcanum ‘Pfauenin­ sel,’” Daidalos, 46 (December 1992): 78 – 94. Henriette Louise von Waldner, bar­ onne d’Oberkirch, Memoirs of the Baroness d’Oberkirch, ed. Count de Mont­ brison, vol. 1 (London: Colburn, 1852),

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p. 313. The baroness was Maria Feodo­ rovna’s friend and traveling companion. My account of ancien régime aristo­ cratic identity and its historical shift is informed by Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Guy Chaussi­ nand­Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570 – 1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay M. Smith (Uni­ versity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ versity Press, 2006). John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Amy S. Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). Jill H. Casid, “Queer(y)ing Georgic: Utility, Pleasure, and Marie Antoinette’s Ornamented Farm,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 30, no. 3 (spring 1997): 304 – 318. For the nobility’s obsession with agriculture, see Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (especially chap. 2), and André J. Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1967). Carol Blum discusses France’s population

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anxieties in Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). I analyze the neo­Hippocratic medical revival and its connection to pleasure dairies and the “milk cure” (discussed below) in Chapter 3 of this book. Pliny the Younger’s villa letters are reprinted in Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Rousseau’s conflation of milk with fem­ inine “sweetness” appears in Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997), p. 372. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xiv. Sarah Maza examines the revival of this feudal ritual in “The Rose­Girl of Salency: Representations of Virtue in Prerevolutionary France,” EighteenthCentury Studies, 22, no. 3 (spring 1989): 395 – 412. La rosière appears in vol. 2 of Proverbes et comédies posthumes de Carmontel, précédés d’une notice par Madame la comtesse de Genlis (Paris: Ladvocat, 1825). Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 78. Jacques­François Blondel, De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, et de la décoration des édifices en général, vol. 1 (Paris: Charles­Antoine Jombert, 1737 – 1738), p. 16. Quoted in Langner, “L’architecture pastorale,” p. 172. Blondel, Cours d’architecture, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint, 1771 – 1777), pp. 69 – 70.

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26 Claude­Henri Watelet, Essay on Gardens: A Chapter in the French Picturesque Translated into English for the First Time, ed. and trans. Samuel Danon, with an introduction by Joseph Disponzio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl­ vania Press, 2003), p. 29. Danon writes that the dairy was “most probably” designed by Boucher on p. 83. The Moulin Joli dairy is described in a docu­ ment in the Archives Nationales de France (AN) MC, LVII, 579. See also Françoise Arquié­Bruley, “Watelet, Marguerite Le Comte et le Moulin Joli d’après les Archives Nationales,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (1998): 131 – 156. 27 “Ordonnance promulguée par le prince de Condé, en date du 1er juillet 1786,” reprinted in Gustave Loisel, Histoire des ménageries de l’antiquité à nos jours, vol. 1 (Paris: O. Doin et fils, 1912), pp. 351 – 352. 28 The myth of the fleur­de­lis appears in Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston, ed. Frederic L. Cheyette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 204. The Chantilly dairy rituals are discussed in Chapter 2 of the present book. 29 Jacques Toudouze, Journal des chasses de SAS Monseigneur le Prince de Conde (1748 – 1785), Musée Condé, Chantilly, Ms. 371, 372. See, e.g., entries dated July 18, 1755; July 10, 1769; July 15, 1770; July 3, 1776; June 2, 1777; July 29, 1777; June 25, 1779; and June 4, 1781. 30 In addition to Hellman’s article on the “work of leisure” cited above, I am also drawing upon Johan Huizinga’s analy­ sis of play and its cultural importance in Homo Ludens: A Study of the PlayElement in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

31 Méré is quoted in Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art, p. 126. Catherine Cusset references Aristotle’s poetics in relation to the agreeable/useful dichotomy in No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment (Charlottes­ ville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 8. In Siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1768), Voltaire writes, “The art of gardens was created and perfected by Le Nôtre for the agreeable, and La Quintinie for the useful” (p. 227). 32 In The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (New York: Palgrave, 2001), Marisa Linton writes that bienfaisance was viewed as the opposite of aristo­ cratic honnêteté because it was charitable rather than solipsistic (p. 71). 33 Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse, p. 372. 34 The works of these historians, among them Jill Casid, Lynn Hunt, Sarah Maza, Mary Sheriff, and Caroline Weber, are cited in Chapter 4. 35 De Serres, Le théâtre d’agriculture, p. 260. A portion of de Serres’s description is quoted in Langner, “L’architecture pastorale,” p. 170. 36 Claire Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (Phila­ delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 193 – 199. 37 Jennifer Spinks, “Education and Entertainment: The Redecoration of Marie­Adélaïde of Savoy´s Menagerie at Versailles,” Melbourne Art Journal, 6 (2003): 25 – 34. 38 See the short story La femme hermite by the salonnière Madame de Lambert in Oeuvres de Madame la Marquise de Lambert (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1747). 39 A number of scholars have analyzed how the practice of masquerade in early modern Europe was used by elites to reaffirm rather than dismantle class

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(and gender) distinctions. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top: Sym­ bolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe,” in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1978), pp. 147 – 190; and Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), who argues that reasserting hierarchy and difference through mas­ querade only began to occur in the eighteenth century. 40 Sarah Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited: The Case of the Missing Queen,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Balti­ more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 63 – 89.

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1 . CaTheRINe De’ MeDICI, The FReNCh Cybele

1 The program and festivities of the Royal Tour, including the warm­up events at Fontainebleau, are described in Victor E. Graham and W. McAllister Johnson, eds., The Royal Tour of France by Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici: Festivals and Entries 1564 – 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). The book reprints and analyzes Abel Jouan’s Recueil et discours du voyage de Charles IX, written by a royal clerk and pub­ lished in 1566 – 1567. 2 Unless otherwise noted, biographical and historical background information for this chapter is taken from R. J. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici (London: Longman, 1998); and Leonie Frieda, Catherine de’ Medici (London: Weiden­ feld and Nicholson, 2003). 3 Félix Herbet, L’ancien Fontainebleau; Histoire de la ville, rues, maisons, habi-

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tants au XVIIe siècle (Fontainebleau: Maurice Bourges, 1912), p. 221. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, p. 24. Pierre de Ronsard, “Bergerie,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1950), p. 928. Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm­Maddox analyze this poem in Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen’s Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainbleau (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007). Quoted and translated in Scott and Sturm­Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics, p. 84. In Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), Katherine Crawford has demonstrated how Catherine de’ Medici “created a new logic of politi­ cal entitlement based on her confor­ mity with accepted notions of gender and power” (24). Although Crawford doesn’t discuss architecture or mention Catherine’s dairies, her argument res­ onates strongly with their political sig­ nificance and use. Herbet, L’ancien Fontainebleau, p. 221. See also Scott and Sturm­Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics, pp. 96 – 98; and Louis Dimier, Le Primatice: Peintre, sculpteur et architecte des rois de France (Paris: E. Leroux, 1900), pp. 195 – 197, 374. Catherine acquired the property through an intermediary, Guillaume Moynier, an upholsterer to the king. Herbet, L’ancien Fontainebleau, p. 221. The Mi­voie’s destruction in 1702 is documented in Jules Guiffrey, Comptes de bâtiments du roi sous le règne de Louis XIV, vol. 4 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881 – 1901), p. 819.

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10 Frieda, Catherine de’ Medici, p. 75. The amount of payment for the Mi­voie is recorded in Herbet, L’ancien Fontainebleau, p. 221. 11 Liliane Chatelet­Lange, “Philibert Delorme à Montceaux­en­Brie: Le pavillon de la grotte,” Architectura, 2 (1973): 153 – 170. 12 Account entries pertaining to the dairy and its decoration are reprinted in Léon de Laborde, Les comptes des bâtiments du roi (1528 – 1571), vol. 2 (Paris: J. Baur, 1877 – 1880), pp. 48 – 49, 66 – 67, 96, 129, 195. Because these entries denote when the work was paid for, not nec­ essarily when it was executed, it is pos­ sible that the renovations started prior to 1560. An entry from 1562 (p. 66) indicates that the dairy had “just been built” (“naguerré edifiée de neuf ”). 13 Adam Pérelle (attr.), “Veuë des Cas­ cades et de l’Estang de Fontaine­bleau,” later published in Veues des belles maisons de France, fait par Perelle (Paris: I. Mariette, 17 —). 14 Catherine de’ Medici’s architectural and landscape patronage is discussed in Nicola Courtright, “A Garden and a Gallery at Fontainebleau: Imagery of Rule for Medici Queens,” Court Historian, 10, no. 1 (December 2005): 55 – 84; Sabine Frommel, Gerhard Wolf, and Flaminia Bardati, eds., Il mecenatismo di Caterina de’ Medici: Poesia, feste, musica, pittura, scultura, architettura (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); and several articles by Sheila ffolliott, cited below. Vincent Droguet address the Medici connection, and discusses the Mi­voie, in “De l’agrément à la splen­ deur: Le goût de Catherine de Médicis pour l’architecture et les jar­ dins,” in Il mecenatismo di Caterina de’ Medici, pp. 305 – 326. I would like to thank M. Droguet for generously sharing an earlier, unpublished version

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of his article with me along with other research materials related to the Mi­Voie and cassine at Saint­Maur. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (De re aedificatoria), trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 294. See also James Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). The Mi­voie is also referred to as a menagerie in a 1731 description by Pierre Guilbert; see Description historique des château, bourg et forest de Fontainebleau, vol. 2 (Paris: André Cailleau, 1731), p. 118. I discuss the con­ nection between pleasure dairies and menageries in Chapter 2. Mary Whiteley, “Late Medieval Royal Maisons des Champs in France,” in Maisons des champs dans l’Europe de la Renaissance: Actes des premières rencontres d’architecture européenne, château de Maisons, 10 – 13 juin 2003, ed. Monique Chatenet (Paris: Picard, 2006), pp. 99 – 104. See also Claude Mignot’s essay “La villégiature cardinalice en France au XVIe siècle: Continuités, ruptures et avatars” in the same volume. G. E. Fussell, “The Classical Tradition in West European Farming: The Six­ teenth Century,” Economic History Review, 22, no. 3 (1969): 538 – 551. The French translations of Vitruvius and Alberti were by Jean Martin. Cathe­ rine’s library inventory, which lists trea­ tises by Vitruvius, Serlio, and Alberti, is partially reprinted in Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, Notice sur la bibliothèque de Catherine de Médicis, in Bulletin du bibliophile (1858): 915 – 941.

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19 Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (Paris: Flam­ marion, 2003), pp. 61 – 62. 20 Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, publiées par M. le comte Hector de la Ferrière, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1880 – 1943); letter from October 28, 1571; quoted in Droguet, “De l’agrément à la splendeur,” pp. 318 – 319. Saint­Maur had originally been designed for the car­ dinal du Bellay in the early 1540s by Philibert de l’Orme. Catherine acquired the château in 1563 and began renovat­ ing it in 1566. See Monique Kitaeff, “Le château de Saint­Maur­des­Fossés,” Fondation Eugène Piot: Monuments et mémoires, 75 (1996): 65 – 126. 21 Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The circulation of dairy products as diplomatic gifts during the Renais­ sance is analyzed by Deborah L. Krohn in “Say It with Eels: Toward the Mate­ rial Culture of Food in Early Modern Italy,” paper presented at the “Novelty, Trade, and Exchange in the Renais­ sance Interior” conference at the Vic­ toria and Albert Museum in 2003. 22 Henri Estienne (attr.), Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions, et deportemens de Catherine de Médicis Royne-mère (Paris, 1575). 23 Crawford, Perilous Performances, p. 24. For more on the Salic law see Sarah Hanley, “The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate over Female Exclusion,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1998), pp. 289 – 304. 24 Robert Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 43. Filarete’s biological model

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of architectural patronage is described in Luisa Giordano, “On Filarete’s Libro architettonico,” in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 56. Philibert de l’Orme, Le premier tome de l’architecture (Paris: Fédéric Morel, 1567). Letters that Primaticcio wrote to Catherine while she was on her Royal Tour are reprinted in Henri Stein, “Quelques lettres inédits du Primatice,” Annales de la Société historique et archéologique du Gâtinais, 28 (1910): 307 – 325. David Coffin writes that there is “increasingly convincing evidence” that Lorenzo designed the villa himself in his review of Philip Ellis Foster’s A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa at Poggio a Caiano published in Burlington Magazine, 122, no. 926 (May 1980), p. 350. What little information we know about Catherine’s early childhood is discussed in Jean Héritier, Les premières années de Catherine de Médicis (Paris: A. Fayard, 1939). Her presence at Poggio a Caiano and the site’s possible influence on her is also pointed out in Scott and Sturm­ Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics, p. 83, and Droguet, “De l’agrément à la splendeur,” p. 318. Catherine Grodecki and Monique Kitaeff, “Saint­Maur en 1570: Les deux projets de Catherine de Médicis,” Bulletin Monumental, 158, no. 3 (2000): 205. Philip Ellis Foster, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Cascina at Poggio a Caiano,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 14 (1969): 47 – 56. Foster reprints the portion of the inventory pertaining to the dairy on pp. 54 – 55. Foster, A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa at Poggio a Caiano, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: University Microforms Inter­

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national, 1978), p. 80. Michele Verino is quoted in Foster, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Cascina at Poggio a Caiano,” p. 50. Annabel M. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1987), p. 64. Quoted in Foster, A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa, p. 65. See Angelo Poliziano, Silvae, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). This quotation, taken from George Puttenham’s definition of the pastoral genre in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is discussed in the Introduction to this book. Dimier, Le Primatice, p. 195. Primaticcio’s career is documented in Primatice: Maître de Fontainebleau (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), curated by Dominique Cordellier. See also Zerner, Renaissance Art in France, pp. 106 – 121. The names of the Mi­voie’s designers appear in the royal accounts. Ruggiero specialized in gro­ tesque decoration and had received a royal commission for this in 1559 – 1560 (Primatice, pp. 412, 459). Nicolò dell’Abate and Primaticcio frequently collaborated, as outlined in the Primatice catalog and in Zerner, Renaissance Art in France, pp. 109 – 112. Laborde, Les comptes des bâtiments du roi, p. 66. Ibid., p. 96. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). Vitruvius, De architectura, Book VII, p. 5; quoted in Kayser, The Grotesque in Art, p. 20. Zerner, Renaissance Art in France, pp. 120 – 121. The phrase “manipulable, artful process” is taken from Stephen

41

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45

Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 2. Castiglione’s book was enormously popular in France; it went through three separate translations and twenty­ three editions between 1537 and 1592. See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 63. Sylvie Béguin, Jean Guillaume, and Alain Roy reconstruct this gallery based on surviving documents in La galerie d’Ulysse à Fontainebleau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). They identify du Cerceau’s engraving with the vault’s sixth and tenth compartments. Primatice, catalog entries 144, 146, and 148. E. H. Gombrich, “The Sala dei Venti in the Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950): 189 – 201. The astrological dec­ oration of the Palazzo Schifanoia is analyzed in Aby Warburg’s “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912), reprinted in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Italian Renaissance, intro. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humani­ ties, 1999), pp. 732 – 758. Dominique Cordellier, “Précisions sur l’activité de Francesco Primaticcio et de son entourage au temps de Catherine de Médicis,” in Il mecenatismo di Caterina de’ Medici, pp. 241 – 242. Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). One of the faux hieroglyphs represented in the Louvre drawing, the symbol of a pair of crossed

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48 49

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palm fronds, resembles a similar motif from the Hypnerotomachia (illustrated in Curran, p. 141). Kent Hieatt and Anne Lake Prescott, “Contemporizing Antiquity: The Hypnerotomachia and Its Afterlife in France,” Word and Image, 8, no. 4 (1992): 291 – 321; Anthony Blunt, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in Seventeenth Cen­ tury France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1 (1937 – 1938): 117 – 137. William Newman and Anthony Grafton, “The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, eds. Newman and Grafton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 1 – 38. Frances Yates makes a similar distinc­ tion in her definition of “astral magic,” which “is quite a different thing from astrology proper, being a way of escape from astrological determinism by teach­ ing how to control and use the stellar influences.” See Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 115. Béguin et al., La galerie d’Ulysse à Fontainebleau, p. 145. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1957). Hanley, “The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France.” Luisa Capodieci, “Art et tradition her­ métique à la cour de Catherine de Médicis (1547 – 1581),” vol. 1 (Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris I Panthéon­ Sorbonne, 2005), p. 54; Le Roux de Lincy, Notice sur la bibliothèque, p. 918. Some of Catherine’s fertility treatments are described in Frieda, Catherine de’ Medici, p. 59.

52 Jean Liébault, Thrésor des remèdes secrets pour les maladies des femmes (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1585), pp. 4 – 5. Marinel­ lo’s original title was Le Medecine partenenti alle infermita delle donne (1563). 53 Courtright discusses Catherine’s appro­ priation of Henri’s apartment in “A Garden and a Gallery at Fontaine­ bleau,” p. 61. 54 Lucile M. Golson, “Serlio, Primaticcio, and the Architectural Grotto,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 77 (1971): 95 – 108. Some scholars have argued that Serlio was the grotto’s principal designer, whereas others (including Golson) attribute it to Primaticcio. As Zerner attests, Prima­ ticcio was in charge of the grotto’s inte­ rior decoration (Renaissance Art in France, p. 432). 55 The Meudon grotto is discussed in Golson and Margaret McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 177 – 179. 56 Leonard N. Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), pp. 32 – 40, 238; Kerrie­Rue Michahelles, “Catherine de Medici’s 1589 Inventory at the Hôtel de la Reine in Paris,” Furniture History, 38 (2002): 8. 57 Scott and Sturm­Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics, p. 97. 58 Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Pimlico, 1975), pp. 133 – 134. 59 Estienne (attr.), Discours merveilleux; translated into English in 1575 as A Mervaylous Discourse vpon the Lyfe, Deedes, and Behaviours of Katherine de Medicis Queene Mother, p. 19. 60 Quoted in Maguelonne Toussaint­ Samat, A History of Food, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 612.

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61 Primatice, pp. 68 – 73, 186 – 101 (essays by Ugo Bazzotti and Dominique Cor­ dellier). Roussel’s work for Catherine is discussed in Primatice, pp. 35 – 36 (essay by Geneviève Bresc­Bautier). 62 Yates, Astraea, pp. 133 – 134. 63 Nicolas Houel, “L’histoire de la Reine Artémise” (1562), Bibliothèque Nation­ ale (BN), Est Ad 105 Rés f. 2 vol. There is a microform copy in the BN dépar­ tement des Manuscrits. Sheila ffolliott discusses Houel’s text in “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 227 – 241; “Exemplarity and Gender: Three Lives of Catherine de’ Medici,” in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 321 – 340; and “Women in the Garden of Allegory: Catherine de Médicis and the Locus of Female Rule,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 207 – 224. 64 ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia,” p. 232. 65 Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, pp. 6, 25. 66 Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 101 – 103; and Stephen Murphy, “Catherine, Cybele, and Ronsard’s Witness,” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early

67 68

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Modern France, ed. Kathleen Perry Long (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 55 – 70. Murphy relays several instances in which Ronsard compares Catherine to Cybele, including a 1555 ode in which Ronsard describes her as “une autre mère Cybelle” (p. 55). Laborde, Les comptes des bâtiments du roi, p. 66. Vincent Droguet has also proposed a connection between the dairy’s decora­ tion and the story of Amalthea, based on the nymph’s “protecting and nurtur­ ing” character and on the connection between the Mi­voie and the building type of an amaltheum (“De l’agrément à la splendeur,” p. 321). Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, pp. 114 – 115. Jean Ehrmann, Antoine Caron: Peintre des fêtes et des massacres (Paris: Flam­ marion, 1986), p. 85. R. Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 74, 83 – 84. The figure of Amal­ thea was linked to Christian symbolism at Pius IV’s Vatican Casino, a project initiated in 1558. See Graham Smith, The Casino of Pius IV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Droguet, “De l’agrément à la splendeur,” p. 321; Le Roux de Lincy, Notice sur la bibliothèque, pp. 931 – 932. Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 211 – 217. Two of these paint­ ings are in the British Royal Collec­ tions; the third is in the National Gal­ lery in London. See John Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press,

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1983), pp. 126 – 131. Shearman disputes Hartt’s theory that they were intended for a single room in the Palazzo Ducale. Stefania Massari, Giulio Romano pinxit et delineavit: Opere grafiche autografe di collaborazione e bottega (Rome: F.lli Palombi, 1993), p. 71. For Poussin’s paint­ ings of Amalthea, see Nicolas Poussin, 1594 – 1665, ed. Richard Verdi (London: Zwemmer in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, 1995), pp. 207 – 208. Bruce L. Edelstein, “La fecundissima Signora Duchessa: The Courtly Persona of Eleonora di Toledo and the Icono­ graphy of Abundance,” in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. Konrad Eisen­ bichler (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 71 – 97. Primatice, pp. 341 – 343. The drawing resembles the artist’s work for the Ulysses gallery. Sylvie Béguin and Francesca Piccinini, Nicolò Dell’Abate: Storie dipinte nella pittura del Cinquecento tra Modena e Fontainebleau (Milan: Silvana, 2005), catalog no. 243. Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Kristen Neuschel describes how nobles “expected relationships and sta­ tus to be enacted” in Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in SixteenthCentury France (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1989), quoted in Scott and Sturm­Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics, p. 198. Frieda, Catherine de’ Medici, p. 125, and Casimir Chevalier, Histoire de Chenonceau, ses artistes, ses fêtes, ses vicissitudes (Lyon: L. Perrin, 1868), p. 342.

80 Diane de Poitiers’s famed milk baths are mentioned by several of her biog­ raphers; the reference to her drinking gold appears in an article published in 2009 in the British Medical Journal. See “A Gold Elixir of Youth in the 16th­ Century French Court,” December 16, 2009. 81 Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, vol. 1, letter dated April 20, 1563. Catherine refers to the ability of court entertain­ ments to instill peace in a letter that she wrote to Charles IX, in which she claims to have learned this tactic from Francis I. Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, vol. 2, p. 92, quoted in Margaret McGowan, “The Arts Conjoined: A Context for the Study of Music,” Early Music History, 13 (1994): 174 – 175. 82 Roy C. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450 – 1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1987), p. 103. These festivals are described in Chevalier, Histoire de Chenonceau, pp. 313 – 340. 83 The Bayonne fêtes are described in Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, where they reprint some of the sixteenth­century accounts. The report that Catherine wanted to do something “rustic” and “different” is taken from Recueil des choses notables qui ont esté faictes à Bayonne (Paris, 1566), reprinted as Appendix 21. The reference to “les fruicts de Sibelle feconde” appears on p. 114. 84 Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, p. 29. The event itself is described on pp. 42 – 44. For Margue­ rite’s account, see Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, sér. 1, vol. 37, ed. M. Petitot (Paris: Foucault, 1819 – 1829), pp. 322 – 324. 85 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), pp. 83 – 85.

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86 These rituals resonate with other forms of “inversion” explored by Natalie Zemon Davis in “Women on Top: Sym­ bolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe,” in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1978), pp. 147 – 190. 87 Supposed similarities between Cathe­ rine de’ Medici and Marie­Antoinette are evoked in a Revolutionary­era pam­ phlet entitled Catherine de’ Medici in Marie-Antoinette’s Cabinet at SaintCloud, BN LB39­4562. The pamphlet imagines a conversation between the two queens in which Catherine teaches her successor how to “take back her empire” by using violence and force. 88 Documents pertaining to the cassine are in the Archives de Chantilly, Série F, carton 1. In their article “Saint­Maur en 1570,” Grodecki and Kitaeff cite an archival document from October 1570 indicating that Catherine’s master mason, Raphaël Hameau, had permis­ sion to take sand from the grounds of the cassine to make mortar (205). They suggest that this document concerned a projected building site but do not confirm whether or not the cassine was actually built. In “De l’agrément à la splendeur” Droguet notes, based on her 1571 letter to Cosimo, that Catherine possessed a model farm at Saint­ Maur but does not elaborate on its construction (318). 89 Information on Henri IV’s visits to Saint­Maur, which are documented in the Journal de Henri IV (1602 – 1607), is taken from the Archives de Val­de­ Marne dossier, 2 J 4. 90 The cassine’s layout is described in a 1660 sale document (AC, Série F, car­ ton 1), and the furnishings are listed in

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the “Inventaire après décès de Louis de Bourbon” (1710), AC, Série A, 116 D. Kitaeff, “Le château de Saint­Maur.” Gourville’s activities at Saint­Maur are described in his memoirs, first pub­ lished in 1782. See Jean Hérault, sieur de Gourville, Mémoires (Paris: Mercure de France, 2004). Gourville, Mémoires, p. 217. Marie de Rabutin­Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, Selected Lettres, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), letters dated October 12, 1677, and January 29, 1690. Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, Oeuvres diverses de M. L. de Chaulieu, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Z. Chatelain, 1733), pp. 8 – 24. These repairs included reinstalling and repainting the garden’s trellising. See AC, Série CF, carton 7, “Mémoire des ouvrages peintures d’impression dor­ rures autres faits pour le service de SAS Mgr le Prince de Condé en son châ­ teau de Saint Maur et dépendances,” concerning work from 1779 through the first half of 1780. The relationship between Fouquet, Menneville, and la femme Laloy is explored in a forthcoming biography on Fouquet by Catharine Taylor, who has generously provided me with helpful information about the Mi­voie as a venue for theatrical performances in the summer of 1661. The specific plays are cited in Georges Monval, Chronologie Molièresque (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1897), p. 121. The reference to Henri IV’s milkman appears in Herbet, L’ancien Fontainebleau, p. 221. The king’s promenades are reported in Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Louis XIV, ed. M. de Lescure, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1888), p. 119.

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2. absOlUTIsM aND The sexUal POlITICs OF PasTORal ReTReaT

1 Philippe de Courcillon, marquis de Dangeau, Journal du marquis de Dangeau, publié en entier pour la première fois par MM. Soulié, Dussieux, de Chennevières, Mantz, de Montaiglon, avec les additions inédites du duc de Saint-Simon, vol. 6 (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1854 – 1860), p. 30. Dangeau was the head of the duchesse de Bourgogne’s house­ hold at Versailles. Unless otherwise indi­ cated, the comments and quotations about the menagerie in the first few paragraphs of this chapter are taken from his journals. See vol. 6, pp. 136 – 137, 349 – 352, 368, 389 – 395, 401, 427 – 428, 464; vol. 7, pp. 55, 96, 132, 320. Specific dates in which the comments appear are noted in the text. 2 M. Le Grand d’Aussy, Histoire de la vie privée des Français: Depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 2 (Paris: Pierres, 1782), p. 52. One of the menag­ erie’s workmen, Claude Denis, observed that the duchess made dairy products there that Louis XIV found “admirable” (Maurice Raynal, “La manuscrit de C. Denis, fontainier de Louis XIV à Ver­ sailles,” Revue des Sociétés des Amis de Versailles, 44, no. 3 [1971], p. 14). 3 Anne­Marie­Louise d’Orléans, duch­ esse de Montpensier, Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle, ed. and trans. Joan DeJean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 49. 4 Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 67; Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 248. 5 Claire Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents

6

7

8

9

10

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12

That Made Modern France (Philadel­ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 3 – 4, 193 – 195. Although Goldstein does not discuss Louis XIV’s menagerie or dairy, her concept of royal parthenogenesis has informed my reading of these sites. Louis XIV’s invention of titles of “pure honor,” with no estate or territory attached, is noted in Alain Texier, Qu’est-ce que la noblesse? Annexes, textes et décisions jurisprudentielles, planches de blasons, lexique de droit nobiliaire, index analytique (Paris: Tallandier, 1988), p. 63. Carolyn C. Lougee, Le paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), chaps. 11 – 12. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Gérard Mabille, “La ménagerie de Versailles,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6 ser., 83 (January 1974): 5 – 36. I rely on Mabille’s article for my description of the site. In “The Birdcage of the Muses: The Seventeenth­Century Ménagerie at Versailles” (manuscript in progress), Paula Young Lee demonstrates that food production was a significant aspect of Louis XIV’s menagerie, one that has been overlooked by historians. Le Vau designed the Parterre du Tibre in the Fontainebleau gardens in 1662, according to Dietrich Feldmann’s entry on Le Vau in Grove Art Online. The best­known example of this repres­ sion is Vaux­le­Vicomte, the residence of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet. Vaux was also designed by Le Vau and reworked in numerous aspects at Versailles. See Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles.

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13 Johannes Langner, “L’architecture pas­ torale sous Louis XVI,” Art de France, 3 (1963): 172. 14 The classic study of menageries is Gustave Loisel, Histoire des ménageries de l’antiquité à nos jours, 3 vols. (Paris: O. Doin et fils, 1912). See also Marina Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe: And Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006); Sally Festing, “Menageries and the Landscape Garden,” Journal of Garden History, 8, no. 4 (1988): 104 – 117; Masumi Iriye, “Le Vau’s Menagerie and the Rise of the animalier: Enclos­ ing, Dissecting, and Representing the Animal in Early Modern France” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994); and Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 15 Madeleine de Scudéry, La promenade de Versailles (Paris, 1669; Reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), p. 94. 16 Claude Perrault, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux, vol. 2 (Paris, 1671 – 1676), p. 324, cited in Robbins, Elephant Slaves, p. 44. 17 Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Mary Morton (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), p. 140. 18 Michel Conan, “The Conundrum of Le Nôtre’s Labyrinthe,” in Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods, ed. John Dixon Hunt (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992), pp. 119 – 150. 19 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 203.

20 Olivier de Serres, Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris: I. Métayer, 1600), p. 260. 21 This explains why octagons were fre­ quently used in the design of baptister­ ies at Pisa and elsewhere. See Eloise M. Angiola, “Nicola Pisano, Federigo Visconti, and the Classical Style in Pisa,” Art Bulletin, 59, no. 1 (March 1977): 8. 22 Both quotations from Félibien in this paragraph are taken from Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles, p. 195. Though she does not mention Aristotle, Goldstein does compare Félibien’s analogy to theories of biological generation and argues that his model of creation pre­ supposes a “single masculine parent.” For a similar biological or parental model of patronage, but one that has different gender implications, see my discussion of Filarete and Catherine de’ Medici in Chapter 1 of this book. 23 Elizabeth Hyde has made a similar argument in relation to Louis XIV’s extensive use of flowers at Versailles and elsewhere; see Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. xx. 24 Elias, The Court Society, p. 42. 25 Loisel, Histoire des ménageries, p. 112. Ultimately, he decreed that they should be larger and higher up the wall. 26 These diplomatic visits are discussed in Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin, Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV (Philadel­ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). For the dairy at Poggio a Caiano see Chapter 1 of the present book. 27 It is interesting to note that Louis XIV’s development of the menagerie and gardens at Versailles coincided with “the worst famine of the seventeenth cen­

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28

29

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31

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tury.” See Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1987), p. 22. Denis Diderot, “Ménageries,” in Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: Briasson, 1751 – 1765). Jean de La Fontaine, Oeuvres diverses, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1958), p. 615, quoted and translated in Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 135. The “His” in this passage refers to Lully but implies by extension, as Cowart indi­ cates, Louis XIV. See Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure; Hyde, Cultivated Power; Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions; Robert W. Berger, In the Garden of the Sun King: Studies on the Park of Versailles Under Louis XIV (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1985); Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2000); and Sabine Du Crest, Des fêtes à Versailles: Les divertissements de Louis XIV (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1990). Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 – 1789 (Philadelphia: Univer­ sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 131 – 133. André Félibien, Relation de la fête de Versailles du dix-huit juillet mille six cent soixante-huit; Les divertissements de Versailles donnés par le Roi à toute sa cour au retour de la conquête de la FrancheComté en l’année mille six cent soixante-

33 34

35

36

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38

quatorze (Maisonneuve et Larose: Dédale, 1994). Du Crest, Des fêtes à Versailles, p. 39. Jean­Baptiste de Monicart notes the presence of Amalthea on the palace’s garden façade in Versailles immortalisé par les merveilles parlantes (Paris: E. Ganau, 1720), pp. 406 – 407. A painting by Noël Coypel entitled Amalthea Sending the Horn of Plenty to Hercules was installed at Grand Trianon in 1705. See Xavier Salmon, Pomp and Power: French Drawings from Versailles (London: The Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 2006), pp. 55 – 56. Laurent Morellet (le sieur Combes), Explication historique, de ce qu’il y a de plus remarquable dans la maison royale de Versailles, et en celle de Monsieur à Saint-Cloud (Paris: C. Nego, 1681), p. 3; quoted in Elizabeth J. MacArthur, “Nature Made Word: Guidebooks to the Gardens at Versailles,” Cahiers du dix-septième siècle, 5, no. 1 (1991): 185. Carole Fabricant traces the age­old met­ aphorical connection between nature and fertile female bodies in “Binding and Dressing Nature’s Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979): 109 – 135. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1990), pp. 35 – 36, 104 – 105. Louis Bonnaisseux, Le château de Clagny: Et Madame de Montespan (Paris: A. Picard, 1881), p. 50; Pierre de Nolhac, “Clagny,” Revue d’histoire de Versailles et de Seine-et-Oise, 2 (1900): 81 – 93. In Lepautre’s plan (see Figure 2.4), Clagny is depicted in the lower right quad­ rant, just beneath a large pool of water labeled “L’Estang.”

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39 Jules Guiffrey, Comptes des bâtiments du roi sous la règne de Louis XIV, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881 – 1901), entries dated September 11, 1676; March 19, 1677; and January 20, 1677. The dairy is also noted in a masonry report from June 18, 1681 (Archives Nationales de France O1 1869). The only information gleaned from these records is that the dairy was paved in plaster and had a wall around it. Sévigné’s comments about Clagny’s appear in Bonnaisseux, Le château de Clagny, p. 54, and Correspondance de Madame de Sévigné, ed. Roger Duchêne, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972 – 1978), p. 449. 40 Juliette Cherbuliez, “Before and Beyond Versailles: The Counter­Court of the Duchesse de Montpensier, 1652 – 1660,” Nottingham French Studies, 39, no. 2 (autumn 2000): 129 – 139; and Claude Mignot, “Mademoiselle et son château de Saint­Fargeau,” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 22, no. 42 (1995): 91 – 101. 41 Jean­Regnault de Segrais, Les nouvelles françaises, ou Les divertissements de la princesse Aurélie (1656), ed. Roger Guichemerre (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990 – ), pp. 280 – 281. 42 Anne­Marie­Louise d’Orléans, duch­ esse de Montpensier, Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, vol. 3 (Amster­ dam: J. Wetstein and G. Smith, 1746), p. 537. 43 Quoted and translated in DeJean, ed., Against Marriage, p. 33. 44 DeJean, ed., Against Marriage, p. 22. 45 Domna C. Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,” Yale French Studies, 62 (1981): 107 – 134. Molière used the term negatively, as a synonym for frivolity and affectation, in Les précieuses ridicules (1659).

46 Katharine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 50 – 73. 47 Anthony Blunt, “The Précieux and French Art,” in Fritz Saxl, 1890 – 1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England, ed. D. J. Gordon (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957), pp. 326 – 338. 48 Charles de La Fosse (attr.), La Marquise de Montespan entourée de ses quatre premiers enfants légitimés, c. 1677. Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MV8016. 49 Nikolaus Pevsner and S. Lang, “The Egyptian Revival,” in From Mannerism to Romanticism, vol. 1 of Studies in Art, Architecture, and Design, ed. Nikolaus Pevsner (New York: Walker, 1968), pp. 212 – 235; Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 310; and Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1593). 50 Morellet, Explication historique, pp. 128 – 129; quoted in Berger, In the Garden of the Sun King, p. 28. These statues, which survive today, are illustrated in Berger, fig. 59. They sit atop a set of stairs lead­ ing from the palace to the petit parc. 51 The Sceaux menagerie is described in Une journée à la cour de la duchesse du Maine, exposition du 24 septembre 2003 au 12 janvier 2004, organized by Cécile Dupont­Logié (Sceaux: Le Musée, 2003), p. 89. We know that it was fin­ ished by 1725 since it appears in the Suite des divertissements de Sceaux from that same year. 52 Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), p. 105.

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53 Une journée à la cour de la duchesse du Maine, pp. 87 – 88. The decoration for Anne of Austria’s salle basse is discussed in Pierre Rosenberg, ed., Poussin, Watteau, Chardin, David: Peintures françaises dans les collections allemandes XVIIe – XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005), catalog entries on Philippe de Champaigne. 54 Raoul de Broglie, “Le hameau et la laiterie de Chantilly,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 6 ser., 37 (October – December 1950): 309 – 324. 55 Information on the Chantilly menagerie is taken from vol. 2 of Loisel’s Histoire des ménageries. Loisel wrote the section on Chantilly with Gustave Macon. 56 Ellery Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). For more on de Serres and aménagement discourse, which was also directed at the rising bourgeoisie class, see Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions. 57 Quoted in Katia Béguin, “Les enjeux et les manifestations du mécénat aris­ tocratique à l’aube du XVIIIe siècle,” in La duchesse du Maine (1676 – 1753): Une mécène à la croisée des arts et des siècles, ed. Catherine Cessac, Manuel Couvreur, and Fabrice Preyat (Brussels: Editions de Université de Bruxelles, 2003), p. 32. 58 My account of the Isis salon and its decoration, including the prince’s cor­ respondence with Racine, is taken from Loisel, Histoire des ménageries, pp. 201 – 204. 59 Quoted in Loisel, Histoire des ménageries, p. 216. 60 Ibid., pp. 231 – 232. 61 Jean­Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997), p. 372. Croÿ’s comment

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is quoted in Broglie, “Le hameau et la laiterie de Chantilly,” p. 318. Barthélemy Martin, Traité de l’usage du lait (Paris: Denys Thiery, 1684). The dairy and its interior decoration (discussed below) are described in Loisel, Histoire des ménageries, pp. 205 – 206, and Broglie, “Le hameau et la laiterie de Chantilly,” whose account derives from the Promenade ou itinéraire des jardins de Chantilly illustrated by Mérigot fils (Paris, 1791). Geneviève Le Duc, Porcelaine tendre de Chantilly au XVIII siècle: Héritages des manufactures de Rouen, Saint-Cloud et Paris, et influences sur les autres manufactures du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 1996), pp. 267 – 270. Annick Heitzmann, “Trianon: La place de la faïence dans le château de porce­ laine,” Versalia, 8 (2005): 60 – 65. Gacon is quoted in Broglie, “Le hameau et la laiterie de Chantilly,” p. 324. I would like to thank Alexandre Gady, one of the curators of Bâtir pour le roi — Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646 – 1708) (Musée Carnavalet, 2009), for con­ firming that the ornamental details shown in the 1784 plan resemble other projects designed by Hardouin­Man­ sart. For the Sceaux orangerie, see Bertrand Jestaz, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, vol. 2 (Paris: Picard, 2008), p. 275. Mimi Hellman’s concept of the “work of leisure” has inspired my thinking about the kind of work that takes place in pleasure dairies (“Furniture, Sociabil­ ity, and the Work of Leisure in Eigh­ teenth­Century France,” EighteenthCentury Studies, 32, no. 4 [summer 1999]: 415 – 445). Louis François du Bouchet, marquis de Sourches, Mémoires du marquis de Sourches sur le règne de Louis XIV, vol. 4 (Paris: Hachette 1882 – 1893), p. 456.

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69 Fiske Kimball, “Le décor du château de la ménagerie à Versailles,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6 ser., 16 (December 1936): 245 – 256. 70 Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style (1943; Reprint New York: Dover Publications, 1980), p. 108. 71 Quoted in Kimball, “Le décor du châ­ teau de la ménagerie à Versailles,” p. 252. Kimball describes this initial pro­ posal and the revised one submitted on September 8. 72 Mabille, “La ménagerie de Versailles,” p. 26. 73 Audran’s possible sketches for the menagerie, including this drawing, are analyzed in detail in chap. 4 of Jenni­ fer Susan Spinks, “Louis XIV’s Youth­ ful Spirit: A Study of the 1699 Redeco­ ration of the Versailles Menagerie for Marie­Adélaïde, Duchesse de Bour­ gogne” (Master’s thesis, University of Tasmania, 2000). 74 Ibid., p. 165. 75 Marie­Catherine Sahut, “Le tableau du mois n. 100: Les Divertissements champêtres de Jean­Baptiste Oudry: Un rare décor d’arabesques en provenance du château de Voré,” brochure printed by the Musée du Louvre in 2003. 76 The quotation in this sentence, which refers to the nature and appearance of Audran’s arabesques, is taken from Crow, Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris, p. 59. For more on ara­ besques and their cultural role, see Crow; Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture; and Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), especially pp. 123 – 133. 77 Kimball, “Le décor du château de la ménagerie à Versailles,” p. 253. 78 These interior features appear in a c. 1770 – 1789 plan of the Versailles menag­

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erie by De Marne, now in the Archives départementales de Yvelines (A 482). Elisabeth­Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, 1652 – 1722, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), letter dated November 22, 1696. Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 262 – 286. François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses, trans. Tobias Smollett (1699; Reprint Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 267. Ibid., p. 273. H. C. Barnard, Fénelon on Education: A Translation of the “Traité de l’éducation des filles” and Other Documents Illustrating Fénelon’s Educational Theories and Practice, Together with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 15, 40, 71. Quoted and translated in Lougee, Le paradis des femmes, p. 195; a description of Maintenon’s pedagogical program is on pp. 188 – 195. See also Jean­Joseph Milhiet, Saint-Cyr, trois siècles d’histoire: Du poète Jean Racine au sculpteur César (Paris: Editions Christian, 1998), pp. 50 – 86. Lewis Carl Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690 – 1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7, 179 – 181. The Correspondence of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother of the Regent; of MarieAdélaïde de Savoie, duchesse de Bourgogne; and of Madame de Maintenon, in Relation to Saint-Cyr, ed. and trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston:

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Hardy, Pratt, 1902). See, for example, a letter to Maintenon from July 1707, in which Marie­Adélaïde apologizes for her frivolous behavior and writes that she has “thoroughly resolved to correct myself ” (p. 207). 87 Quoted in Spinks, “Louis XIV’s Youth­ ful Spirit,” p. 55. See also Spinks, “Edu­ cation and Entertainment: The Redec­ oration of Marie­Adélaïde of Savoy´s Menagerie at Versailles,” Melbourne Art Journal, 6 (2003): 25 – 34. 88 See, for example, Gobert’s portrait in the collection of the Musée National du Château de Versailles et de Trianon, MV2102. 89 Iriye, “Le Vau’s Menagerie,” p. 48. 3. healTh, hygIeNe, aND The heRMITages OF MaDaMe De POMPaDOUR

1 Colin Jones, Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (London: The National Gallery, 2002), pp. 29 – 31. The event, and the encounter, was captured in a 1746 engraving by Charles­Nicolas Cochin the Elder entitled Decoration for the Masked Ball Given by the King . . . on the Occasion of the Marriage of Louis Dauphin de France to Maria Theresa Infanta of Spain, illustrated in Jones, pp. 32 – 33. 2 Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles, along with her other hermitages, is dis­ cussed in Rose­Marie Langlois, L’ermitage de Madame de Pompadour (Lar­ gentière: Humbert et Fils, 1947); Jean Bastien, “Les ermitages,” in Madame de Pompadour et la floraison des arts, ed. Catherine Arminjon (Montreal: David M. Stewart Museum, 1988); and in catalog entries written by Pierre­Xavier Hans in Madame de Pompadour et les arts, ed. Xavier Salmon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). The ref­

erence to Pompadour’s “bon à executer” appears in a letter from Versailles build­ ing inspector Lécuyer dated October 8, 1748, now in the Archives Nationales de France (AN) O1 1810. 3 Emmanuel de Croÿ­Solre, Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ (1718 – 1784), ed. Emmanuel­Henri de Grouchy and Paul Cottin, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1906 – 1907), p. 264. Richelieu’s com­ ments appear in Louis François Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, Mémoires du maréchal duc de Richelieu, vol. 9 (Paris: Buisson), p. 166. The duc de Luynes visited the hermitage in November 1748 and described its layout in Mémoires du duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV (1735-1758), vol. 9 (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, fils et cie, 1860 – ), p. 254. A second story was added to the build­ ing around 1781, when the complex was given to Louis XV’s daughters, the Mesdames. 4 Several historians have written about Pompadour’s use of portraiture, archi­ tecture, and decorative arts to shape and express her identity. Some accounts that have been especially useful for me are Alden R. Gordon, “The Art Patronage of the Marquise de Pompadour and the Marquis de Marigny, in La volupté du goût: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour, eds. Penelope Hunter­ Stiebel and Philippe Le Leyzour (Port­ land: Portland Art Museum, 2008): 38 – 57; Melissa Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour at Her Toi­ lette,” Art Bulletin, 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 453 – 475; Ewa Lajer­Burcharth, “Pompadour’s Touch: Difference in Representation,” Representations, 73 (2001): 54 – 88; and Katie Scott, “Framing Ambition: The Interior

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Politics of Madame de Pompadour,” Art History, 28, no. 2 (April 2005): 248 – 290. Information about Pompadour’s back­ ground and early years at court is taken from Thomas E. Kaiser, “Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power,” French Historical Studies, 19, no. 4 (fall 1996): 1025 – 1044. Ibid., pp. 1026 – 1028. Jean­Louis Soulavie, Mémoires historiques et anecdotes de la Cour de France pendant le faveur de la Marquise de Pompadour (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1802), p. 366. Scott, “Framing Ambition,” pp. 248, 258; Danielle Gallet, “Madame de Pompa­ dour et l’appartement d’en bas au châ­ teau de Versailles,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 118 (1991): 129 – 138. Scott, “Framing Ambition,” p. 263. The duc de Luynes reported in May 1752 (Mémoires, vol. 12) that Pompadour had built “a house for the Crécy chap­ lain, an infirmary, and a stable for nearly 200 horses.” That September, he noted that Louis XV had traveled to Crécy where “Madame de Pompadour will sponsor eight marriages.” Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 159. The La Celle fête, held on the night of September 1, 1748, is described in Luynes, Mémoires, vol. 9, pp. 88 – 90. It included a supper, an outdoor concert, a pastoral ballet, and a masquerade. AN O1 1581 and 1582; François Fossier, Les dessins du fonds Robert de Cotte de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Architecture et décor (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1997), p. 104. The duchess’s fête is described in the September 1707 edition of the journal Mercure galant.

14 Saint­Simon is quoted in Christopher Tadgell, Ange-Jacques Gabriel (London: A. Zwemmer, 1978), p. 159. The cow and dairy items were gifts from Made­ moiselle de la Chausseraye; see Amable Charles Franquet, comte de Fran­ queville, Le château de la Muette (Paris: Hachette, 1915), p. 86. 15 See the architectural plans for the château contained in AN O1 1581. 16 Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques: Avec leur explication, vol. 1 (Paris: Briasson, 1762 – 1772). Intended to accompany Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: Briasson, 1751 – 1765). 17 Quoted in Albert Meyrac, Louis XV: Ses maîtresses, le Parc aux Cerfs, d’après le Journal-Mémoires de d’Argenson, vol. 1 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1913 – 1914), p. 13. 18 The remodeling campaign is described in AN O1 1582. For the dairy, see a masonry bill from Oré and Tellier dated 1748 and a letter from Soufflot dated May 28, 1756. 19 Luynes, Mémoires, vol. 2, p. 391. 20 Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ, vol. 1, p. 148. The marquis d’Argenson is quoted in Pierre de Nolhac, Le Trianon de MarieAntoinette (Paris: Goupil et cie, 1914), p. 25. 21 The construction is documented in AN O1 1810; see especially the letter from Lécuyer to Tournehem dated October 13, 1748. 22 Gustave Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon: Histoire et description (Versailles: L. Bernard, 1885), p. 10. 23 Jacques­François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint, 1771 – 1777), p. 417. 24 Yves Bottineau and Michel Gallet, Les Gabriel (Paris: Picard, 1982), pp. 170 – 172.

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25 Blondel, Cours d’architecture, vol. 1, p. 418. 26 AN O1 1810; document dated October 18, 1750. 27 “The women who go with her on these voyages are pretty much all the same; there are eight or nine of them.” Luynes, Mémoires, vol. 12, p. 319. 28 Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, p. 15. Another eighteenth­century “gardener king” was George III of England, who was nicknamed “Farmer George.” 29 The first dairy at Bellevue was situated in one of the château’s service wings; the second was in Brimborion, the small riverside pavilion that Pompadour purchased in 1750. Both are listed in a document from 1757 entitled “Des­ cription du château de Bellevue et de ses dépendances,” AN O1 1531; the for­ mer is described as “une laiterie entou­ rée de tablettes sur consoles en liais, une grande table idem en liais, le tout orné de moulures, et cannelures pour l’usage de la laiterie.” The Brimborion dairy had formerly been used as a kit­ chen and was attached to a cow stable. The two dairies at Saint­Ouen and Menars had been built before Pompa­ dour took over these estates, in 1759 and 1760 respectively. They are listed in pro­ bate inventories made after her death and the death of her brother and heir, the marquis de Marigny. See Jean Cordey, Inventaire des biens de Madame de Pompadour rédigé après son décès (Paris: Pour la Société des Bibliophiles François, 1939); and Alden R. Gordon, The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny, ed. Carolyne Ayçaguer­Ron (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003). 30 Annick Heitzmann, “Trianon: Le pavillon frais en son jardin,” Versalia, 10 (2007), p. 69.

31 Quoted and translated in Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 319. 32 Antoinette Emch­Dériaz, “The Non­ Naturals Made Easy,” in The Popularization of Medicine, 1650 – 1850, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1992): 134 – 159. 33 William Coleman, “Health and Hygiene in the Encyclopédie: A Medical Doctrine for the Bourgeoisie,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 29, no. 4 (October 1974): 406. 34 Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feue Madame la marquise de Pompadour, dame du palais de la reine (Paris, 1765; Reprint Paris: J.­M. Malzieu, 1984), catalog no. 419. She also owned a 1697 French translation of Hippocrates’s Oeuvres by André Dacier and the Lettre d’Hippocrate à Damagette, traduit par Passerat (1700). 35 Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 65. Relevant entries in the Encyclopédie include “Hygiène,” “Non­naturels,” “Médicine,” “Régime,” and “Santé.” 36 Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). See also Colin Jones, “The Médecins du Roi at the End of the Ancien Régime and in the French Revolution,” in Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500 – 1837, ed. Vivian Nutton (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 209 – 261. 37 Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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1997), p. 378. The changing format of medical books is discussed in Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 2000), p. 26. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism, p. 230; Lindsay B. Wilson, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over “Maladies des femmes” (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins University Press, 1993). Tronchin’s career is outlined in Henry Tronchin, Un médecin du XVIIIe siècle: Théodore Tronchin (1709 – 1781), d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Plon­Nourrit, 1906). Pierre de Nolhac, Versailles au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: L. Conard, 1926), pp. 203 – 204. Quoted in Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, p. 600. Paul P. Christensen discusses Quesnay’s awareness of contemporary trends in “Fire, Motion, and Produc­ tivity: The Proto­Energetics of Nature and Economy in François Quesnay,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw,” ed. Philip Mirowski (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1994), pp. 249 – 288. In addition to his treatise on the fevers, Quesnay also wrote a treatise on bleeding (1736) and another on the animal economy (1736; expanded and reissued 1746). Pompadour had all of Quesnay’s medical books in her library. His medical career is discussed in Paul Delaunay, Le monde médical parisien au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Jules Rousset, 1906); and Gustav Schelle, Le Docteur Quesnay: Chirurgien, médecin de Madame de Pompadour et de Louis XV, physiocrate (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907). The Private Memoirs of Louis XV: Taken from the Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, Lady’s Maid to Madame de Pompadour (London: Nichols, 1895), p. 55.

42 Alden R. Gordon, “The Longest­ Enduring Pompadour Hoax: Sénac de Meilhan and the Journal de Madame du Hausset,” in Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives, ed. Elise Goodman (Newark: University of Del­ aware Press, 2001), pp. 28 – 38. 43 The duc de Choiseul quoted in Jones, Madame de Pompadour, p. 22. 44 Quesnay moved into the entresol above Pompadour’s apartment at Versailles in 1749 (Salmon, ed., Madame de Pompadour et les arts, p. 83). In September that same year, he was also given an apartment at Fontainebleau, according to a letter dated September 8, 1749, in AN O1 1430. Information on his quar­ ters at La Muette appears in AN O1 1583. When Pompadour commissioned a hôtel particulier on the outskirts of Versailles, she requested yet another apartment for Quesnay whose contents are listed in Cordey, Inventaire, no. 1494 – 1513. 45 AN O1 1385; document entitled “État des ouvrages du château de Compiègne le 23 et 24 fevrier 1753.” 46 Luynes, Mémoires, vol. 12, pp. 96, 103 – 104. 47 For more on the relationship between botany and medicine, see Rio C. Howard, “Guy de la Brosse and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,” in The Analytic Spirit: Essays in the History of Science in Honor of Henry Guerlac, ed. Harry Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1981), pp. 195 – 224. 48 Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, p. 24. 49 Pliny the Younger makes several refer­ ences to milk and dairy products in his villa letters, both of which are reprinted in du Prey, The Villas of Pliny. 50 Jeremy D. Popkin, ed., Panorama of Paris: Selections from Le Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (University

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Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 62. Mercier’s Tableau de Paris originally appeared between 1781 and 1788. Antoine Le Camus, Abdeker, ou L’art de conserver la beauté (Paris, 1748). This quotation comes from the 1754 English translation, p. 75. Danielle Gallet­Guerne, Madame de Pompadour ou Le pouvoir féminin (Paris: Fayard, 1985), p. 126. Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 259. Corson also mentions a Madame Josse who supplied the ladies of Louis XVI’s court, among them Marie­Antoinette, with a natural vegetable rouge (p. 252). Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise,” p. 453. Alden Gordon has suggested, in personal correspondence, that this rumor may have resulted from Pompa­ dour’s promotion that year to lady in waiting for the queen, and her subse­ quent desire to cultivate a more sober appearance for Marie Lecszinska and her circle of dévots. Terry Smiley Dock discusses the Encyclopedic entry on makeup in Woman in the Encyclopédie: A Compendium (Potomac, Md.: Studia Humanitatis, 1983), p. 66. Mlle. Clairon’s treatise, entitled “Sur le blanc,” is trans­ lated and reprinted in Memoirs of Hyppolite Clairon, the celebrated French actress: With reflections upon the dramatic art, written by herself, vol. 1 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1800), pp. 88 – 96. See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity,” Representations, 20 (1987): 77 – 87. Marie de Maupeou Fouquet, Recueil des remèdes faciles et domestiques . . . Avec un régime de vie pour chaque complexion et pour chaque maladie; et un traité du

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lait (Paris: Jean Musier, 1739). Fouquet’s remedies were later reprinted in L’art de conserver sa santé, composé par l’école de Salerne (Paris, 1759), and Le médecin des dames, ou L’art de les conserver en santé (Paris, 1771). Hoffmann’s treatise was originally written in Latin; the quotations that follow are taken from an unpaginated English translation. The full title is A Treatise of the Extraordinary Virtues and Effects of Asses Milk, in the Cure of Various Diseases, Particularly the Gout, Scurvy, and Nervous Disorders; and of its peculiar nourishing and restorative qualities in all consumptive disorders, and even the decays of old age (London: John Whiston and Benjamin White, 1754). Encyclopédie, “Lait.” Quoted in Christiane Mervaud, Voltaire à table: Plaisir du corps, plaisir de l’esprit (Paris: Editions Desjonquères, 1998); letter dated May 24, 1762. Voltaire’s numerous references to milk appear in his Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1953 – 1977), vol. 108 (pp. 421, 425); vol. 109 (p. 17); vol. 120 (pp. 72, 73, and 103). The dauphine’s letter, dated May 11, 1760, is reprinted in Casimir Stryienski, La mère des trois derniers bourbons, Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, et la cour de Louis XV (Paris: Plon­Nourrit, 1902). The French translation was entitled Régime de Pythagore. An English trans­ lation was also published by Robert Dodsley in 1745. Quoted and translated in Popkin, ed., Panorama of Paris, p. 69. Potiquet reprints the letter, and attri­ butes it to Quesnay, in “Un document inédit sur la santé de Madame de Pompadour, interprété par M. le Dr. Potiquet,” La chronique médicale, 4 (February 15, 1901): 97 – 108. Although

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he asserts that the letter’s “authenticity cannot be doubted,” I am cautious only because I have not seen the origi­ nal document and because many letters connected to Pompadour have turned out to be forgeries. I am not sure precisely when the milk goblet was first developed; sales records for Vincennes were only kept from 1752. I have seen a few gobelets à lait that were manufactured a decade or two earlier at Chantilly and Saint Cloud (Yvonne Dallot­Naudin and Alain Jacob, Porcelaines tendres françaises: Rouen, L. Poterat, Saint-Cloud, Mennecy, Chantilly, Bourg-la-Reine, Vincennes [Paris: ABC Collection, 1983], p. 35). As far as I have been able to determine, the milk goblet originated with the neo­ Hippocratic medical revival and became prominent around the mid­eighteenth century. Rosalind Savill discusses the milk goblet in more detail and notes its connection to health remedies and royal women in The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, vol. 2 (London: Trustees of the Wallace Col­ lection, 1988), pp. 667 – 674. Cordey, Inventaire; see entries on Elysée, Versailles, and Fontainebleau. Her purchase of eight milk goblets for the Compiègne dairy is noted in Livrejournal de Lazare Duvaux, marchandbijoutier ordinaire du roy 1748 – 58, vol. 2 (Paris: Pour la Société des Biblio­ philes François, 1873), p. 251. They are listed as part of the Compiègne dairy inventory in Cordey, Inventaire, no. 1715 – 16. Janine Terrasson, Madame de Pompadour et la création de la porcelaine de France, art et expansion économique au XVIII siècle (Paris: la Bibliothèque des Arts, 1969). In a controversial 1990 article on Pom­ padour’s patronage, Donald Posner

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argued that her influence on the visual arts had been vastly overstated and that her patronage was not especially “imaginative” or original. He did, how­ ever, allow that “whatever her influ­ ence on the visual arts, it must be said that Pompadour at least appreciated their social uses.” (“Mme. de Pompa­ dour as a Patron of the Visual Arts,” Art Bulletin, 72, no. 1 [March 1990]: 74 – 105). Posner’s reductive and “anachro­ nistic” definition of patronage has since been questioned by several historians; see, for example, Gordon, “The Art Patronage of the Marquise de Pompa­ dour,” p. 30 and footnote 1, from which these quotations derive. Savill, Wallace Collection Catalogue, p. 675. Savill also lists other buyers of milk goblets, including the princesse de Condé. Quoted and translated in Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, which analyzes Le Camus’s treatise at length on pp. 81 – 88. Ibid., p. 82. Jean­François Marmontel, Memoirs of Marmontel, vol. 1 (1804; Philadelphia: Abel Dickinson, 1807), p. 121. Rous­ seau’s hermitage regimen is discussed in Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, p. 183. John Evelyn, “To Sir John Denham,” in A Parallel of the Antient [sic] Architecture with the Modern (London: T. Roycroft for John Place, 1664). Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture, or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (1780), trans. David Britt (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), pp. 115 – 117. Judith Coulton, “Kent’s Hermitage for Queen Caroline at Richmond,” Architectura, 2 (1974): 181 – 191. Catherine de’

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Medici’s hermitage is discussed in Catherine Grodecki, “De l’Ermitage de la Reine à la villa à l’antique,” Revue de l’art, 150 (2005): 21 – 31. Stephanie Chapotot, Les jardins du Roi Stanislas en Lorraine (Metz: Serpenoise, 1999), p. 94. As noted in Chapter 2, the duchesse du Maine also had a small, secret apartment in her château at Sceaux known as “La Chartreuse.” Edward Harwood, “Luxurious Hermits: Asceticism, Luxury, and Retirement in the Eighteenth­Century English Gar­ den,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 20, no. 4 (win­ ter 2000): 265 – 296. See also David Watkin, “Built Ruins: The Hermitage as a Retreat,” in Visions of Ruin: Architectural Fantasies and Designs for Garden Follies (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1999), pp. 5 – 14. Richelieu, Mémoires, p. 166. Hans, in Madame de Pompadour et les arts, describes the hermitage’s interior on p. 90 and associates it with an “extremely refined simplicity.” Joseph­Adrien Le Roi, Relevé des dépenses de Mme de Pompadour, depuis la première année de sa faveur jusqu’à sa mort (9 septembre 1745 – 15 avril 1764) (Versailles: Montalant­Bougleux, 1853), p. 372. This practice was also followed at the Fontainebleau hermitage, where the wife of her gardener, Belleville, took care of the cows and chickens. See Archives départementales de Yvelines (AD) 2 Q 11. The various components of the hermitage’s garden and menag­ erie and their contents are listed in Cordey, Inventaire. Ewa Lajer­Burcharth, “A Woman’s Worth,” Art in America (April 2003): 104. The menagerie’s location can be seen in a Revolutionary­era plan of the hermitage in the Archives départe­ mentales de Yvelines (AD) 4 Q 3.

78 Reprinted in Correspondance de Mme. de Pompadour avec son père, m. Poisson, et son frère, m. de Vandières, ed. A. Poulet­Malassis (Paris: J. Baur, 1878), p. 102 (February 27, 1749). 79 Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ, vol. 1, p. 407. The king’s fondness for cooking is noted in René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, vol. 6 (Paris: J. Renouard, 1859 – 1867), p. 128 (entry from November 2, 1749). 80 Hans, in Madame de Pompadour et les arts, p. 96, and Edmond, comte de Fels, Ange-Jacques Gabriel: Premier architecte du roi (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1924), pp. 201 – 202. See also AN O1 1430. The piece of land on which the hermitage was erected was later given to Pompadour in 1753. 81 AN O1 1805, inventory dated February 10, 1751. 82 Quoted in Ernest Bourges, Recherches sur Fontainebleau (Fontainebleau: Maurice Bourges, 1896), p. 33. 83 Luynes, Mémoires, vol. 14, p. 200. See also Jacques Robiquet, Pour mieux connaître le Palais de Compiègne (Com­ piègne: Société historique de Com­ piègne, 1938). 84 AN O1 1385 (February 16, 1754). See also Godot’s letters from October 20, November 6, and November 22, 1753; and March 30, April 26, May 28, and October 30, 1754. 85 After her death these were replaced with the arms of the king, who used the building to entertain foreign dignitaries. The hermitage was torn down in the late eighteenth century. See Bastien, “Les ermitages,” p. 100. Gabriel’s “bien chargée” comment (see below) is taken from Fels, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, p. 206. 86 Almost nothing about this site has been written; a brief description is given in Jean­Aimar Piganiol de la Force’s Des-

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cription historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs (Paris: Chez les Libraires associés, 1765), cited in Scott, The Rococo Interior, p. 292. See the catalog entry by Alastair Laing in François Boucher, 1703 – 1770 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), pp. 208 – 212. The story was pub­ lished in La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers (1664 – 1674). Kaiser discusses the Parc aux Cerfs and Pompadour’s emulation of Main­ tenon (as well as her ordering of Maintenon’s memoirs) in “Madame de Pompadour,” pp. 1037 – 1038. For more on the Parc aux Cerfs see Meyrac, Louis XV; and Camille Pascal, Le goût du roi: Louis XV et Marie-Louise O’Murphy (Paris: Perrin, 2006). Charles­Pinot Duclos, Les confessions du comte de*** (1741; Reprint Paris: Slatkine, 1996), p. 30. In a letter written to her brother dated November 8, 1750, and now contained at the Morgan Library, MA 2628 (p. 17), Pompadour refers to Duclos as “le plus honnête homme du monde.” Jones, Madame de Pompadour, pp. 72 – 77; Katherine K. Gordon, “Madame de Pompadour, Pigalle, and the Icono­ graphy of Friendship,” Art Bulletin, 50 (1968): 249 – 262. Anne­Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert, Oeuvres de Madame la marquise de Lambert (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1747), pp. 285 – 366. Jean­Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997), p. 372. Thierry Bajou, “Le portrait de la mar­ quise de Pompadour (vers 1760), un nouveau Carle Van Loo à Versailles,” Revue du Louvre, 43, no. 1 (1995): 36 – 45. Although the 1782 engraving links van

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Loo’s portrait with her château at Bellevue, Bajou points out that the tone of the portrait is at odds with the mondain image she cultivated there, and argues (convincingly, in my view) that it was more likely intended for the hermitage. See also Humphrey Wine’s catalog entry for this painting in Madame de Pompadour et les arts, pp. 158 – 159. Wine suggests that the portrait was painted around 1754 – 1755, which seems more plausible than Bajou’s proposed date of around 1760. Madame de Pompadour et les arts, p. 111. At Crécy the dairy and the hermitage were separated. Pierre Pajot, “Les résidents du château de Saint­Just à l’époque du duc de Penthièvre,” Les cahiers vernonnais, 27 (2005): 60 – 72. The duke’s repairs to the dairy at Crécy are listed in estate documents contained in AN G (5) 179B. The dairy that he built at Saint­ Just survives today on the grounds of the estate. The details of the commission are dis­ cussed in letters exchanged between Marigny (then known as the marquis de Vandières) and the secretary of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculp­ ture, Nicolas­Bernard Lépicié. See AN O1 1908; letters exchanged between July and September 1753. Falconet à Sèvres, 1756 – 1766, ou, L’art de plaire, ed. Marie­Noëlle Pinot de Villechenon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), pp. 48 – 49, 112 – 113. The designers of these replicas were two Vincennes employees, Jean­Baptiste Defernex and Claude­Louis Suzanne. Alastair Laing, “Boucher et la pastorale peinte,” Revue de l’art, 73 (1986): 55 – 64; Antoinette Faÿ­Hallé, “The Influence of Boucher’s Art on the Production of the Vincennes­Sèvres Porcelain Manu­ factory,” in François Boucher, pp. 345 –

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350; and Rosalind Savill, “François Boucher and the Porcelains of Vin­ cennes and Sèvres,” Apollo, 115 (March 1982): 162 – 170. Some of these Boucher­ inspired pastoral figures represented children and were known collectively as the Enfants Boucher. A skilled print­ maker, Pompadour engraved several of Boucher’s drawings of children, includ­ ing The Little Milk Drinkers of 1751. She also owned numerous examples of biscuit figurines inspired by his work, according to her 1764 inventory. 99 Emma Barker, “Painting and Reform in Eighteenth­Century France: Greuze’s L’accordée de village,” Oxford Art Journal, 20, no. 2 (1997): 42 – 52. 100 Marianne­Agnès Pillement, dame de Fauques, L’histoire de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, vol. 2 (1759; Reprint Paris: Le Moniteur du Bibliophile, 1879), pp. 19 – 20.

2 3

4. MaRIe-aNTOINeTTe

4

aND The haMeaU eFFeCT

1 The dates of the queen’s sojourns to Petit Trianon are given in Léon Rey, Le Petit Trianon et le Hameau de MarieAntoinette (Paris: Pierre Vorms, 1936). Annick Heitzmann has meticulously described the Hameau and its construc­ tion, based on royal building records, in several publications, including “Laiteries royales, laiteries impériales: Trianon et Rambouillet,” Histoire de l’art, 11 (October 1990): 37 – 45; Trianon, la ferme du Hameau (Marly­le­Roi: Omage, 1991); “Hameau de Trianon: la laiterie de préparation,” Versalia, 4 (2001): 72 – 79; “Restauration au Hameau de Trianon: la tour de Marlborough et la laiterie de propreté,” Versalia, 5 (2002): 32 – 43; and “La laiterie de Rambouillet,” Versalia, 10 (2007): 46 – 57. See also Gustave Desjardins, Le Petit-

5

Trianon: Histoire et description (Ver­ sailles: L. Bernard, 1885); Pierre de Nolhac, Le Trianon de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Goupil et cie, 1914); Jill H. Casid, “Queer(y)ing Georgic: Utility, Pleasure, and Marie Antoinette’s Orna­ mented Farm,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 30, no. 3 (spring 1997): 304 – 318; and Anna Hoffman Steinhardt, “La reine et le fermier: Marie­Antoinette’s Hameau in Context” (Master’s Thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2008). Heitzmann, “Hameau de Trianon: La laiterie de préparation,” pp. 74 – 75. Heitzmann, Trianon, la ferme du Hameau, p. 25; Nolhac, Le Trianon, p. 161. Heitzmann describes the creation of the rustic ballroom in “Hameau de Trianon: Une salle de bal dans la grange,” Versalia, 6 (2003): 36 – 44. Since the dance hall was not finished until just before the Revolution it seems not to have been used. For Pompadour’s dairy, see Chapter 3. The aesthetics of sensibility and bienfaisance are discussed with regard to painting in Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Barker, “From Charity to Bienfaisance: Picturing Good Deeds in Eighteenth­Century France,” forth­ coming from the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. See also D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France: A Study in European Cultural History, 1750 – 1800 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1984). This sentimental pastoral literature is analyzed in Roland Guy Bonnel, Ethique et esthétique du retour à la campagne au XVIIIe siècle: L’oeuvre littéraire et utopique du Lezay-Marnésia, 1735 – 1800 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); and Amy S. Wyngaard, From Savage to

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Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). Régine de Plinval de Guillebon, La manufacture de porcelaine de la rue Thiroux, dite de la reine (Paris: Société d’études historiques du IXe arrondis­ ment de Paris, 1988). For the list of por­ celain items delivered to the dairy, see Archives Nationales de France (AN) O1 1878. Caroline Weber notes Marie­ Antoinette’s 1782 visit to Ermenonville in Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: H. Holt, 2006), p. 327. The transportation of milk products from the Hameau to Versailles is doc­ umented in Patrice Higonnet, “Mique, the Architect of Royal Intimacy,” in Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550 – 1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), p. 34. Sarah Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited: The Case of the Missing Queen,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 63 – 89. For more on the scandals sur­ rounding Marie­Antoinette, see essays by Mary D. Sheriff, Maza, Chantal Thomas, Lynn Hunt, and Elizabeth Collwill in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of the Queen, ed. Dena Goodman (New York: Routledge, 2003). Jean­Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997), p. 372. For the surprising reaction that Julie’s for­ mer lover, Saint­Preux, has to her dairy — a reaction that reinforces the precarious symbolism of the pastoral genre as discussed in this chapter — see the Introduction to the present book.

10 Rousseau’s tomb is described in Mérigot fils, illustrator, Promenade, ou, Itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville (Paris: Mérigot père, 1788). Designed by Hubert Robert, who later assisted in the creation of the queen’s Hameau, the tomb was made of white marble and decorated with bas­relief carvings of fertility symbols and the figure of a nursing mother. The island on which Rousseau was buried was known as the Isle of Poplars. For more on Ermenon­ ville, see David Hays, “Figuring the Commonplace at Ermenonville,” in Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Martin Calder (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 87 – 108. 11 Weber mentions Marie­Antoinette’s attempts to nurse her children in Queen of Fashion, p. 144; I discuss the eigh­ teenth­century breastfeeding campaign in Chapter 5 of this book. 12 The Royal Dildo is reprinted in Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone Books, 2001). See also Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie­Antoinette,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, pp. 108 – 130. 13 This statement comes from the Encyclopédie’s entry on “Femme (Morale),” quoted and translated in Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 32. 14 Casid, in “Queer(y)ing Georgic,” has described a similar instability with regard to the georgic mode, as evidenced in Revolutionary­era satirical prints lam­ pooning Marie­Antoinette. Her argu­ ment that these prints “reveal how anxiously precarious was the boundary between improved nature which could be identified as ‘natural’ and improved nature as spoiling artifice or excessive

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15

16

17

18 19

20

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cultivation” (p. 310) has informed my own reading of these sites. For more on the relationship between pastoral and georgic see the Introduction to this book. Quoted and translated in Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 205. For an expanded discussion of these debates, see Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen. Pierre François Guyot, l’abbé Desfon­ taines, trans., Les oeuvres de Virgile, traduites en François (Paris: Quillau, 1743), quoted and translated in Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, p. 237. Casid, “Queer(y)ing Georgic,” p. 315. See also Paul Lacroix, Bibliothèque de la reine Marie-Antoinette au Petit Trianon (Paris: Jules Gay, 1863). Fears about noble dissipation and population decline are discussed in John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), and Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Quoted and translated in Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, p. 77. Jean­François Marmontel, Mémoires de Marmontel, vol. 1 (1804; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), p. 24. Renata Tyszczuk, “Nature Intended: The Garden of a Roi bienfaisant,” in Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 161 – 187. Saint­Lambert’s sentimental view of the peasantry is discussed in Liana Vardi, “Imagining the Harvest in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review, 101, no. 5 (December 1996): 1395 – 1396. Liana Vardi, “Rewriting the Lives of Eighteenth­Century Economists,”

22

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24

25

26 27

American Historical Review, 114, no. 3 ( June 2009): 653. Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, p. 2. A much more extended treatment of Mirabeau’s text appears in Shovlin’s book and in Michael Kwass, “Con­ sumption and the World of Ideas: Con­ sumer Revolution and the Moral Econ­ omy of the Marquis de Mirabeau,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 37, no. 2 (winter 2003): 187 – 213; my brief analysis of L’ami des hommes is indebted to theirs. Quoted and translated in Kwass, “Con­ sumption and the World of Ideas,” p. 195. AN M. 780, n. 4, “De l’institution des femmes” (c. 1768), manuscript by Mirabeau with notes in the margin by Quesnay. Mirabeau wrote other man­ uscripts on the subject of women, including one entitled “L’ami des femmes” that he never finished. See Georges Weulersse, Les manuscrits économiques de François Quesnay et du marquis de Mirabeau aux Archives Nationales (M. 778 à M. 785) (Paris: P. Geunther, 1910). Samuel Tissot, An Essay on the Disorders of People of Fashion (1770; English translation, 1772), preface. Tissot dedi­ cated his text to an aristocratic woman, the Baroness of Wallmoden. The essay’s popularity is noted in Antoinette Emch­ Dériaz, “The Non­Naturals Made Easy,” in The Popularization of Medicine, 1650 – 1850, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 149. See also Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1998), pp. 187 – 196. Tissot, Essay on the Disorders, p. 36. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, p. 189.

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28 Quoted and translated in Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, pp. 190 – 191. 29 Edme­Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne, De l’influence des affections de l’âme dans les maladies nerveuses des femmes (Mont­ pellier and Paris: Méquignon l’aîné, 1781), p. 33. See also Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, pp. 234 – 238. 30 Quoted and translated in Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, p. 238. 31 D. T. de Bienville, La nymphomanie ou Traité de la fureur utérine (Amsterdam: Marc­Michel Rey, 1771), p. 116. His account of “Eléonore” appears on pp. 99 – 124. The pornographic pamphlet mentioned in this paragraph is entitled The Uterine Furies of Marie-Antoinette, Wife of Louis XVI (Paris, 1791). 32 Anne L. Schroder, “Going Public Against the Academy in 1784: Mme de Genlis Speaks Out on Gender Bias,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, no. 3 (spring 1999): 377. Genlis describes the pedagogical program that she created at the duc de Chartres’s country estate at Saint­Leu near Montmorency in Souvenirs de Félicie (Paris: Firmin­ Didot, 1857). 33 Madame de Genlis, “Delphine, ou La heureuse guérison,” in Les veillées du château, ou Cours de morale à l’usage des enfans, vol. 1 (1784; Reprint London, 1796). Steinhaussen’s advice echoes a treatment known as the “cow house method” that was devised for consump­ tives and nervous women. It was pop­ ularized in the late eighteenth century by the English physician Thomas Beddoes. See Roy Porter, Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (Lon­ don: Routledge, 1992). The relation­ ship between the physician Seiffert and the princesse de Lamballe is described in Augustin Cabanès, La princesse de

34

35

36

37

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Lamballe intime (d’après les confidences de son médecin) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1922). Kwass, in “Consumption and the World of Ideas,” makes a similar observation in his analysis of Mirabeau’s L’ami des hommes: “In the process of staking out this new role for the nobility, he dis­ credited the very forms of display on which the power of the order had long rested” (p. 205). John Shovlin, “Political Economy and the French Nobility, 1750 – 1789,” in The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay M. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 130. Colin B. Bailey, “Surveying Genre in Eighteenth­Century French Painting,” in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, ed. Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 14; Catherine Clavilier, Céres et le laboureur. La construction d’un mythe historique de l’agriculture au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de Patrimoine, 2009), pp. 32 – 33. The engraving, entitled Monsieur le dauphin labourant, is illustrated and dis­ cussed in Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, pp. 89 – 91. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. John Goodman, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 82. For Drouais’s life and career, see C. Gabillot, “Les trois Drouais,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3 ser., 34 (1905): 177 – 194; 288 – 298; 384 – 400; and 35 (1906): 155 – 174; 246 – 258. For more on the sexual symbolism of pastoral paint­ ing, and François Boucher in particular, see Colin Bailey, “‘Details that surrep­ titiously explain’: Boucher as a Genre Painter,” in Rethinking Boucher, ed.

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39

40

41

42

43 44

45

Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2006), pp. 39 – 60. Album du comte du Nord: Recueil des plans des châteaux, parcs et jardins de Chantilly levé en 1784, intro. Jean­ Pierre Babelon (Saint­Rémy­en­l’Eau: Monelle Hayot, 2000), p. 52. Babelon, introduction to Album du comte du Nord, p. 54; Raoul de Broglie, “Le hameau et la laiterie de Chantilly,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, 6 ser., 37 (Octo­ ber – December 1950): 309 – 324. Hays, “Figuring the Commonplace,” p. 90. The prince de Condé’s visits to Ermenonville in the 1770s are recorded in Jacques Toudouze, Journal des chasses de SAS Monseigneur le Prince de Conde (1748 – 1785), Musée Condé, Chantilly, Ms. 371, 372. Stanislas’s Chartreuses at Lunéville and his image as a roi bienfaisant are analyzed in Tyszczuk, “Nature Intended.” Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 71. My account of these festivals is drawn from Maza’s text. Ibid., p. 75. Similar rituals of inversion, though focusing on gender rather than class, are described in Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe,” in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 147 – 190. The feudal cere­ monies at the Chantilly hameau are described in Toudouze, Journal des chasses; the copper pots are cited in Broglie, “Le Hameau,” p. 311. Blondel’s extended discussion of archi­ tectural caractère appears in vol. 1 of his

46

47

48

49

50

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Cours d’architecture (Paris: Desaint, 1771 – 1777), pp. 373 – 437. Quoted and translated in Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 302. The family’s frequent visits to the Hameau throughout the 1770s and 1780s are documented in Toudouze, Journal des chasses. Gustave Loisel, Histoire des ménageries de l’antiquité à nos jours, vol. 1 (Paris: O. Doin et fils, 1912), pp. 351 – 352. As I noted in the Introduction, this 1786 document represents the earliest use of the term “laiterie d’agrément” that I have come across, although the con­ cept of this building type was around long before then. Rapport fait à la Société d’agriculture du Département de la Seine, sur la nécessité de conserver l’établissement rural de l’ancienne ménagerie de Versailles par une commission spéciale composée des citoyens Chaptal, Moreau de St-Méry, Grégoire, Duquesnoy et Chassiron [1800] (Paris: Ballard, n.d.), pp. 11 – 12. According to Desjardins, Mique studied the architectural plans for the Hameau de Chantilly prior to beginning his designs for the queen’s hamlet (Le PetitTrianon, p. 225). Dmitrii O. Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 135. Maria Feodorovna’s letter to her building director, Küchel­ becker, concerning her dairy and dated 25 October/5 November 1782 is quoted in Marie Martin, Marie Feódorovna en son temps, 1759 – 1828: Contribution à l’histoire de la Russie et de l’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), p. 84.

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52 A few examples of this pan­European trend are cited in the Introduction to this book; for England, see my article “Interiors and Interiority in the Orna­ mental Dairy Tradition,” EighteenthCentury Fiction, 20, no. 3 (spring 2008): 357 – 384. 53 Mémoires secrets (London: John Adamson, 1777 – 1789), vol. 7, entry dated July 31, 1773. The Vanves dairy is listed in the Archives de Chantilly, Série E, carton 7; see “Mémoires des ouvrages de peintures d’impression faits pour le service de Mgr le prince de Condé en son château de Vanves et dependences” (1780). 54 Hubert Beylier, “Le jardin du Palais de l’Elysée,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France (1980): 135 – 159; Pierre Pinon, “Pierre­Adrien Pâris, ou L’archéologie malgre soi” (Thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris IV, 1998). 55 A plan of the Elysée gardens from 1802 with the words “Hameau de Chantilly” written over it is illustrated in Gilles­ Antoine Langlois, Folies, Tivolis, et attractions: Les premiers parcs de loisirs parisiens (Paris: Délégation à l’action artistique de la ville de Paris, 1991), p. 148. 56 Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (Bloomington: Indiana Univer­ sity Press, 1968), p. 151. 57 Weber describes more of these urban rustic fashions in Queen of Fashion, pp. 145 – 148. A series of boutons d’habit depicting the gardens of the Folie St. James in Neuilly (discussed below) is illustrated in Gabrielle Joudiou, La folie de M. de Sainte-James: Une demeure, un jardin pittoresque (Neuilly­sur­Seine: Editions Spiralinthe, 2001). The Correspondance secrète is quoted in Ernest de Ganay, “Les jardins à l’anglaise en France au dix­huitième siècle” (1923),

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unpublished two­volume manuscript at the Bibliothèque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, vol. 1, p. 83. Michel Gallet, Stately Mansions: Eighteenth-Century Paris Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1972); John Goodman, “‘Altar against Altar’: The Colisée, Vauxhall Utopianism and Symbolic Politics in Paris (1769 – 77),” Art History, 15, no. 4 (December 1992): 434 – 468. Tivoli is described and illustrated in Gilles­Antoine Langlois, “Les origines des premiers parcs de divertissements parisiens,” Histoire de l’art, 19 (1992): 51 – 63. Henriette Louise von Waldner, baronne d’Oberkirch, Memoirs of the Baroness d’Oberkirch, ed. Count de Montbrison, vol. 1 (London: Colburn, 1852), p. 313. Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, pp. 91 – 97. The Méréville dairy is discussed in let­ ters exchanged between Robert, Julien, and Laborde in the Archives Mouchy, photocopies of which are in the Bib­ liothèque littérraire Jacques Doucet in Paris (MS 1099). In the nineteenth century the dairy’s façade was removed and placed in the Parc de Jeurre in Étampes, where it currently resides. For more on the Méréville gardens see Simone de Lassus, “Quelques détails inédits sur Méréville,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (1976): 273 – 287; and Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 74 – 93, which inter­ prets the garden in light of Laborde’s colonial interests. Louis­Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1781 – 1788), vol. 3, p. 201. See Joudiou, La folie de M. de SainteJames. Luc­Vincent Thiéry, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris (Paris:

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Chez Hardouin & Gattey, 1787), quoted in Ernest de Ganay, “Les jar­ dins de Sainte­James,” La revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 41 (May 1922): 398. Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, p. 340. For Mesmer, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Har­ vard University Press, 1968). Oberkirch describes some of these séances (and the marquis de Puységur’s role in them) in volume 3 of her memoirs. Mémoires secrets, November 16, 1785; I would like to thank Susan Taylor­Leduc for this reference. The construction of Balbi’s dairy and hamlet (which seem to have been short­lived) is documented in AN R 5 92. In addition to the dairy, there was also a cow stable and a chicken coop. The comte de Provence’s attempts to develop the garden, and his strug­ gles with the church, are noted in A. Hustin, “Le jardin du Luxembourg du commencement du XVIIe siècle à 1812,” Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de L’Ile-de-France, 49 (1927): 57 – 67. Louis de Carmontelle (Louis Carrogis), Proverbes et comédies posthumes de Carmontel, précédés d’une notice par Madame la comtesse de Genlis, vol. 2 (Paris: Ladvocat, 1825). Carmontelle’s proverb is also discussed in Maza, Private Lives, pp. 81 – 82. For more on these gouache portraits, see Laurence Chatel de Brancion, Carmontelle au jardin des illusions (Château de Saint­Rémy­en­l’Eau: Monelle Hayot, 2003). Very little is known about either of the two women depicted in Les fermières. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp (1964),” reprinted in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), pp. 275 – 292.

71 Louis de Carmontelle, Jardin de Monceau, prés de Paris, appartenant à son altesse sérénissime monseigneur le Duc de Chartres (Paris: Delafosse, Née & Masquelier, 1779), p. 5. 72 Ibid., p. 4. 73 An inventory of the dairy’s contents (dated April 20, 1783) is in the private archives of the Orléans family housed at the AN, AP 300 (I) 183. The building is described in two post­Revolutionary inventories of Monceau (also in AP 300 [I] 183), one made by Beaumont in 1797 and the other by Pierre Fontaine in 1814. Carmontelle mentions the dairy briefly in Jardin de Monceau, p. 8. 74 Genlis, Souvenirs de Félicie, vol. 3, p. 97. 75 David Hays, “‘This is Not a jardin anglais’: Carmontelle, the Jardin de Monceau, and Irregular Garden Design in Late­Eighteenth­Century France,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 294 – 326. Hays points out that the ruined château may have been a reference to the seig­ neurial estate at Bagnolet that the family had sold in 1769 (p. 302). 76 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” p. 281. 77 Quoted and translated in Views and Plans of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, trans. Barbara Mellor, with commentary by Pierre Arizzoli­Clémentel (Paris: A. de Gourcuff, 1998), p. 10. 78 Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Baker is cited in Susan Taylor­Leduc, “Louis XVI’s Public Gar­ dens: The Replantation of Versailles in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Garden History, 14, no. 2 (1994): 67 – 91, which discusses the impact of public

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opinion on the reception of the queen’s gardens. Georges Gromort, Le Hameau de Trianon: Histoire et description (Paris: Vincent, Fréal, 1928), p. 40. For the Petit Trianon gardens, see Desjardins, Nolhac, and Christian Duvernois, Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles (New York: Rizzoli, 2008). For more on Mique and the designs that he created for royal women in this period, especially the Mesdames, see Higonnet, “Mique, the Architect of Royal Intimacy,” pp. 25 – 42. Weber, Queen of Fashion, p. 111; she also refers to the mock village fête of 1777 on p. 135. Correspondance secrète, June 1778; quoted in Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, pp. 104 – 105. Correspondance secrète, July 12, 1777. Her 1779 sojourn is described in Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, p. 188. This letter and the Mémoires secrets entry of September 1775 are cited in Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, pp. 74, 97. Weber, Queen of Fashion, p. 134. Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse, pp. 387 – 388. Marie­Antoinette may have also attempted to mimic the appearance and topography of Julie’s estate by including naturalistic plantings, serpentine walk­ ways, a lake, and an “Alpine Garden” (a reference to Switzerland) that is described in more detail in Duvernois’s Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles. Thomas E. Kaiser, “Scandal in the Royal Nursery: Marie­Antoinette and the Gouvernantes des Enfants de France,” Historical Reflections, 32, no. 2 (2006): 403 – 420. André Bellessort, “Le théâtre de Marie­ Antoinette,” Revue des deux-mondes (1933): 635.

88 For more on the relationship between the queen and Vigée Le Brun, see Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). As Sheriff notes, Vigée Le Brun was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1783 after Marie­ Antoinette intervened on her behalf (p. 82). 89 See Joseph Baillio’s catalog entry to this work in The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoleon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York (New York: Wildenstein, 2005), pp. 302 – 304. 90 Greuze’s The Milkmaid is in the col­ lection of the Louvre, RF 1277. In his catalog entry for The Arts of France, Baillio points to the “Greuze­like qual­ ity” of the Guiche pastel and compares it to Greuze’s The Broken Jug of c. 1772. 91 Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman, p. 146. Sheriff analyzes the portrait and its Salon reception at length in a chapter in her book entitled “The Portrait of the Queen.” 92 In “Marie­Antoinette and Her Por­ traits: The Politics of Queenly Self­ Imaging in Late Eighteenth­Century France” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000), Todd Larkin writes that she had little reason to expect “an unfavorable reception” at the Salon, in part because “she had been widely acclaimed in the summer of 1781” when she had donned similar attire to accompany Joseph II in “car­ riage rides to Paris and Trianon” (p. 227). 93 The Mémoires secrets entry is quoted and translated in Larkin, “Marie­ Antoinette and Her Portraits,” p. 211. 94 Larkin, “Marie­Antoinette and Her Portraits,” p. 227. 95 Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie­

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Antoinette,” p. 125. In “The Heroine of the Crime: Marie­Antoinette in Pam­ phlets” in the Goodman edited vol­ ume Marie-Antoinette, Thomas writes, “the libels against Marie­Antoinette did not become serious, really animated by a will to destroy her, until the time of her first pregnancy (in 1778), and above all after 1781, the year the Dauphin was born” (p. 105). Nolhac, Le Trianon, p. 170. For the trial transcript, see Procès de Marie-Antoinette: 23 – 25 vendémiaire an II (14 – 16 octobre 1793): Actes du Tribunal révolutionnaire, ed. Gérard Walter (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1993). As Weber (Queen of Fashion, p. 157) explains, Marie­Antoinette was accused of conspiring to ruin the Lyon silk industry by wearing white muslin. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman, pp. 99 – 103. I discuss the Grands hommes series in the next chapter. Taylor­Leduc provides an insightful account of d’Angiviller’s project and his frustrations in “Louis XVI’s Public Gardens.” Larkin, “Marie­Antoinette and Her Portraits,” p. 216, who cites documents contained in AN O1 1883. AN O1 1804; letter from Louis XVI to d’Angiviller dated May 22, 1784. Ed Lilley, “The Name of the Boudoir,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 53, no. 2 (1994): 193 – 198. Weber, Queen of Fashion, p. 171. For the portraits of Marie­Antoinette com­ missioned by d’Angiviller and the king of Sweden, see Chapter 5 of the present book. This quotation, cited in numerous sources, comes from a letter that Marie­ Antoinette wrote to Bussard in 1786 in AN O1 1880. For the farm see Heitz­ mann, Trianon, la ferme du Hameau.

105 A document contained in AN O1 1880 entitled “Mémoire des médicaments fournis pour le compte de sa majestée la reine par mauba apoticaire petit lait (1784)” lists the names of Marie­ Antoinette’s workers and the amount of milk that they were given. 106 With respect to the question of whether Marie­Antoinette actually milked her own cows, one of her ladies in waiting, Madame Campan, recalled in her mem­ oirs that the queen preferred to watch the cows being milked rather than do it herself. See Mémoires de Madame Campan, première femme de chambre de Marie-Antoinette, ed. Jean Chalon (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), p. 145. 107 See Higonnet, “Mique, the Architect of Royal Intimacy.” 108 The comtesse de Provence’s garden and hamlet are described in Archives départementales de Yvelines (AD) 1Q 168; 5Q 193; and 4Q 3. In addition to her dairy, there was a cow stable, a barn, a dovecote, and a chicken coop. See Jacqueline and Roger Zimmermann, Le jardin de Madame: La Comtesse de Provence à Montreuil-les-Versailles (Versailles, 1988). 109 J. Guillaume, “Le quartier de Montreuil à Versailles,” Les monuments historiques de la France, 17, no. 4 (1971): 53 – 89. Louis XVI purchased the estate for her in 1781. 110 Madame Elisabeth’s dairy and its fur­ nishings are documented in AN O1 1869. Guillaume describes her activities there in “Le quartier de Montreuil à Versailles.” Elisabeth also embroidered a suite of furniture for her house that is now in the Louvre. 111 All of the modifications and additions to the pleasure dairy cited in this para­ graph (as well as the possible connec­ tion to the Rambouillet dairy cited in the next paragraph) are taken from

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Heitzmann’s article, “Restauration au Hameau de Trianon.” 112 AN O1 1708, document entitled “Bail de la laiterie de M de Breteuil.” The transportation of the Hameau’s prod­ ucts to Versailles, Saint­Cloud, and Tuileries is noted in Heitzmann, Trianon, la ferme du Hameau, p. 30, and Higonnet, “Mique, the Architect of Royal Intimacy,” p. 34.

3

5. RegeNeRaTINg The

4

MONaRChy: The QUeeN’s DaIRy aT RaMbOUIlleT

Epigraph: Excerpt from “Wine and Milk” from Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers. Translation copyright © 1972 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Reprinted by per­ mission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. 1 On November 29, 1783, the Mémoires secrets reported that Marie­Antoinette had been to see her husband’s newly acquired estate, “qui est gothique et lui a fort déplu.” Her description of Ram­ bouillet as a “crapaudière gothique” is cited in Félix Lorin, Rambouillet: La ville, le château, ses hôtes, 768 – 1906 (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1907), p. 220. 2 The story of the dairy encounter is repeated in Johannes Langner, “L’archi­ tecture pastorale sous Louis XVI,” Art de France, 3 (1963): 170 – 186, and in other accounts. The date of June 26, 1787, for the royal visit is recorded in the king’s hunting journal; see Journal of Louis XVI, publié pour la première fois d’après le manuscrit autographe du Roi, par le comte de Beauchamp (Paris: L. Gougy, 1900). A notoriously terse doc­ ument, it reports only that Marie­ Antoinette “supped” at Rambouillet on that day. Given the fact that her daugh­

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ter, Sophie, had died just the week before, she may have been in no mood to appreciate such festivities. Quoted in Selma Schwartz, “The ‘Etruscan’ Style at Sèvres: A Bowl from Marie­Antoinette’s Dairy at Ram­ bouillet,” Metropolitan Museum Journal: Essays in Honor of Clare le Corbeiller, 37 (2002): 266. D’Angiviller’s original letter, addressed to the Sèvres director Antoine Régnier, is in the archives of the Musée Nationale de Sèvres, H3 L4, no. 79. Susan Taylor­Leduc, “Louis XVI’s Public Gardens: The Replantation of Versailles in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Garden History, 14, no. 2 (1994): 67 – 91. By comparison, the crown’s purchase of Saint­Cloud for Marie­Antoinette in 1785 had cost six million livres. Perhaps Louis XVI escaped censure because he purchased Rambouillet with his own private funds, or because he was king and not queen. The November 1783 entry attested that although d’Angiviller had unveiled his grand rebuilding plans to the king, Louis XVI “found the building estimate too high (trop considérable) and said that it would have to wait.” For the proj­ ects that d’Angiviller supervised at the estate between 1784 and 1785, see Henri Longnon, Le château de Rambouillet (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1909), pp. 73 – 76. Quoted in Jean de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins (Paris: Herscher, 1987), p. 87. Longnon, Le château de Rambouillet, pp. 69 – 72. For illustrations of the Ram­ bouillet jardin anglais and its fabriques, see Georges Le Rouge’s Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode (1776 – 1789). Ernest de Ganay, “Les jardins à l’anglaise en France au dix­huitième siècle” (1923), unpublished manuscript at the Bibliothèque des Arts Decoratifs,

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Paris, p. 561. Ganay also describes the pavilion’s interior and contents, includ­ ing the automata. For more on this project, see Cayeux, Hubert Robert, and Taylor­Leduc, “Louis XVI’s Public Gardens.” Some of the different species are listed in Cayeux, Hubert Robert, p. 87, and Ganay, “Les jardins à l’anglaise en France,” p. 394. They included Louisiana cypress and American red oak. Cayeux notes that similar attempts at acclimatization were undertaken around the same time in the formal gardens of Versailles. This quotation is taken from Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 – 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), where it refers to certain impulses in eighteenth­century British landscape painting (p. 9). For the rela­ tionship between landscape gardening and colonial interests, see Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Brigitte Weltman­Aron, On Other Grounds: Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 161 – 162. The quotations from d’Angiviller’s correspondence are taken from the Archives Nationales de France (AN) O1 1179, letters dated January 25, 1786 (to the tax farmer M. Vente), and October 20, 1786 (to the duc de Béthune­ Charost). Very little is known about Thévenin; see Charles Bauchal, Nouveau diction-

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naire biographique et critique des architectes français (Paris: André, Daly fils, 1887), p. 545. The importation of the merino sheep is discussed below. For more information on Robert’s whereabouts in this period, see the let­ ters that he exchanged with Jean­Joseph de Laborde in the collections of the Archives Mouchy. Photographed cop­ ies of these letters are in the Biblio­ thèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris (MS 1099). Marie­Antoinette’s pre­Revolutionary nickname, “l’Autrichienne,” suggests the hostility that some of her subjects had for her because of her Austrian origins; it could be translated either as “The Austrian Woman” or “The Austrian Bitch.” Joseph Baillio, Les bas-reliefs de Pierre Julien (1731 – 1804) pour la laiterie de la reine à Rambouillet: Collection Wildenstein (Paris: Wildenstein, 2002), p. 8. For a plan of the menagerie, dairy, and surrounding gardens made by Thévenin, see plate 1 of Baillio’s book. Baillio, Les bas-reliefs de Pierre Julien, p. 5. These buildings have today been truncated and roofed; they contain, on the left, a visitor’s center, and, on the right, living quarters for a concierge. Archives départmentales de Yvelines (AD), 60 J 459, contains numerous accounts and documents relating to Madame Dupuis and the running of the Rambouillet dairy from the late 1780s through the Revolution. The Breton milkmaid is mentioned in accounts drawn up from 1787 to 1788 by François Bourgeois, the régisseur de la ferme du roi. In one of these he writes, “M le Comte d’Angiviller a fait venir de la Bretagne une femme pour faire le beurre à la manière de cette province.” The names of the Rambouillet animals and the milk

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orders placed by d’Angiviller’s wife are also listed among these documents. Helen Rosenau, ed., Boullée’s Treatise on Architecture: A Complete Presentation of the “Architecture Essai sur l’art,” which forms part of the Boullée Papers (Ms. 9153) in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (London: A. Tiranti, 1953). Boullée’s treatise was written in the 1790s. For more on the dairy as a “femi­ nine” building type, see the Introduction to the present book. For a detailed account of the dairy’s different stages of design, construction, and remodeling, see Langner, “L’archi­ tecture pastorale,” and Annick Heitz­ mann, “La laiterie de Rambouillet,” Versalia, 10 (2007): 46 – 57. See also Carolin C. Young, “Marie­Antoinette’s Dairy at Rambouillet,” The Magazine Antiques, 158, no. 4 (October 2000): 542 – 553. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in EighteenthCentury Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 56 – 60. Langner, “L’architecture pastorale,” pp. 181 – 182. J. J. A. Bougon and Monique Gaulard, “Le parc du Raincy,” En Aulnoye Jadis, 3 (1974): 16 – 40. There are two gouache drawings by Carmontelle now in the Musée Marmottan in Paris (inventory no. 183 and 184) that depict the English village and dairy. Friedrich Gilly, “A Description of Rincy [sic], A Country Seat Near Paris,” Sammlung nützlicher Aufsätze und Nachrichten, die Baukunst betreffend, 3, 2 (1799), reprinted in Friedrich Gilly: Essays on Architecture, 1796 – 1799, trans. David Britt (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), pp. 155 – 162. The quotes that follow are taken from this

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translation. The Le Raincy dairy appar­ ently made a strong impression on Gilly; upon returning to Berlin, one of his first projects was a neoclassical dairy for Princess Louise at Schlöss Bellevue. The building launched his career, though he died before it could be com­ pleted. His student, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, finished the dairy and went on to design other examples of the build­ ing type, including a neo­Romanesque dairy at Bärwinkel around 1802 – 1803. See Fritz Neumeyer’s essay in Friedrich Gilly, p. 10. Jean Feray, “A Wedgwood Dairy in a French Collection,” Connoisseur (August 1957): 21; Thomas Blaikie, Diary of a Scotch Gardener at the French Court at the End of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Francis Birrell (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1932), p. 210. Julien’s biography and his relationship with d’Angiviller are recounted in Baillio, Les bas-reliefs de Pierre Julien. Andrew McClellan, “D’Angiviller’s ‘Great Men’ of France and the Politics of the Parlements,” Art History, 13, no. 2 ( June 1990): 186. See also Erika Naginski, “Julien’s Poussin, or the Limits of Sculpture,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46 (autumn 2004): 134 – 153. Melissa Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), pp. 4 – 5, 57 – 58. It should be said that David’s painting also represents his own reformist vision in relation to the Academy and French art. See Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 211 – 258. Their correspondence, and the details of Julien’s execution, are reprinted and discussed in Baillio, Les bas-reliefs de Pierre Julien, and Michael Preston

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Worley, Pierre Julien: Sculptor to Queen Marie-Antoinette (New York: iUni­ verse, 2003), pp. 85 – 86. Julien’s reference to the Medici Venus appears in a letter that he wrote to Laborde dated August 14, 1792, in the Archives Mouchy. I briefly discuss the Méréville dairy in Chapter 4 (see Figure 4.11). All of Julien’s sculptures for Rambouillet are beautifully illustrated in Baillio’s book. Elisabeth Caude, “La chambre du roi,” in Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette à Compiègne (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2006), p. 75. In some versions of the myth, Amalthea denotes the goat and not the nymph herself. Geoffrey de Bellaigue, The Louis XVI Service (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1986), p. 86. I am grateful to Dr. Worley for pointing out Julien’s letter in an email corre­ spondence. He reprints part of this let­ ter (though not the reference to Robert) in Pierre Julien, p. 85. Colin B. Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 25 – 26, 127; Nicolas Poussin, 1594 – 1665, ed. Richard Verdi (Lon­ don: Royal Academy of Arts, 1995), pp. 207 – 208. While in France, Rubens made a copy of this drawing that is illustrated in Michael Jaffé, “Rubens and Giulio Romano at Mantua,” Art Bulletin, 40, no. 4 (December 1958), figure 20. Worley, Pierre Julien, p. 83. See also Henri Lavagne, “L’Amalthaeum de Cicéron et la ‘Laiterie de la Reine’ au château de Rambouillet,” in La Mythologie: Clef de lecture du monde classique: Hommage à R. Chevallier (Tours: Centre de recherches A. Piganiol, 1986), pp. 467 – 474.

41 Selma Schwartz, “The ‘Etruscan’ Style”; and “Un ‘air d’Antiquité’: le service de Sèvres réalisé pour la Laiterie de Marie­ Antoinette à Rambouillet,” Versalia, 10 (2007): 154 – 181. Both articles build on the author’s M.A. thesis, “The Sèvres Porcelain for the Rambouillet Dairy in Context” (Cooper­Hewitt Museum and Parsons School of Design, 1993). My account of the Rambouillet com­ mission is indebted to Schwartz’s meticulous research and analysis, and to Juliet Carey’s equally insightful exploration of d’Angiviller’s technolog­ ical, aesthetic, and consumer motiva­ tions with regard to the Sèvres factory in the 1780s, in “Aiming High: Porcelain, Sèvres, and the Grand Vase,” Art History, 31, no. 5 (November 2008): 721 – 753. 42 Carey, “Aiming High,” pp. 730 – 731. 43 Wedgwood’s assertion that “consump­ tion will be great for dairies,” as he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1767, is discussed in my article “Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20, no. 3 (spring 2008): 357 – 384. Schwartz notes Wedgwood’s influence on d’Angiviller on p. 159 of “Un ‘air d’Antiquité.’” 44 Quoted in Frédérique Citera, “Aux origines du néo­classicisme à Sèvres,” L’Estampille: L’objet d’art, 253 (Decem­ ber 1991): 56. Lagrenée’s biography and career are discussed in Marc Sandoz, “Jean­Jacques Lagrenée, peintre d’his­ toire (1739 – 1821),” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Francais (1962): 121 – 133. D’Angiviller’s commission for the Salon of 1777 is analyzed in Crow, Painters and Public Life, pp. 189 – 198. 45 Lagrenée’s comment is quoted in Schwartz, “Un ‘air d’Antiquité,’” p. 160. She notes Robert’s involvement on p. 259 of “The ‘Etruscan’ Style.”

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46 Schwartz. “The ‘Etruscan’ Style,” p. 261. Vivant­Denon had purchased the bulk of his collection in 1780, while accompanying the abbé de Saint­Non on a trip to Southern Italy. 47 Quoted and translated in The Age of Neo-Classicism (London: Arts Coun­ cil of Great Britain, 1972), p. 671. D’Angiviller’s 1786 letter to Hettlinger is quoted in Schwartz, “Un ‘air d’Antiquité,’” p. 161. 48 The entire inventory is listed in Schwartz, “Un ‘air d’Antiquité.’” Schwartz’s article also illustrates a plan indicating how these objects were to be arranged in the dairy’s rotunda, as well as many more porcelain pieces than are shown here, including one of the milk buckets (p. 166). 49 Citera, “Aux origines du néo­classi­ cisme,” p. 56. 50 Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 35. 51 Schwartz, “The ‘Etruscan’ Style,” p. 261. 52 Yves Bottineau, “Précisions sur le Fontainebleau de Louis XVI,” Gazette des beaux-arts, 69 (March 1967): 153. For Compiègne, see Caude, “La chambre du roi,” p. 73. 53 AN O1 1180, letter from d’Angiviller to Rousseau dated April 18, 1787. 54 For more on this, see Bottineau, “Pré­ cisions sur le Fontainebleau.” Robert’s paintings are now in the Musée du Louvre. 55 C. Mauricheau­Beaupré, “Un mobilier de G. Jacob dessiné par Hubert Robert,” Bulletin des Musées de France, 6 (April 1934): 76 – 80. 56 Le procès de Marie-Antoinette: 23 – 25 vendémiaire an II (14 – 16 octobre 1793): Actes du Tribunal révolutionnaire, ed. Gérard Walter (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1993).

57 AN O1 1919 (3), 279, letter dated Sep­ tember 5, 1786. Two treatises praising the benefits of milk were published while the Rambouillet dairy was being built: Samuel Ferris’s A Dissertation on Milk (London: J. Abraham, 1785) and Philippe Petit­Radel’s Essai sur le lait (Paris: E. Boudet, 1786). 58 Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: H. Holt, 2006), p. 106. 59 The Age of Neo-Classicism, catalog entry no. 219. 60 Correspondance secrète inédite sur Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, la cour et la ville de 1777 à 1792, ed. Mathurin de Lescure (Paris: H. Plon, 1866), entry dated September 15, 1787. 61 I discuss this literature in more detail in Chapter 4 of this book. 62 Lascazes de Compayre, Dangers du maillot et du lait de femme; moyen d’y remédier; avis aux mères (Paris: Laporte, 1778). For more on the population debate, see Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 63 Carol Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art,” Art Bulletin, 55 (December 1973): 570 – 583; Mary Jacobus, “Incorruptible Milk: Breast Feeding and the French Revo­ lution,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 54 – 75; Valerie Lastinger, “Re­defining Mother­ hood: Breast­Feeding and the French Enlightenment,” Women’s Studies, 25 (1996): 603 – 617; and Patricia R. Ivinski et al., Farewell to the Wet Nurse: Etienne Aubry and Images of Breast-Feeding in Eighteenth-Century France (Williams­ town, Mass.: Sterling and Francine

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Clark Art Institute, 1998). Although it encouraged a lot of propagandistic art and literature, the campaign ultimately had little real effect. See George D. Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715 – 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). Quoted and translated in Terry Smiley Dock, Woman in the Encyclopédie: A Compendium (Potomac, Md.: Studia Humanitatis, 1983), p. 55. See Julien’s letter to Laborde dated August 14, 1792, in the Archives Mouchy. Madelyn Gutwirth, Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 182. Correspondance secrète, entry dated June 8, 1785. I analyze the negative recep­ tion of Marie­Antoinette’s portrait en chemise and other attacks against the queen in Chapter 4; see also essays by Mary D. Sheriff, Sarah Maza, Chantal Thomas, Lynn Hunt, and Elizabeth Collwill in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of the Queen, ed. Dena Goodman (New York: Routledge, 2003). Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited,” in Goodman, ed., MarieAntoinette. Joseph Baillio, “Marie­Antoinette et ses enfants par Mme Vigée­Lebrun,” L’oeil, 308 (March 1981): 34 – 41, 74 – 75, and L’oeil, 310 (May 1981): 53 – 60, 90 – 91. See also Paula Rea Radisich, “Que peut definir les femmes? Vigée­Lebrun’s Portraits of an Artist,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 25, no. 4 (summer 1992): 441 – 467. Evelyne Lever, Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), p. 190.

71 AN O1 1181, letter from d’Angiviller dated June 26, 1788: “Je desire d’autant plus régler les travaux, qu’en meme temps que je veux maintenir le jardins dans l’état de décence.” In this case the work in question concerned payment owed to a gardener named Belleville. 72 AN O1 1181; letter to Rousseau con­ cerning Pompadour’s hermitage dated July 30, 1788. 73 In a letter to the marquis de Bièvre dated June 22, 1787, d’Angiviller defended Louis XVI’s purchase and improvement of Rambouillet by noting, “En acqui­ erons Rambouillet, le Roi a voulu le posséder patrimoinialement pour effacer jusqu’à la moindre trace de domainial­ ité.” (“In acquiring Rambouillet, the king wanted to possess it patrimoni­ ally in order to erase every last trace of domainialité.”) The distinction between “domaine” and “patrimoine” was his­ torically a legal one, but one wonders if d’Angiviller may have invoked the word “patrimoinialement” in the sense that we use it today, as signifying something that is for the nation’s heritage or use. The letter is now in the collection of the “Panthéon Versaillais d’Angiviller” at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Versailles, no. 21. 74 Carey discusses d’Angiviller’s emulation of Colbert in a different context in “Aiming High.” 75 Much of my knowledge about the Rambouillet bergerie comes from the museum that is now on site. The bergerie and the merino project are discussed in André Bourde, The Influence of England on the French Agronomes, 1750 – 1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1953). 76 Mona Ozouf, “Régénération,” in Dic– tionnaire critique de la Révolution Française, ed. François Furet and Mona

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77 78 79

80

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Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 821 – 831. Bourde, The Influence of England, pp. 212 – 213. AN O1 1180; cited in Worley, Pierre Julien, p. 87. The issue of audience with regard to political propaganda at Rambouillet re­emerged around 1800, when mem­ bers of the Paris Agricultural Society argued that the menagerie at the site (which the Revolutionary government had preserved) could not serve as an effective political tool because it was too far from Paris, thus inhibiting the citizens of the capital from going to see it. See Rapport fait à la Société d’agriculture du Département de la Seine, sur la nécessité de conserver l’établissement rural de l’ancienne ménagerie de Versailles par une commission spéciale composée des citoyens Chaptal, Moreau de St-Méry, Grégoire, Duquesnoy et Chassiron [1800] (Paris: Ballard, n.d.), pp. 11 – 12, discussed in Chapter 4 of this book. Laura Auricchio, Adélaïde LabilleGuiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), p. 31. Madame Mitoire was the granddaughter of Carle van Loo, who depicted Pompadour as “La belle jar­ dinière” around 1754 – 1755 (see Figure 3.14). Another example of the breast­ feeding portrait type, made in 1782 by a protégé of Marie­Antoinette named Jean­Laurent Mosnier, appears in L’enfant chéri au siècle des Lumières: Après l’Émile, ed. Christine Kayser (Louveci­ ennes: Musée Promenade de Marly­ le­Roi, 2003), pp. 12 – 13. Quoted in Gutwirth, Twilight of the Goddesses, p. 183. Lascazes de Compayre, Dangers du maillot, pp. 115 – 118.

83 Madelyn Gutwirth, “Suzanne Necker’s Legacy: Breastfeeding as Metonym in Germaine de Staël’s Delphine,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 28, no. 2 (spring 2004): 17 – 40. 84 Jean­Louis Soulavie, Historical and Political Memoirs of the Reign of Louis XVI from His Marriage to His Death, vol. 2 (London: G. and J. Robinson, 1802), pp. 12 – 14. The Royal Menagerie pamphlet is translated and reprinted in Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of MarieAntoinette, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 85 Charles Chavard and Octave Stemler, Recherches sur le Raincy (1238 – 1848) (Paris: Ch. Blot, 1884), pp. 114, 117. 86 At one point during Marie­Antoinette’s trial, the prosecutor demanded of her, “where did you get the money with which you had built and furnished the Petit Trianon, in which you gave fêtes, where you were always the goddess?” See Procès de Marie-Antoinette. 87 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789 – 1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For more on the difference between abstract allegories, real women, and “bad mothers” (especially Marie­ Antoinette) during the Revolution, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: The Uni­ versity of California Press, 1992). Hunt illustrates the concept of autonomous male rebirth in the Revolutionary era in the form of a caricature of the deputy Guy­Jean­Baptise­Target giving birth to the 1791 constitution (p. 100). 88 Ewa Lajer­Burcharth, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 194.

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1 See Bertrand Rondot’s catalog entry for the Revolutionary­era cup in Odile Nouvel­Kammerer et al., Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style, 1800 – 1815 (New York: Abrams, 2007), pp. 98 – 99. 2 Rondot notes that the cup may have belonged to Reubell (also spelled Rewbell) based on the fact that one of his descendants later gave it to the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris (cat­ alog entry in Symbols of Power, p. 99). 3 Guilhem Scherf, “Les bas­reliefs de Pierre Julien pour la laiterie de Ram­ bouillet acquis par dation,” La revue du Louvre et des musées de France, 2 (April 2004): 24. Josephine’s dairy is illustrated and discussed in Bernard Chevallier, Malmaison: Château et domaine des origines à 1904 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989); and Chevallier, Vues du château et du parc de Malmaison, ed. Alain de Gourcuff (Paris: Perrin, 2003). 4 Caroline Weber describes the Chanel runway show and elaborates on its connection to Marie­Antoinette in “Queen, Please: Remembering Marie­ Antoinette,” posted on the New York Times’ T Magazine Blog on November 2, 2009. 5 Illustrated in Jardins en Ile-de-France, dessins d’Oudry à Carmontelle (Sceaux: Musée de l’Ile de France, 1990), p. 46. 6 Chevallier, Vues du château, p. 40. For Josephine’s use of the dairy see Cheval­ lier, Malmaison, p. 31. Susan Taylor­ Leduc has insightfully analyzed Jose­ phine’s farming and landscape activities in a paper entitled “Utile, agréable et profitable: Joséphine as Estate Manager at Malmaison,” presented at a Novem­ ber 2005 colloquium devoted to Jean­ Marie Morel in Dijon, France.

7 Alexandre de Laborde, Déscription des nouveaux jardins de la France et de ses anciens châteaux (Paris: Delance, 1808), quoted and translated in Taylor­Leduc, “Utile, agréable et profitable.” 8 In addition to Beeton’s own writings, see Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton (New York: Knopf, 2006). 9 Clinton’s cookie recipe is reprinted and discussed in Marian Burros, “Now Is the Time to Come to the Aid of Your Favorite Cookies,” New York Times, July 15, 1992, p. C6. 10 Dan Ackman, “Martha Stewart Counts Her Chickens,” Forbes.com, Septem­ ber 15, 2004. 11 The history of “Alice in Dairyland” is described on the Web site of the Wis­ consin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, www .datcp.state.wi.us/mktg/business/ marketing/alice/history.jsp. The Web site reveals that whereas in the past Alice was typically a “wholesome” young woman, a “beauty queen fresh out of high school,” today she is a “public relations professional with at least four years of experience or edu­ cation in agriculture, public relations, communications, or related fields.” For William Harley, see The Harleian Dairy System (London: J. Ridgway, 1829). 12 Alicia Carroll, “Human Milk in the Modern World: Breastfeeding and the Cult of the Dairy in Adam Bede and Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Women’s Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 165 – 197. 13 Jane Roberts, Royal Landscape: The Gardens and Parks of Windsor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 203 – 204. 14 Charles, Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (London: Doubleday, 1989).

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15 Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosen­ zweig, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 200, 202. See also the booklet entitled “The Dairy in Central Park: Restoration Notes” published by the Central Park Conservancy. 16 Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, L’épicurien français, no. 120 and 121, quoted and translated in Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Berg, 2008), p. 292. 17 Roland Barthes, “Wine and Milk” (1957), reprinted in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 60. 18 For more on Les Milandes, see Jean­ Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993); and Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 231 – 241. I am grateful to Mr. Baker for discussing Josephine’s life

19

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with me, and for helping me track down the photograph of her in her dairy at Les Milandes (discussed later in this paragraph). Bennetta Jules­Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 41, 207. The rumor about Marie­Antoinette and the twelve peas­ ant families is repeated in Elizabeth Craven, Memoirs of the Margravine of Anspach, Written by Herself, vol. 1 (Lon­ don: Henry Colburn, 1826), p. 119. Jules­Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life, p. 267. The number of tourists to Les Milandes is noted on p. 36. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), reprinted in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), pp. 279, 280. Sean Hannity, “White House Is ‘Big­ gest Loser’ on Election Night,” posted on FOXNEWS.com, November 5, 2009; “How Can Fancy Lettuce Boy Appeal to Poor People?,” posted on Wonkette.com, August 13, 2007.

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Acknowledgments Writing one’s first book can sometimes be a painful rather than a pleasurable experience. Or, it can feel sublime as Edmund Burke defined the term: dauntingly infinite, a bit solitary and obscure, with flashes of terror and delight in equal measure. But I could never have written Dairy Queens without the considerable support of many individuals and institutions over several years, and it is with deep pleasure and gratitude that I acknowledge them here. I am forever indebted to my wonderful advisor at Harvard University, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, for mentoring and encouraging me throughout my graduate career and beyond. I am also grateful to my other dissertation committee members, Neil Levine and Henri Zerner for their invaluable sage advice and friendship, and to professors Suzanne Blier, Giuliana Bruno, Joseph Disponzio, Stephen Greenblatt, Patrice Higonnet, and Robin Kelsey for their inspiring scholarship and guidance. I completed much of the archival work for this book while I was still a graduate student, and during that period my research and writing was made possible by generous funding from the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard, the Georges Lurcy Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. I also had the great fortune to spend part of the summer of 2004 at the Getty Research Institute, where Ann Bermingham and Mary Sheriff taught a predoctoral seminar on “Sensibility/Sensibilité” that was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and that helped shape the future direction of this book. The Mellon Foundation also supported my postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University from 2006 to 2007, where I carried out additional research and started writing the book manuscript. I would like to thank Hilary Ballon, Barry Bergdoll, Vittoria Di Palma, Mary Gordon, Caroline Weber, and most especially Anne Higonnet for their advice on revising and publishing the text while I was at Columbia, and Claudia Funke, formerly the Curator of Rare Books at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, for sharing her vast knowledge of early modern printed materials with me. The Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia generously provided additional travel and publication funds while I was a fellow there. In France, many archivists, librarians, and curators gave me crucial assistance with my research. I am grateful to the staffs of the Archives Nationales de France, the Archives Départementales du Val-de-Marne, the Archives Départementales du Yvelines, the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque Doucet, the

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Bibliothèque Mazarine, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée Condé de Chantilly, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée National de Céramique at Sèvres, and the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Particular thanks go to Jean-Charles Capronnier, Jean Pouëssel, and Cécile Souchon at the Archives Nationales; Annick Bezaud at Yvelines; Véronique Royet at the BNF’s Cabinet des Estampes; Nicole Garnier-Pelle at the Musée Condé; Isabelle Lemaistre, Jean-François Méjanès, and MarieCatherine Sahut at the Louvre; Tamara Préaud at Sèvres; Vincent Droguet at the Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau; and Jérémie Benoît, Xavier Salmon, and Annick Heitzmann at Versailles and Trianon. I would also like to thank Jean-Marc Bernard, Luisa Capodieci, JeanJacques Cauchois, Olivier Choppin de Janvry, Laurent Mortier, Pierre Pinon, Roger Zimmermann, and the late Marianne Roland Michel in France; Stephen Astley and Susan Palmer at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London; and Mårten Snickare at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. My time in Paris was greatly enriched by the presence of several colleagues and friends, among them Esther Bell, Helen Burnham, Kate Butler, Paul Galvez, Aden Kumler, Cora Michael, and Elizabeth Rudy. In Paris and back in the United States, I have benefited enormously from the advice and friendship of Nina Dubin, Amy Freund, and Susan Taylor-Leduc, all of whom read and commented on the manuscript as I began to revise it. Nina, along with Jeffrey Collins, David Drogin, Alden Gordon, and Jay Oles, also read portions of the manuscript and offered tremendously insightful and helpful comments. Nicolas de la Housseraye and Olivier Werenne made sure that I had a lot of fun while I was abroad and provided me with a place to stay on numerous occasions. For their kind assistance with my research in the United States, I would like to acknowledge the staffs of the Harvard College Libraries, especially Susan Halpert at Houghton and Mary Daniels at Loeb, and the librarians and curators at the Frick Collection, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, where I spent many memorable afternoons reading early modern treatises on medicine and milk. Over the past two years, Wellesley College has provided generous financial support for finishing Dairy Queens and preparing it for publication. I feel incredibly lucky to have found such smart and supportive colleagues at Wellesley. A special thanks to Hélène Bilis in the French Department and, in the Art Department, to Margaret Carroll for our many stimulating conversations; to Alice Friedman for suggesting the perfect image with which to end this book; and to Jay Oles for making Wellesley feel like a second home.

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I owe an enormous debt to Patrice Higonnet, one of my former professors, for championing my work and encouraging me to submit a book proposal to Harvard University Press. As the editor for the Harvard Historical Studies series, Patrice has shepherded the project through its various stages and has given me valuable advice and suggestions for revision. I must also thank my anonymous readers for their thoughtful and detailed comments, as well as Jean Wilcox, my book designer, Judith Feldmann, my copy editor, and Kathleen McDermott, my editor at Harvard University Press, for their wisdom, support, and patience. I am profoundly grateful to my fellow dix-huitièmistes and other academic friends for making scholarly life a convivial rather than isolating endeavor. In addition to those I have already mentioned, I must single out Laura Auricchio, Denise Amy Baxter, Marie d’Origny, Christian Duvernois, Jason Herrick, Melissa Hyde, Mark Ledbury, Mary Sheriff, Kelly Turner, and Eunice Williams. Warm thanks go to Todd Larkin, Paula Young Lee, Erika Naginski, and Mary Terrall for discussing my project and exchanging ideas. Anne Bass, Susan Merriam, Elizabeth Ross, and Alexis Sornin all invited me to give talks on this material and offered their incisive comments and warm hospitality. My deepest personal gratitude goes to Matt Lasner, Scott Rothkopf, and Kristina van Dyke for helping me survive graduate school and continuing to keep me happy and sane. I can’t imagine what I would do without Matt, who has read nearly every word I have written, and who has seen me through innumerable scholarly and other crises. It’s equally impossible to imagine life without my family, or to thank them adequately for all of the love and support that they have given me. My father-in-law, Marvin Siegel, and my husband, Josh Siegel, have enthusiastically read and commented on my work and have helped rescue me from the pitfalls of academic jargon. Words cannot express my gratitude to Josh for supporting me in countless ways; for enduring long, difficult periods of my writing this book; and for being the most challenging and intellectually curious partner that I could hope for. I offer heartfelt thanks to my late grandparents for their infinite love and for inspiring my career in education. My brother Jay, my cousin Amy, my stepparents Tom King and Sandra Martin, and my parents Dianne King and Jay Martin have all given me more than I can ever repay, and have reminded me of a larger, more meaningful world beyond the confines of my computer screen. I dedicate Dairy Queens to my mother and father, who first instilled my love of art, travel, and history, and who always thought that it was a perfectly reasonable idea to write a book on pleasure dairies.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations. Abdeker, 134, 138 Absolutism, 75, 83, 84, 89, 92, 121 Academic éloge, 231 Ackman, Dan, 262 Adam, Robert, 7, 229 Aesop, 80 Agrément, 18 – 19 Alberti, Leon Battista, 37, 47; De re aedificatoria, 35, 36 Albert, prince consort of Victoria, queen of Great Britain, 263 Album du comte du Nord, 95, 96, 99, 100, 183, 184 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 131 “Alice in Dairyland,” 262, 310n11 Allegrain, Christophe-Gabriel: The Butter Churner for the dairy at Crécy, 152, 155 Amalthea, 27, 234; as allegory, 85, 256, 257; and Grotticina di Madama, 58; and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 56 – 57, 58; as “mistress” for Louis XIV, 85; myth of, 54 – 59, 256; paintings by Nicolas Poussin of, 58, 235 – 236; at Palazza Ducale, Mantua, 58; possible subject of Mi-Voie dairy, 54 – 59, 277n68; print after Giulio Romano of, 57, 59; statue at Rambouillet, 227 – 229, 227, 235 – 236, 247, 252, 257, 260; as symbol of political regeneration, 229, 257; and Versailles, 85, 282n34 Amaltheum, 56, 58, 236, 245 Aménagement tradition, 95, 109 Amour: statue of, 150 Ancien régime, 132, 211, 240, 256, 261; and pleasure dairies, 4, 5, 8, 52, 179, 216; and women’s architectural patronage, 15, 87 Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques: Grandes grotesques, 44, 45 Angennes, Julie d’, 90 Angiviller, Charles-Claude de Flahaut de la Billaderie, comte d’, 22, 26 – 27, 207, 208, 212, 216, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229, 231 – 232, 234 – 239, 241, 244, 248, 250 – 253, 256, 263; appointment as governor of Rambouillet, 218; correspondence with Sèvres manufactory, 217, 238, 252; Grands hommes sculptural project by, 207, 231; letter to Pierre Julien, 252; relationship with Louis XVI, 222

Anglomania, 229 Anne of Austria, queen of France, 67, 74, 81, 85; salle basse of, 93 Anseaume, Louis: The Two Hunters and the Milkmaid, 203 Antiope, 109 Antiquités étrusques, grecques, et romaines, 238 Antoine, Jacques-Denis, 189 Apis, 97 Apollo, 46, 47, 104, 221, 234 Architecture champêtre, 125 Architecture naïve, 125 Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’, 122, 124, 125 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando furioso, 31 Aristocratic identity, 11, 15, 18, 45, 21, 36, 48, 61, 95, 107, 157, 164 – 166, 167, 170, 176 – 177, 181, 182, 185, 270n15; See also Performance Aristocratic women: attacks against, 14, 15, 157, 164 – 165, 167, 171 – 173, 246, 253 – 254; selfexpression through architecture, 4, 22, 31, 41, 94, 117, 160 – 161, 163 Aristotle: Poetics, 18; theory of generation, 39, 81 Artemisia, queen of Caria, 53 Artois, Charles-Philippe de France, comte d’, 191, 243 Asclepieion, 245 Astrological Decoration: at Mi-voie dairy, 42, 43, 45 – 49; at Versailles, 104 Atticus, 56 Audran, Claude III, 104, 108; arabesque ceiling design by, 105 Aughié, Madame Adélaïde, 211; portrait of, 213 Aumont, Arnulfe d’, 130 Auvergne, Madeleine de la Tour d’, 51 – 52 Avaux, Jean-François Félibien des: Plans et les descriptions de deux des plus belles maisons de campagne de Pline le consul, 130 Bagatelle, 191 Bagnolet, 148, 300n75; hermitage at, 148 Baillio, Joseph, 248 – 249 Baker, Josephine, 266; in her dairy at Les Milandes, France, 265 Baker, Keith Michael, 199 Balbi, Anne de Caumont La Force, comtesse de, 26, 164, 194, 210; dairy of, 194

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315

Barthes, Roland: “Wine and Milk,” 215, 265 Bärwinkel: dairy at, 305n26 Beauchêne, Edme-Pierre Chauvot de, 14; De l’influence des affections de l’âme dans les maladies nerveuses des femmes, 174 – 175 Beauharnais, Josephine de, 5, 260 – 261 Beauvallet, Pierre-Nicolas: Abundance, 233, 234 Beckford, Mrs. Peter: as Hygieia, 245 Beddoes, Thomas, 297n33 Beeton, Isabella: Book of Household Management, 261 Béguin, Sylvie, 48 Bélanger, François-Joseph, 7, 10, 191 Belleau, Rémy, 51 Bellevue, château de, 150; dairy at, 127, 288n29; hamlet at, 209 Beloeil: dairy at, 10 Beloved Mother, The, 189 – 190 Bergerie (pastoral poem), 31, 51, 53, 56 Bergerie (sheep farm): at Malmaison, 260, 261; at Rambouillet, 222, 250 – 251, 251, 256 Berry, Marie-Caroline-Ferdinande-Louise, duchesse de, 121 “Betty Crocker,” 261 Bible, the, 14, 109 Bienfaisance, 12, 15, 161, 181, 209, 271n32, 294n4 Bienville, D. T. de: treatise on nymphomania, 175 Binet, Sophie: milk cup and saucer, 259 Blaikie, Thomas, 229 Blanc, 120, 134 – 135 Blondel, Jacques-François: Cours d’architecture, 16, 125, 183; De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, 16 Blondel de Gagny, Augustin de, 235 Boboli Gardens, 58 Boel, Pieter, 80; crowned crane and other royal birds at the Versailles menagerie, 79 Boerhaave, Herman, 131, 133, 135 Bonasone, Giulio (after Giulio Romano): The Nurture of Jupiter, 57, 59, 235 Book of Household Management, 261 Book of the Courtier, 45 Bordeu, Théophile de, 130, 131 Boucher, François, 7, 17, 152, 154 – 155, 156, 178, 197, 231, 293n98, 297n38; Friar Luce, 149 Boufflers, Marie-Françoise-Catherine de Beauvau-Craon, marquise de, 140 Boullée, Étienne-Louis, 225 Boullogne, Bon, 97 Bourbon-Condé, house of, 65, 94, 102; rivalry with monarchy, 95, 103; wedding rituals, 17 – 18, 98, 179 Bourbon, Louise-Adélaïde de, 186 Bourbon, Louise-Marie-Thérèse-Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de, 67, 164, 188; hameau and dairy of, 187

Bourbon, Louis III de, 66 Bourbon monarchy, 71, 87, 111, 260; as degenerate, 254 – 255 Bourbon Restoration, 211 Bourderelle, David, 127 Bourgogne, duc de. See Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne Bourgogne, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, duchesse de, 22 – 23, 25, 64, 70 – 71, 75, 78, 80, 83, 87, 94, 103, 107 – 113, 121, 223; as Antiope, 109; death of, 111; garden pavilions of, 108; infertility troubles of, 108; plan of Versailles menagerie with dairy of, 73; portrait of, 112; at SaintCyr, 110. See also Ménagerie de Versailles Bourneville: dairy at, 194 Boutin, Simon-Charles, 11, 17, 189; dairy of, 10 Boutons d’habit, 188 “Breast Cup” (jatte téton): for Rambouillet dairy, 26, 239 – 240, 242, 256, 257 Breastfeeding: campaign to promote, 5, 14, 26, 164, 173, 246 – 247, 253 – 254; represented at Elysée, 187, 188; at Ermenonville, 164, 165; at Malmaison, 260; at Méréville, 190, 247; at Rambouillet, 232, 236, 247; at Salon of 1783, 252, 253 British Royal Academy: exhibition of 1782, 245 Brongniart, Alexandre, 239 Buffon, comte de, 131 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 47 “Burlesque Comedy, The,” 105, 106 Bush, George W., 267 Bussard, Valy, 209, 211, 213 Butter Churner, The, 152, 155 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 245 Cameron, Charles, 186 Camillo, Giulio, 59 Campan, Jeanne-Louise-Henriette, 211 Capricorn, 56, 58 Caractère, 183 Carmontelle, Louis de (Louis Carrogis), 7, 26, 166, 195 – 198, 222, 266; Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris, 195 – 197; La rosière (The Rose-Girl), 15, 194; “Les fermières” (“The Female Farmers”), 195, 196; view of the Watermill and Bridge at Monceau, 198 Caroline, queen of England, 5, 140 Caron, Antoine, 53, 56; portrait of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici from the Histoire des rois de France, 57 Cascina at Poggio a Caiano, 24, 39, 40, 41 Casid, Jill, 12, 295n14 Cassine at Saint-Maur, 35, 37, 39, 64 – 65, 66, 95, 279n88

index

316

Castell, Robert: The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, 130 Castello, Villa Medici, 38 Castiglione, Baldassare: Book of the Courtier, 45 Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France, 4, 5, 7, 8, 21 – 22, 24, 27, 30 – 67, 77, 78, 108, 111, 140, 167, 177, 217, 255, 262; banquet staged by at Bayonne in 1565, 62 – 63, 85; banquet staged by at Mi-voie in 1564, 8, 24, 30 – 31, 41, 51, 62, 63; compared to Artemisia, 53; compared to Cybele, 31, 53 – 54; compared to Marie-Antoinette, 64, 209, 255, 279n87; and festivals, 8, 30 – 31, 61 – 63, 81, 83, 182; infertility troubles, 48 – 49; letter to Cosimo of 1571, 37 – 39, 64; portrayed as Amalthea, 56. See also Mi-voie (Vacherie) Central Park (New York City), 263; dairy at, 263 Ceres, 104 Certeau, Michel de, 14 Chalgrin, Jean-François, 7, 26, 194, 210 Chambray, Roland Fréart de: Parallèle de l’architecture antique et moderne, 139 Champaigne, Philippe de, 93 Chanel, House of: fall 2009 Paris runway show, 260 – 261 Chantilly, 11, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 65, 255; compared to Versailles, 94, 95; destruction of pleasure dairy at, 94; fête for the comte and comtesse du Nord (Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia), 186; hameau at, 162, 176 – 185, 182, 184, 208; history of château de, 94; jardin anglais at, 179; interior of pleasure dairy at, 10, 99 – 102, 100; Isis salon at, 97 – 98; menagerie at, 17 – 18, 82 – 83, 95, 96, 97, 98, 179, 181, 185; pleasure dairy at, 17 – 18, 75, 77, 94 – 103, 107, 137 – 138, 147, 154, 189, 223, 243; porcelain manufactory at, 101; wedding at, 98, 99, 179; working dairy farm at, 18, 185 Charity: as allegory, 52, 56, 187 Charles, prince of Wales, 263 Charles V, king of France, 36 Charles IX, king of France, 7, 8, 30, 38, 53, 54, 56 Chârost, Armand Joseph de Béthune, duc de, 222 Chartres, duc de (Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’Orléans), 15, 120, 136, 164, 166, 175, 187, 188, 194, 195, 198, 229, 256; dairy of, 197 Chaulieu, abbé de, 66 Chaumière des coquillages (Shell Cottage), 221 Chemilly, Préaudeau de, 194 Chenonceau, château de, 61, 62 Chigi, Cardinal Flavio, 82 Childs, James, 267 Cicero, 56, 236 Clagny, château de, 87, 116; menagerie at, 87 Clairon, Mlle, 135

Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, 5 Clement VII, Pope, 32, 78 Clinton, Hillary, 261 – 262 Clodion, Claude-Michel, 231 Clouet, François, 49 Cocchi, Antonio: The Pythagorean Diet, of Vegetables Only, Conducive to the Preservation of Health and the Cure of Diseases, 136 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas, 168, 235; engraved illustration for Les oeuvres de Virgile by, 169 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 85, 92, 220, 250 – 251 Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus: De re rustica, 36 Compayre, Lascazes de, 254; Dangers of Swaddling and Breast Milk, 246 Compiègne, château de, 13, 21, 132, 139; dairy for Madame de Pompadour at, 21, 137, 145 – 147, 146; hermitage for Pompadour at, 145 – 147, 146; remodeling of Louis XVI’s chambre at, 234, 241 Condé, Henri I de Bourbon, prince de, 65 Condé, Henri III Jules de Bourbon, prince de, 16, 75, 95, 97, 98 Condé family. See Bourbon-Condé, house of Condé, Louis-Henri de Bourbon, prince de, 67 Condé, Louis II de Bourbon, prince de (Grand Condé), 82 – 83, 90, 94 – 95, 97, 99; rivalry with Louis XIV, 82 – 83, 94 – 95 Condé, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, prince de, 17, 18, 99, 101, 137, 162, 177 – 186; portrait of, 180 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 140 Converset, Bregide, 67 Cordellier, Dominique, 46 Corne d’Amalthée, 85 Cornelia (Roman heroine), 248 Correspondance secrète: July 1777, 201; June 1775, 188; June 1778, 201; June 1785, 248; September 1787, 245 Corrozet, Gilles, 54 Corybantes, 54, 57, 234 – 235 Cotelle, Jean: Fables de La Fontaine, 99 Cours d’architecture, 16, 125, 183 Cousin, Jean, 47 Coustou II, Guillaume, 152 Cow house method, 176, 297n33 Cows, 18, 87, 142, 185, 213, 247, 256, 266; Dutch, 124; as gifts, 98, 121; Jersey, 263; Lombard, 40; Swiss, 23, 160, 209, 225 Crawford, Katherine, 38 Crécy, château de, 117, 120, 132, 137, 152; dairy at, 152; statues for, 13, 122, 152 – 155 Crosnier, Louis, 142 Croÿ, Emmanuel, duc de, 99, 142; visit to Chantilly dairy, 99, 147; to Nouvelle

index

317

Du Barry, Jeanne Bécu, comtesse, 179, 206 Du Cerceau. See Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques Duchesne, Antoine, 133 Duclos, Charles-Pinot: Les confessions du comte de*** (The Pleasures of Retirement, Preferable to the Joys of Dissipation), 149 – 150 Dupré, Julien, 263 Dupuis, Madame, 224 – 225 Duvaux, Lazare, 137, 138, 142, 147

ménagerie, 124 – 125; to Madame de Pompadour’s hermitage at Versailles, 116, 143 Cybele, 104; Catherine de’ Medici compared to, 31, 53 – 54 Da Confienza, Pantaleone, 40 Dairy industry: U.S., 262, 263, 265 Dan, Pierre, Father, 31, 35; Le Trésor des merveilles de la maison royale de Fontainebleau, 29 Dangeau, Philippe de Courcillon, marquis de, 280n1 Dangerous Liaisons, 181 – 182 Dangers of Swaddling and Breast Milk, 246 Da Sangallo, Giuliano, 39 Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie, 252 David, Jacques-Louis: Oath of the Horatii, 220, 231 Degeneration, 245 – 247; as political metaphor, 245, 254 – 256 DeJean, Joan, 89 Dejoux, Claude, 232 De l’éducation des filles, 109, 110 Delille, Jacques, 23; Les Géorgiques de Virgile, 12, 170 Dell’Abate, Nicolò, 42, 43, 177; The Winnowing of Grain, 59, 60 De l’Orme, Philibert, 34, 42; Premier tome de l’architecture, 39 De re aedificatoria, 35 Deruet, Claude, 90 Descartes, René, 231 Description de la grotte de Versailles, 81 Description of the Royal Menagerie of Living Animals, 254 Desfontaines, abbé, 168, 170 Desgots, Claude, 65 Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode, 11, 189; view of the dairies at Tivoli and Chantilly from, 10 Dévots, 109, 119, 121, 178 Diamond Necklace Affair, 25 – 26, 163, 248 – 249 Diana, 46, 104 Diane de Poitiers, 32, 42, 61, 92, 134; milk baths of, 61, 134 Diary of the French Revolution, A, 159 Diderot, Denis, 130, 131, 156; criticism of royal menageries in Encyclopédie, 83, 133; Eléments de physiologie, 130; and Pythagorean diet, 136; Salon criticism, 179 Dimier, Louis, 42 Directory (Directoire) Government, 260 Divertissements champêtres, 104 – 106 Domesticity: cultural valorization of, 14, 109, 110, 155, 164, 166, 172, 176, 247, 253, 261 Drouais, François-Hubert, 178 – 179; The Prince and Princesse de Condé Dressed as Gardeners, 180

Eleonora of Toledo, 58 Elisabeth-Philippine-Marie-Hélène, princess of France, 5, 164, 186, 202, 210, 223; dairy of, 210 – 211; portrait of, 211, 212 Elysée, hôtel de l’, 137, 187; grotto and fountain designed for the duchesse de Bourbon at, 188; hameau and dairy at, 187 Empire style, 230, 260 Encyclopédie, 131 166; article by Marmontel on pastoral poetry in, 12, 170; article on milk in, 133, 136; discussion of neo-Hippocratic medicine in, 129, 131; engraving of royal dairy at La Muette in, 122, 123; entry on makeup in, 135; entry on menageries by Diderot in, 83; “Paternal Love,” 246 – 247 Encyclopedists, 131 Ermenonville, 187, 208; hameau at, 162, 181; jardin anglais at, 181; tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau at, 164, 165, 295n10 Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde, 172 – 173 Este, Borso d’, 46 Estienne, Charles, 36 Estienne, Henri, 38, 52 “Etruscan” furniture and decorative arts, 217, 237 – 243, 244, 259 Eugénie, empress of France, 261 Evelyn, John, 139 Fables de La Fontaine, 99 Fagon, Louis, 104 – 105 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 7, 150, 152 Félibien, André, 84; Description de la grotte de Versailles, 81 Female allegories, 27, 86, 256, 257; abundance, 85, 187, 233, 234; charity, 52, 56, 187; France, 245; health (santé), 129; nature, 54, 55, 85, 187; peace, 85; sickness (maladie), 129 “Female Farmers, The,” 196 Female hermit, 23, 93, 150 Femininity: cultural valorization of, 12, 52, 94, 109, 110, 164, 176, 191, 206, 253, 254; expressed in art and architecture, 71, 92, 121, 151, 208, 219, 247, 256

index

318

Fénelon, François, 11, 25, 75, 83, 109, 111, 119, 231; De l’éducation des filles, 109, 110, 172; Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse,109 Feodorovna, Maria, Grand Duchess of Russia, 5, 95, 183, 185, 189; dairy of, 186 Fermier Généraux, 119, 177 Fer, Nicolas de, 32; L’atlas curieux, 33 Fêtes champêtres (pastoral and garden festivals), 4, 8, 24, 61; at Bayonne, 62 – 63; at Chantilly, 18, 97, 102, 103, 179, 182, 186; at Chenonceau, 62; at Fontainebleau, 8, 30, 51, 63; at La Celle, 120; at La Muette, 121; at Nouvelle ménagerie, 125; at Petit Trianon, 201; Revolutionary, 187, 257; as ritual of inversion, 24, 63, 182; at Saint-Fargeau, 88; at Sceaux, 85; at Tivoli, 189; at Versailles (for Louis XIV), 25, 63, 67, 74, 81 – 86; wedding, 62, 98 ffolliott, Sheila, 53 Ficino, Marsilio: Three Books on Life, 47 Filarete (Antonio Averlino), 38 Financier class, 5, 10, 11, 113, 121, 164, 177, 189, 191, 267; hostile reception of, 119, 190 Fiorentino, Rosso, 42, 44, 45 First Empire, 211, 260 Fleurs blanches, 119 – 120, 136, 156 Fleur-de-lis, 17 – 18, 111 “Folie St. James,” 191; dairy at, 191; grotto at, 191; view of the Chinese-style kiosk and underground dairy, 192 Fontaine, Pierre, 225, 261 Fontainebleau, 4, 30, 42 – 49, 54, 63, 111; Galerie François I, 44 – 45; Grotte des Pins, 49, 50; hermitage (and dairy) for Madame de Pompadour at, 141, 143 – 145, 144, 250; plan of Mi-voie at, 34; remodeling for Louis XVI, 241; Ulysses gallery, 44, 45, 48, 49; view of the château and gardens from L’atlas curieux, 33. See also Mi-voie (Vacherie) Fontenelle, Bernard de, 197; Discours sur la nature de l’églogue, 168 Foucault, Michel, 80 Foucou, Jean-Joseph, 232 Fountain of Regeneration over the Ruins of the Bastille, The, 257 Fouquet, Marie de Maupeou: Recueil de remèdes faciles et domestiques, 13, 135 Fouquet, Nicolas, 13, 67, 103, 135, 280n12 Francis I, king of France, 32, 36, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 78, 94, 143, 220, 241 Francis II, king of France, 30; wedding fête, 62 Frederick William II, king of Prussia, 10; dairy of, 9 Freemasonry, 191, 194 French Revolution, 8, 190, 213, 219, 257, 259 – 260; anti-royal caricatures and pamphlets, 254, 255;

female allegories of, 85, 256; fêtes of, 187, 257; re-use of ancien régime symbols, 187, 251, 257, 260; seizure of royal estates, 65, 185, 255 – 256 Friedrich I, king of Prussia, 135 Fronde, the, 22, 74, 88, 93, 94 Gabriel, Ange-Jacques, 7, 125, 132, 141; design of hermitage at Compiègne, 145, 146, 147; design of hermitage at Fontainebleau, 141, 143; design of Nouvelle ménagerie, 125, 126, 128 Gacon, François, 101 Galen, 48, 129 Gazette de France, 127 Genest, abbé, 110 Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de St. Aubin, comtesse de, 14, 110, 176, 181, 197, 253; Les veillées du château, 175 Georgic genre, 12, 41, 59, 75, 122, 170, 176 Gilly, Friedrich, 229; The Dairy at Le Raincy, 228 Girardin, René-Louis, marquis de, 162, 164, 181 Gittard, Daniel, 65, 97 Glatigny: menagerie, dairy, and sheepfold at, 87 Gobelet “à Anses Étrusques,” 239, 240 Gobelet à lait, 137, 138, 237, 291n62 Gobert, Pierre, 90, 92, 111; Portrait of MarieAdélaïde de Savoie, duchesse de Bourgogne, 112; Portrait of the Duchesse du Maine, 91 Goldstein, Claire, 22, 74, 81 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de: Histoire de Marie-Antoinette, 240 Gonzaga, Federigo II, 61 Gordon, Alden, 132 Goupy, Claude-Martin, 221 Gourville, Jean Hérault de, 65 Gout, 65, 99; milk recommended as treatment, 13, 99, 135 Grafton, Anthony, 47 Grande Laiterie; See Ménagerie de Versailles Grands hommes, 207, 231 Great Exhibition of 1851, 263 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 173; The Beloved Mother, 189 – 190; The Milkmaid, 203; The Village Bride, 155, 157 Grotesque Ornament, 44, 51, 63, 107; at Galerie François I, 42 – 45; at Mi-voie, 43 – 45; at Versailles menagerie, 104 Grotte des Pins. See Fontainebleau Grotticina di Madama, 58 Grottoes, 49 – 52, 77, 85; as womblike or feminine, 14, 58, 80, 81, 187, 191, 236 Guépière, Jacques de la, 92 Guiche, Aglaïé de Polignac, duchesse de, 202, 203; portrait of, 204 Gustav III, king of Sweden, 248

index

319

Hachette, Nicolas, 42, 43 Hameau (hamlet): as building type, 12, 23 – 24, 140, 141, 155, 161 – 162, 168, 178, 181 – 185, 260; at Chantilly, 162, 176 – 185, 182, 184, 208; at Elysée, 187; at Ermenonville, 162, 181; hostile reception by critics of, 15, 164 – 166, 167, 183; at Luxembourg, 194; at Montreuil, 210 Hameau de Versailles: 2, 9, 12, 15, 17, 24, 25 – 26, 157, 160 – 164, 182, 186, 208 – 209, 213, 218, 221, 223, 260, 266; boudoir at, 162, 208; criticism of, 15, 164 – 166, 167; farm at, 209, 210; mill at, 161; plan of Petit Trianon with jardin anglais and, 200; pleasure dairy at, 2, 3, 2 – 4, 17, 20, 160, 162 – 163, 208, 211, 213, 261; preparation dairy at, 3 – 4, 160, 162, 181, 201, 211 “Hameau effect,” 167 Hamilton, William, 238 Hancarville, Pierre d’, 238, 239 Hardouin-Mansart, Jules, 7, 16, 17, 20, 70, 75, 77, 87, 95, 97, 126, 141, 243; design for dairy and Isis salon at Chantilly, 102; design of SaintCyr, 109 – 110; the duchesse de Bourgogne’s garden pavilions at Versailles menagerie, 108; renovations at Versailles menagerie, 103, 104 Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 262 Harley, William, 262 “Hausset, Madame du,” 131 – 132 Health (Santé), 127 – 133; 171 – 175, 243 – 247; and milk cure, 13 – 14, 40, 133 – 139, 175, 243; and neo-Hippocratic theories, 129 – 132; statue at Versailles, 127 – 129 Heitzmann, Annick, 211 – 212 Helman I. S. (after Charles Monnet): The Fountain of Regeneration over the Ruins of the Bastille, 257 Henri II, king of France, 30, 34, 42, 48, 56 Henri IV, king of France, 34, 65, 67, 231, 255 Herculaneum, 26, 237, 238, 243 Hermitage: at Bagnolet, 148; as building type, 13, 21, 23, 93, 118, 140 – 141, 148 – 149, 157; history of, 140; at Montmorency, 139, 151; at Richmond, 140; as therapeutic health retreat, 23, 139 – 140; women associated with, 93, 150. See also Compiègne; Fontainebleau; and Versailles Hesse-Rheinfels, Marie-Caroline de: wedding of, 98 Hettlinger, Jean-Jacques, 238, 239, 241 Hilton, Paris: The Simple Life, 266 – 267 Hippocrates, 48, 129, 130, 131; milk prescribed as a health regimen by, 134 Histoire de Marie-Antoinette, 240 Historical and Political Memoirs of the Reign of Louis XVI, from His Marriage to His Death, 254

Hoffmann, Friedrich: Treatise of the Extraordinary Virtues and Effects of Asses Milk, 135 Honnête femme, 90, 92 Horus, 98 Houasse, René-Antoine: Fables de La Fontaine, 99 Houel, Nicolas: Histoire des rois de France, 56; “L’histoire de la Reine Artémise,” 53 Houze, madame de la, 195, 196 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 47, 51, 56 – 57; detail of Jupiter and Amalthea from the 1546 French edition of, 58 Isis, 54, 92, 97 Isis salon. See Chantilly Jacob, Georges, 26, 241, 243; armchair for the Rambouillet dairy, 244 Jardin anglais, 142, 179, 188; at Chantilly, 179; at Ermenonville, 181; at Fontainebleau, 241; at Elysée, 187; at Le Raincy, 229; at Montreuil, 210; at Petit Trianon, 199, 200, 201, 202, 218; at Rambouillet, 221, 223; at Versailles hermitage, 142 Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris, 195 – 197, 198. See also Monceau Jardin de propreté, 16 Jardin du Roi (Paris), 133 Jardin français, 199, 223 Jatte téton. See “Breast Cup” ( j atte téton) Jaucourt, Louis de, 130, 131 Jerusalem Delivered, 87 Julien, Pierre, 7, 26, 187, 238; Apollo, Shepherd of Admetus, 234; biography of, 231; correspondence with d’Angiviller, 232, 248, 252 – 253; Dying Gladiator, 231; Jupiter Raised by the Corybantes, 234, 234 – 235; A Mother Nursing Her Child, 232; sculpture for Méréville dairy by, 190, 229, 233, 247; sculpture for Rambouillet dairy by, 231 – 237, 247, 260; statue of Amalthea by, 227, 235, 257; statue of Jean de la Fontaine by, 231; statue of Nicolas Poussin by, 231 Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, 5, 14, 19, 24, 118, 151, 164, 172, 194, 202 Juliette, 186 Juno, 17, 50, 53, 57, 104 Jupiter, 27, 46, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 85, 227, 234, 235, 236, 256 Jussieu, Bernard de, 133 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 48 Kaolin: discovery of, 238 Kent, William, 140 Kimball, Fiske, 103

index

320

Larkin, Todd, 206 Lassurance, Jean, 116, 143; design of hermitage at Versailles, 141 – 142, 117 L’Astrée, 71, 88, 89, 197 Laugier, Marc-Antoine: Essay on Architecture, 183 La Vallière, Louise de, 84 La vie champêtre, 14, 70, 74, 75, 88, 95, 122, 140, 150, 166, 172, 186, 189, 194, 208, 261; milk associated with, 176; “frivolous” or theatrical displays of, 189, 194 Le Camus, Antoine: Abdeker, 134, 138; La médecine de l’esprit, 138 – 139 Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas: Le génie de l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations, 140 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 7, 183; dairy at Bourneville, 194 Le Goût Étrusque, 238 Lémery, Nicolas: Recueil des curiositéz rares et nouvelles des plus admirables effets de la nature et de l’art, 134 Lemonnier, Louis-Guillaume, 133 Le Nôtre, André, 65, 75, 87, 94, 207 Leo X, Pope, 46 Lepautre, Pierre, 77; map of the town and château of Versailles, 76 L’épicurien français, 264 Le Raincy, 136, 229, 255 – 256; dairy at, 228, 305n26 Le Rouge, Georges: view of the dairies at Tivoli and Chantilly from Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode, 10, 11, 189 Le Roy, Jean-François, 179, 186; Hameau de Chantilly, 182 Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse, 109 Les confessions du comte de*** (The Pleasures of Retirement, Preferable to the Joys of Dissipation), 149 – 150 “Les divertissements de Versailles,” 85 Les Géorgiques de Virgile, 12, 170 Les Milandes, 266 Les précieuses, 47, 90, 109 Les saisons, 12, 170 Les veillées du château: “Delphine, or the Fortunate Cure,” 175 – 176 Leszczynski, Stanislas, 140, 170 – 171, 181 Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, 20, 36, 80 Le Vau, François, 88 Le Vau, Louis, 88; design of menagerie and Grande Laiterie at Versailles, 67, 70, 74, 77, 126 L’hermite de la cour ou le courtisan reformé, 150 l’Hôpital, Aloph de, 32 L’idylle sur la paix, 85; title page, 86

Krafft, J.-C., view of the dairy at the Folie St. James from Plans, coupes, élévations des plus belles maisons et des hôtels construits à Paris et dans les environs, 191, 192 Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde: Portrait of Madame Mitoire with Her Children (miniature after), 252, 253 Laborde, Alexandre de, 261 Laborde, Jean-Joseph de, 5, 164, 189 – 191, 223, 229, 247; arrest and execution of, 190; dairy of, 190 La Bruyère, Jean de: Les caractères, 115 Lacaze, Louis de, 133; Idée de l’homme physique et moral, 130 La Celle: fête champêtre at, 120 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de: Dangerous Liaisons, 181 – 182 Lactanius, 56 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de, 65 – 66, 90; La princesse de Clèves, 65 La femme hermite, 150 La Fontaine, Jean de, 84, 110, 149, 231; Fables de La Fontaine, 99 La Fosse, Charles de, 92 “La France Malade” (“France Is Ill”), 245 La Grande Mademoiselle. See Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Lagrenée, Jean-Jacques, 238, 239, 244; “breast cup” (jatte téton) for Rambouillet dairy, 242; design for Rambouillet dairy service, 240 L’agriculture et maison rustique, 36, 49 Laiterie d’agrément; See Pleasure dairies Laiterie de la Reine. See Queen’s Dairy Laiterie de préparation. See Preparation dairies Laiterie de propreté, 2 Laiterie parée, 16 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 142 Lamballe, Marie-Thérèse-Louise de SavoieCarignan, princesse de, 176, 202, 206, 221 Lambert, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de: La femme hermite, 150; Oeuvres, 150 La médecine de l’esprit, 138 – 139 L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population, 171 – 172, 179 La Muette, château de, 121 – 124; dairy at, 122, 123, 126; history of, 121; as love nest for Louis XV, king of France, 122 La nature, 54, 55 La nouvelle Héloïse. See Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse La princesse de Clèves, 65

index

321

Liébault, Jean, 49, 52; L’agriculture et maison rustique, 36 Ligne, Charles-Joseph, prince de: dairy of, 10 Linnaeus, Carl, 133 Longueil, mademoiselle de, 195, 196 Lorraine, cardinal de, 51 Lorry, Anne-Charles: Essai sur les alimens, pour servir de commentaire aux livres diététiques d’Hippocrate, 130 Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne, 22, 70, 75, 83, 108 – 109; death of, 111; marriage at Versailles, 70 Louis Philippe I, king of France, 175 Louis XIII, king of France, 77 Louis XIV, king of France, 5, 13, 16, 22, 24 – 25, 27, 37, 67, 70 – 75, 77 – 78, 80 – 81, 92, 99, 101, 102, 104, 109, 111, 113, 121, 148, 220; and diplomatic visits, 82; fêtes of, 63, 83 – 86; plan of menagerie and Grande Laiterie of, 72, 73; relationships with women, 70, 84 – 89; rivalry with Grand Condé, 82 – 83, 94 – 95; selling of noble offices, 74, 176 – 177 Louis XV, king of France, 25, 32, 70, 93, 108, 116, 117, 119 – 122, 124, 130 – 133, 142 – 143, 145, 149, 150, 156, 171, 177, 237; dairy at La Muette of, 122, 123; as “gardener king,” 127; health of, 133, 149 Louis XVI, king of France, 160, 178, 187, 202, 206, 207, 209, 224, 234, 235, 236, 241, 244, 254, 256; depicted plowing a field, 178, 267; purchase of Rambouillet by, 185, 216, 217, 220; as “regenerator” of France, 251; Revolutionary caricatures of, 254, 255 “Louis XVI service,” 235 Louvre, 227, 235, 238 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 84, 85; Alceste, 85 Lunéville, château de, 171, 199; “Chartreuses” at, 140, 181 Lutzelbourg, comtesse de, 142 Luxembourg Gardens, 26, 194; dairy at, 194 Luynes, Charles Philippe d’Albert, duc de, 124, 127, 132, 133, 145 Madame Elisabeth of France Distributing Milk, 212 Mailly, Louise Julie de Mailly, comtesse de, 122 Maine, Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de BourbonCondé, duchesse du, 74, 90, 95 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de, 25, 70, 75, 109 – 110, 149 Malmaison: bergerie (sheep farm) at, 260, 261; dairy at, 260; sculptures from Rambouillet transported to, 260 Marchands-merciers, 243 Marianne, 256 Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, 199, 202 Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, 2 – 4, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 22 – 23, 24, 25 – 26, 32, 52, 64, 87, 94, 108,

127, 152, 160, 170, 176, 179, 182, 183, 187, 188, 195, 198, 237, 248, 261, 266; attacks against, 15, 19, 25 – 26, 199, 163, 164, 167, 206, 243, 245, 248 – 249, 254 – 256, 262; and breastfeeding, 164; compared to Catherine de’ Medici, 64, 209, 255, 279n87; and d’Angiviller, 207 – 208, 218, 250; imprisonment of, 213; as “l’Autrichienne,” 223, 304n17; as milkmaid queen of Versailles, 2, 208 – 213, 240, 302n106; at Petit Trianon, 160, 199 – 207; porcelain cups molded from breasts of, 26, 240; pornographic pamphlets published against, 175, 206; portrait “en chemise,” 203 – 204, 205, 206, 208, 248; portrait with her children, 248, 249; “poufs” of, 188, 254 – 255; and Rambouillet, 26 – 27, 216, 218 – 219, 220, 223, 249 – 250, 257; Revolutionary caricatures of, 254, 255; in role of milkmaid Perrette, 203; trial of, 207, 243, 256. See also Hameau de Versailles Marie-Louise, empress of France, 211, 261 Marigny, Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, marquis de, 152, 155 Marinello, Giovanni, 49, 52 Marlet, Étienne, 65; detail of cassine at SaintMaur, 66 Marmontel, Jean-François, 131, 139; article on pastoral poetry in Encyclopédie, 12, 170, 171 Martin, Barthélemy, 99 Martin, Jean, 47 Mary II, queen of England, 5 Mastos cup, 240 Maternity: ideal of, 247, 253 Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de, 120 Maza, Sarah, 181 Mazarin, Cardinal, 75, 81, 85 Mazery, Gaspard, 42, 43 Medici, Catherine de’. See Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France Medici, Cosimo I de’, 37 – 39, 58, 64 Medici, Cosimo III de’, 82 Medici, Francesco I de’, 38 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 24, 37, 78, 39 – 41, 51; cascina (dairy farm) of, 40 Medici, Maddalena de’, 40 Medici Venus, 233 Medusa, 187 Meilhan, Gabriel Sénac de, 132 Mémoires secrets, 205 – 206, 217, 252; August 1788, 256; July 1773, 186; November 1783, 220; November 1784, 220; November 1785, 194; September 1775, 202 Menagerie, 16; as building type, 21, 22 – 23, 75 – 82, 223; at Chantilly, 17 – 18, 82 – 83, 95, 96, 97, 98, 179, 181, 185; at Chenonceau, 62; at Clagny/ Glatigny, 87; criticism of by Diderot, 83; history of, 78; at La Muette, 121; at Madame de

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322

Pompadour’s hermitages, 116, 142, 143; at Mi-voie, 35; at Rambouillet, 185, 216, 218, 222, 223 – 225, 229; revived during Revolution, 185, 255; royal women compared to animals in, 23, 78, 223, 254; at Sceaux, 92 – 93; at Tivoli, 189. See also Ménagerie de Versailles Ménagerie de Versailles, 16, 22, 24 – 25, 67, 70 – 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 94, 97, 99, 103 – 113, 121, 124, 126, 143, 145, 185, 223; the duchesse de Bourgogne’s dairy at, 22, 25, 70 – 71, 73; 75, 78, 94, 103, 107, 108, 110 – 113; the duchesse de Bourgogne’s garden pavilions at, 107, 108; Grande Laiterie at, 16, 22, 75, 77 – 78, 73, 80 – 81; interior remodeling at, 103 – 107, 105; plan of, 72 “Menagerie service,” 101 Menars: dairy at, 127, 288n29 Mendès-France, Pierre, 263 – 266; as guest on Meet the Press, 264 Menneville, Mademoiselle de, 67 Menus-Plaisirs, 187 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien: Tableau de Paris, 136, 190, 243 – 244 Mercure de France, 98 Mercure galant, 97 Mercy-Argenteau, Florimond Claude, comte de, 202 Méré, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de, 18 Méréville, dairy at, 189 – 190, 190, 299n62; gardens at, 223; sculpture by Pierre Julien at, 190, 233, 247 Mérigot fils, 97; view of Rousseau’s tomb from Promenade ou Itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville, 165; view of menagerie from Promenades ou itinéraire des jardins de Chantilly, 98 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 191 Michaux, André, 222 Mignard, Pierre, 90 Milk, 86, 93, 257; article on milk in Enyclopédie, 133, 136; asses, 134, 135 – 136, 201, 244; associated with abundance or fertility, 82, 86, 93, 98, 102, 141, 160, 162, 179, 187, 233 – 234, 260; associated with Arcadia or la vie champêtre, 8, 17, 31, 41, 63, 143, 176, 185; associated with purity, 20, 175; baths, 61, 134; bowl from MarieAntoinette’s pleasure dairy at the Hameau de Versailles, 163; breast milk, 17, 26, 86, 99, 135, 173, 246 – 247, 254; camel’s, 48, 244; as cosmetic agent, 134; cow’s, 18, 135, 136, 244; cup and saucer, 259, 259; and dairy industry, 262, 263, 265; distributed as charitable gesture, 152, 209, 211, 212; goat’s, 27, 54, 85, 135, 227, 235, 244, 256; goblets, 137, 138, 147, 237, 291n62; images of women drinking, 173, 174, 195, 196; as medicinal remedy (“milk cure”), 13, 14, 15, 25, 38, 40,

66, 99, 118, 130, 133 – 139, 175 – 176, 201; and national pride, 263 – 265; as part of new religion of nature, 10, 14; as part of preventive health regimen, 23, 136, 168, 243; sheep’s, 135; tracts and treatises on, 13, 133, 135 – 136, 243 – 244, 307n57; women’s “natural” taste for, 151, 194 Milkmaid, The, 203 Milkmaids, 2, 5, 13, 22, 71, 89, 104, 152 – 155, 191, 197, 203, 208, 225, 262 – 263; images of milking, 14, 105, 106, 233, 265, 266, 267; porcelain figurines of, 12 – 13 Millet, Jean-François, 263 Minerva, 50, 104 Mique, Richard, 2, 160, 250; correspondence with d’Angiviller, 207, 218; design for hamlet at Bellevue, 209; farm at Hameau de Versailles, 209, 210; garden design at Petit Trianon, 199 – 201; as Intendant et controleur général des bâtiments de la reine, 199; the mill at Hameau de Versailles, 161; plan of Petit Trianon, 200; pleasure dairy at Hameau de Versailles, 2, 3; theater at Petit Trianon, 202 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 12, 14, 18, 110, 122, 253; “De l’institution des femmes,” 172; L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population, 171 – 172, 179 Mi-voie (Vacherie), 7, 21, 24, 30 – 35, 38, 42 – 43, 45 – 47, 49 – 59, 63, 67, 74, 77, 104, 162 – 163, 217, 229; afterlife of, 67; banquet staged at in 1564, 8, 24, 30 – 31, 41, 51, 62, 63; decoration of dairy at, 42 – 59; design of, 32; destruction of by Louis XIV, 77, 104; plan of, 34, 35; purchase of, 32, 34 Molière, 67, 77 Monceau, 195, 222; dairy at, 15, 136, 166, 197; engravings of gardens by Louis de Carmontelle at, 195 – 198; garden at, 188, 197, 198, 222. See also Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris Monceau, Henri-Louis Duhamel du: Traité de la culture des terres, 127 Mondain, 118, 140, 157, 170, 195, 221, 243 Montceaux, 34, 51 Montespan, Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, marquise de, 5, 25, 84, 87, 90, 116, 120, 134, 148, 149; menagerie and dairy of, 87; portraits of, 87, 92 Montpellier Medical School, 130 Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de, 71, 74, 88 – 90; letters to Madame de Motteville, 69, 89, 93 Montreuil (garden retreat of the comtesse de Provence), 210; dairy and hameau at, 210 Montreuil (house and garden of Madame Elisabeth), 210, 223; dairy at, 210 – 211

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323

Morel, Jean-Marie, 260 Morellet, Laurent, 85, 92 Morris, Gouverneur, 15, 160; A Diary of the French Revolution, 159 Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de, 89, 93 Moulin Joli, 17; dairy at, 17, 271n26 Murat, Caroline, 261 Napoleon Bonaparte, 5, 211, 225, 230, 260, 261; section view of Rambouillet dairy with changes proposed by Napoleon, 230 Napoleonic art, 259 Necker, Suzanne, 130, 254 Negotium, 31, 37 – 38, 61, 83, 230 Neoclassical style, 9, 12, 142, 143, 147, 162, 166, 189, 212, 220, 225, 229, 231, 238, 239, 241 Neo-Hippocratic medicine, 13, 19, 99, 129 – 132, 135, 243; discussed extensively in Encyclopédie, 130; faith in health regimens of, by Madame de Pompadour, 156; as inspiration for Pompadour’s hermitages, 139; revival, 25, 118, 129; and therapeutic effects of milk, 133; as widespread health craze by 1750, 13 Nero, 43, 134 Neuilly, 191; dairy at, 261 Newman, William, 47 Nobility. See Aristocratic Identity; Aristocratic Women “Notes on Camp,” 195, 266 Nouvelle ménagerie de Versailles, 117, 124, 124 – 127, 132, 141, 142, 177, 178, 201; dairy at, 126, 127, 128; French pavilion at, 125, 126 Nurture of Jupiter, The, 57, 59, 235 Nymphaeum, 50, 56, 227 Nymphomania (“uterine furies”), 13, 175 Obama, Barack, 267 Obama, Michelle, 267 Oberkirch, Henriette Louise von Waldner, baroness d’, 11, 189 Octagon: as symbol of regeneration, 63, 81 Orlando furioso, 31 Orléans, Bathilde d’. See Bourbon, Louise-MarieThérèse-Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de Orléans, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, duchesse d’, 148; hermitage of, 148 Orléans, Philippe II, duc d’, 121, 148 Osiris, 98 Otium, 31, 37, 61, 83, 102, 230 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste, 104; The Farm, 122, 177 – 178, 178; “The Burlesque Comedy,” 105, 106 Ovid, 56, 85, 234; Fasti, 235 Paindebled, Jean-Baptiste, 221 Palais Royal, 197

Palatine, Princess (Elisabeth-Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans), 107 Palazzo del Tè, 42, 43, 46, 52, 61; Sala dei Venti at, 46 Palazzo Ducale (Mantua), 57 Palazzo Schifanoia, 46 Pales, 104 Palissy, Bernard, 51; Recepte véritable, 51 Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 5 Parallèle de l’architecture antique et moderne, 139 Pâris, Pierre-Adrien, 187; grotto and fountain at hôtel de l’Elysée, 188 Paris Agricultural Society, 222 Pastoral: architecture, 7 – 8, 12, 15, 19, 21, 25, 31, 41, 71, 74, 87, 117 – 118, 125, 148 – 149, 162, 166 – 167, 183 – 184; fêtes, 17, 18, 22, 30 – 31, 61 – 64, 67, 83 – 86, 98, 120, 121, 179, 182, 186; instability of, 19, 26, 167, 203, 206; as literary mode, 7 – 8, 12, 19, 31, 41, 51, 71 – 72, 75, 89, 93, 162, 164, 166 – 171; painting, 59 – 60, 104, 110, 122, 154 – 155, 178, 263; performance, 8, 31, 61, 71, 111, 195, 266 – 267; portraiture, 90 – 92, 157, 178 – 179, 203; reformation of, 10, 110, 168 – 176; theater, 150, 202 – 203; urban, 186 – 198 Patrimoine, 250, 256, 308n73 Pattullo, Henry: Essai sur l’amélioration des terres, 127, 170 Paul I, Grand Duke of Russia, 95, 183, 185 Pavlovsk Palace, 186; dairy at, 186 Peace: as allegory, 85 Penthièvre, Louis Jean-Marie de Bourbon, duc de, 120, 152, 220, 221; dairy of, 152 Percier, Charles, 225, 230; section view of Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, 230 Perée, Jacques-Louis: “The Regenerated Man,” 257 Performance: and aristocratic identity, 61, 74, 113, 149, 181; burden of, 59 – 64. See also Pastoral Perrault, Claude: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux, 79 Petit lait, 209; as medicinal remedy, 136, 137, 175 Petit Trianon, 12, 19, 25, 124, 160, 203, 206 – 208, 243, 248, 250, 253, 256; jardin anglais at, 199 – 201; plan of, 200; regulations at, 202; See also Hameau de Versailles Pfaueninsel: dairy at, 9, 10 “Philippe Égalité.” See Chartres, duc de (LouisPhilippe-Joseph d’Orléans) Philip II, king of Spain, 62 Physiocracy, 11, 18, 36, 118, 121, 132, 155, 171 – 172, 173, 246 Piero Valeriano, 92; Hieroglyphica, 47 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste, 150 Pisano, Nicola, 56 Plans, coupes, élévations des plus belles maisons et des hôtels construits à Paris et dans les environs, 191

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324

Pleasure: alternative definitions of, 149 – 150; associated with pastoral mode, 16, 17, 35, 37, 66, 84, 88, 89, 168. See also Agrément Pleasure dairy: as architectural analogue to pastoral literary mode, 7 – 8, 166; as building type, 2 – 7, 16 – 24, 36, 64, 94, 102, 107, 113, 162, 166, 189, 216, 217; design of, 19 – 20; history of, 7 – 16; popularity of, 7; proliferation after 1750, 8, 10, 168; terminology of, 16 – 18 Pliny the Elder: milk prescribed as a health regimen by, 134 Pliny the Younger, 13, 38, 130; letter describing villa life in Tuscany, 129 Poggio a Caiano, 38, 39 – 41, 82. See also Cascina at Poggio a Caiano Poisson, François, 119 Polignac, Yolande-Martine-Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de, 202, 206, 210 Poliziano, Angelo: “Ambra,” 41; Silvae, 41 Pomona, 104 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson d’Étiolles, marquise de, 5, 10, 13, 14, 25, 64, 66, 87, 113, 116, 150, 168, 170, 177, 178, 179, 187, 201, 240, 250, 286n4; allegorical statues representing herself as “Friendship,” 150; attacks against, 119 – 120, 150, 156 – 157; dairy at Crécy of, 13, 122, 152; hermitages (with dairies) of, 21, 23, 87, 93, 116 – 119, 117, 124 – 127, 128, 139 – 151, 141, 144, 146, 152 – 154, 160, 209; letter to the comtesse de Lutzelbourg, 142; and milk cure, 133 – 139; and neo-Hippocratic medicine, 19, 99, 127 – 131; other dairies of, 127, 288n29; porcelain milk goblets, 137 – 138, 237, portrait of as “La belle jardinière,” 151 – 152, 153; relationship with François Quesnay, 13, 118, 131 – 133, 289n44; salon of, 131, 139 Pompeii, 26, 237, 238; Pompeian style, 221, 241 Poppaea: and her use of milk, 134 Porcelain: biscuit replicas of Crécy dairy statues, 12 – 13, 154 – 155, 154, 155; “breast cup” (jatte téton), 26, 239 – 240, 242, 256, 257; dairy utensils at Chantilly dairy, 99, 102, 179; at Compiègne hermitage, 147; at Hameau de Versailles, 3 – 4, 162, 163; at Le Raincy, 229; at Monceau, 197; at Royal Dairy in Windsor Home Park, 263; “Etruscan” service at Rambouillet, 26, 217, 236 – 242, 240, 259, 306n41; glass cooler from “menagerie service,” 101; gobelet à lait, 10, 118, 137, 138, 237, 291n62; “Louis XVI service,” 235; manufactory at Chantilly, 101; manufactory at Paris (“Queen’s Factory”), 162, 237; manufactory at Saint-Cloud, 137, 138; manufactory at Sèvres, 137 – 138, 217, 237 – 239, 259; manufactory at Vincennes, 137, 154; milk buckets

from Sèvres, 20, 239; soucoupe enfoncé, 138; trembleuse cup, 138; Wedgwood manufactory, 211, 217, 229, 237, 239 Pornographic pamphlets, 175, 206, 248; The Royal Dildo, 166, 206 Portail, Jacques-André, 125; The Nouvelle Ménagerie at Versailles (attr.), 124 Portrait of Madame Aughié, 213 Portrait of Madame Mitoire with Her Children (miniature after), 252, 253 Portrait of Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, duchesse de Bourgogne, 112 Portrait of Marie-Antoinette “en chemise,” 203 – 204, 205, 206, 208, 248 Portrait of Marie-Antoinette with Her Children, 248 – 249, 249 Portrait of the Duchesse de Guiche, 203, 204 Portrait of the Duchesse du Maine, 90 – 92, 91 Potiquet, Henri-Alfred, 136 Poundbury, 263 Poussin, Nicolas, 58, 236; paintings of Amalthea myth by, 235; statue of, 231 Preparation Dairy: as building type, 3, 21. See also Hameau de Versailles; Queen’s Dairy Primaticcio, Francesco, 7, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 57, 58; Grotte des Pins (attr.), 50; as head designer of Mi-voie, 34, 42 – 43, 52; possible study for the Mi-voie dairy (circle of ), 46, 47 Prince and Princesse de Condé Dressed as Gardeners, The, 180 Promenade ou Itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville: view of Rousseau’s tomb, 165 Promenades ou itinéraire des jardins de Chantilly: view of menagerie, 98 Provence, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, comte de, 194, 243, 245 Provence, Marie-Joséphine-Louise de Savoie, comtesse de, 164, 174, 186, 204, 210; hameau and dairy of, 210 Puisieux, Madeleine de, 136 Puttenham, George, 8, 12, 41 Puységur, Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de, 191 Puységur, Marguerite Baudard de Saint-James, marquise de, 191; portrait of, 193 Pythagoras: milk prescribed as a health regimen by, 134 Queen’s Dairy, 20, 22, 26 – 27, 52, 59, 94, 187, 190, 211 – 212, 216 – 219, 243, 245, 247, 250, 251, 253, 256, 260, 268n2, 304n20; architectural design of, 223 – 230; “breast cup” (jatte téton) for, 26, 239 – 240, 242, 256, 257; elevation view of, 219; “Etruscan” furniture for, 241 – 243, 244;

index

325

“Etruscan” porcelain service for, 26, 217, 236 – 242, 240, 259, 306n41; inscription “Laiterie de la Reine” on, 216; interior view of, 226; menagerie at, 185, 218, 223 – 225; preparation dairy at, 224 – 225, 224; salon du roi at, 224; sculptures by Pierre Julien, 231 – 237, 260; section view of (with changes proposed by Napoleon), 230; statue of Amalthea at, 187, 227 – 229, 235 – 236, 247, 252, 257, 260; view of grotto and statue of Amalthea in, 227. See also Rambouillet Quesnay, François, 36, 131, 134, 170, 289n40; as cofounder of Physiocracy, 118, 171; letter describing milk treatments for Madame de Pompadour, 136 – 137; relationship with Pompadour, 13, 118, 131 – 133, 289n44 Racine, Jean, 97; L’idylle sur la paix, 85 Rambouillet, 27, 208, 209, 212, 224, 225, 256, 308n73; bergerie (sheep farm) at, 222, 250 – 251, 251, 256; Chaumière des coquillages at, 221; d’Angiviller appointed governor of, 218; experimental garden designed by Hubert Robert at, 221 – 222; jardin anglais at, 221, 223; and public perception, 251 – 253, 309n79; purchase of, 185, 216, 217, 220; remodeling of, 219, 220, 221, 223. See also Queen’s Dairy Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de, 90 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 43; La belle jardinière, 152 Raulin, Joseph: Traité des affections vaporeuses du sexe, 130 Regeneration, 12, 183, 191, 247; and French monarchy, 26 – 27, 54, 63, 81, 85, 194, 212, 219, 229, 234, 243, 251, 260; and Revolutionary symbolism, 251, 257 Régnier, Antoine, 238 Renoust, Jacques, 42, 43 Retreat: as political gesture, 8, 31, 37, 38, 71, 74, 83, 88 – 93, 151, 209 – 210 Reubell, Jean-François, 260 Revolution. See French Revolution Reynière, Grimod de la, 264 Reynolds, Joshua, 245 Rhea, 54 Richard, Claude, 142 Richard, Fleury: Madame Elisabeth of France Distributing Milk, 211, 212 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, 5; Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 5 Richelieu, Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, maréchal de, 116, 141 – 142 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, 111 Ripa, Cesare, 92

Robert, Hubert, 7, 231; appointment as king’s chief garden designer, 221; design of dairy at Méréville, 189, 229; façade of dairy at Méréville, 190; as head designer of Queen’s Dairy project, 217, 219, 222 – 223, 226, 235, 238; paintings for Fontainebleau done by, 241 Rococo style, 103, 162, 168, 179, 221, 231, 237, 240 Rohan-Soubise, Charlotte de, 99, 178 Romano, Giulio, 42, 43, 46, 235; Jupiter cycle, 57, 58; The Nurture of Jupiter, 235 – 236. See also Bonasone, Giulio (after Giulio Romano), The Nurture of Jupiter Ronsard, Pierre de, 7, 8, 24; Bergerie, 31, 51, 53, 56 Rose festival, 15, 181, 194 – 195 Rose Pompadour, 240 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 11, 23, 37, 99, 110, 122, 168, 203, 246, 253; and hermitage at Montmorency, 139, 151; Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, 5, 14, 19, 24, 118, 151, 164, 172, 194, 202; and Pythagorean diet, 136; tomb at Ermenonville, 164, 295n10; The Village Soothsayer, 202 Rousseau, Pierre, 241 Roussel, Frémin, 42, 43, 45, 52, 54 Royal Dildo, The, 166, 206 Royal Parthenogenesis, 22, 74, 81 Royal Tour of France, 30, 53, 61; visit to Bayonne, 62 Ruggieri, Ruggiero de, 42 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de: Juliette, 186 Saint-Cloud, château de, 213, 303n5 Saint-Cyr: all-girls’ boarding school at, 109 – 110 Saint-James, Claude Baudard de, 191 – 194 Saint-Just: dairy at, 152 Saint-Lambert, Jean-François de, 23, 171; Les saisons, 12, 170 Saint-Maur, château de, 21, 24, 31, 37, 38, 48, 95, 97, 274n20; afterlife of, 64 – 67; sale of, 65. See also Cassine at Saint-Maur Saint-Ouen: dairy at, 127, 288n29 Saint-Simon, duc de, 121 Salic law, 38, 48, 206, 254 Salon of 1742, 149 Salon of 1757, 178 Salon of 1761, 155 Salon of 1777, 238 Salon of 1779, 173, 231 Salon of 1783, 203, 204 – 206, 207, 231, 248, 253 Salon of 1785, 231 Salon of 1787, 241, 248, 252 Salon of 1789, 231 Santeuil, Jean-Baptiste, 95 Saturn, 54, 58, 227, 235

index

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Sauvage, Piat-Joseph: paintings of four seasons by, 224 Sceaux, château de, 66, 85, 94, 95, 102; La Chartreuse at, 93; menagerie at, 92 – 93; orangerie at, 102 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 305n26 Schloss Bellevue (Berlin): dairy at, 305n26 Schwartz, Selma, 217, 237 Scott, Virginia, 31, 51 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 79, 90, 110 Sedaine, Michel-Jean: The King and the Farmer, 202 – 203 Segrais, Jean-Regnault de, 88 Sensibility, 19, 161, 181, 202 Serin, 148; hermitage at Bagnolet, 148 Serlio, Sebastiano, 36 Serres, Olivier de, 95, 102; Le théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, 20, 36, 60, 80 Seven Years’ War, 222 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 65, 66, 87 Sèvres porcelain manufactory: 137 – 138, 217, 237 – 239, 259; biscuit figurines after statues made for dairy at Crécy, 12 – 13, 154, 155, 154, 155; “breast cup” (jatte téton), 26, 239 – 240, 242, 256, 257; d’Angiviller’s correspondence with, 217, 238, 252; drinking vessels from, 25, 26, 138; “Louis XVI service,” 235; milk buckets from, 20, 239; milk cup from, 259, 259; milk goblet (gobelet à lait) from, 137, 138; service for Rambouillet dairy, 236 – 243, 244 Sheep, 87, 88; merinos at Rambouillet, 216 – 217, 222, 250, 251, 255 – 256, 261; represented at Rambouillet dairy, 232, 233, 236, 259. See also Bergerie (Sheep Farm) Shepherdesses, 12, 31, 62, 89, 104, 154, 155; as pastoral disguise, 63, 87, 90, 116 Sheriff, Mary, 203, 207 Shovlin, John, 177 Sickness (Maladie), 127 – 133; “La France malade,” 243 – 247; statue at Versalles, 127 – 129 Simple Life, The, 267 Soane, Sir John, 7 Société d’agriculture du département de la Seine, 185, 309n79 Sontag, Susan: “Notes on Camp,” 195, 198, 266 Soucoupe Enfoncé, 138 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain, 124 Soulavie, Jean-Louis, 120, 255; Historical and Political Memoirs of the Reign of Louis XVI, King of France from His Marriage to His Death, 254 Sphinxes, 92, 111; associated with elite women, 92; as garden statuary, 92; in portraits, 91, 92, 112 Spinks, Jennifer, 110

Stewart, Martha, 261, 262 Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 31, 51 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 52, 231, 251 Sun King, The. See Louis XIV, king of France Sur la fertilité, 48 Tableau de Paris, 136, 190, 244 Tasso, Torquato: Jerusalem Delivered, 87 Taylor-Leduc, Susan, 217 Telemachus, 109 Tencin, Claudine Guérin de, 119 Tessier, Alexandre-Henri, 252 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 262 Theocritus, 7 “The Two Make But One,” 255 Thévenin, Jacques-Jean: architecte ordinaire du domaine de Rambouillet, 223; bergerie (sheep farm) at Rambouillet, 251; interior view of Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, 226; Queen’s Dairy at Rambouillet, 219 Thiéry, Luc-Vincent, 191 Thomas, John, 263 Tissot, Samuel, 14, 246, 247, 253; Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde, 172 – 173 Tivoli, 11, 17, 189; dairy at, 10, 189; fêtes champêtres at, 189; garden at, 189 Toilet of Flora, The, 134 Toudouze, Jacques, 18 Tournehem, Charles-François Lenormant de, 119, 121, 125, 126, 143, 152 Traité des affections vaporeuses du sexe, 130 Treaty of Paris (1783), 234 Trembleuse cup, 138 Trémoïlle, Charlotte-Catherine de la, 65 Trianon de Porcelaine, 101 Tribolo, Niccolò, 54, 58; La nature, 54, 55 Trompe l’oeil decoration: at Galerie François I, 44; at Hameau de Chantilly, 183, 184; at Hameau de Versailles 3, 23, 162; at Rambouillet, 224 Tronchin, Théodore, 130 – 131 Tronchine, 130 Trouard, Louis, 126 Tuileries: grotto designed by Bernard Palissy at, 51; royal family imprisoned in, 213, 254 Tull, Jethro, 127 Turner, Victor, 63 Two Hunters and the Milkmaid, The, 203 Ulysses, 45, 109 Ulysses gallery. See Fontainebleau Urfé, Honoré d’: L’Astrée, 71 Vacherie; See Mi-voie Valade, Jean, 148, 149

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Val-de-Grâce: salle basse, 93 Valeriano, Piero, 47, 92 Valois monarchy, 30, 31, 53, 56 Vandé, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste: milk cup and saucer, 259 Van Loo, Carle: portrait of Madame de Pompadour as “La belle jardinière,” 25, 151 – 152, 153, 155 – 156 Vanves, 65; dairy at, 186; fête at, 186 Vasari, Giorgio, 51 Vassé, Louis-Claude: statue of The Female Gardener for dairy at Crécy, 152, 154 Vatican: Sala dei Pontefici, 46 Vatican Loggia, 43, 44 Vaudoyer, A.-L.-T., 5 – 7; “Dairy in a Magnificent Park” (prix d’émulation), 6 Vaux, Calvert, 263 Vauxhall (London), 189 Venel, Gabriel-François: article on milk in Encyclopédie, 136 Verbeckt, Jacques, 143, 147, 154 Verino, Michele, 40 Versailles, 26, 70, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 107, 109, 113, 116, 119, 132, 199, 207, 208, 217, 220, 225, 248, 249, 289n44, 304n11; as architectural matriarchy, 209 – 211; Bosquet des bains d’Apollon, 221, 223; botanical garden, 133; compared to Chantilly, 94, 95; garden statuary at, 92, 127; Grotte de Thétis at 81; jardin du Grande Maître at, 207; Labyrinth at, 80; l’appartement d’en bas at, 120, 131; Louis XIV’s development of, 22, 67, 74, 75, 81; Madame de Pompadour’s hermitage at, 25, 87, 116, 117, 118 – 119, 134, 141 – 143, 152, 160, 209, 250; Parc aux Cerfs, 149; plan of, 76. See also Fêtes champêtres; Hameau de Versailles; Ménagerie de Versailles; Nouvelle ménagerie de Versailles; Petit Trianon Vertumnus, 92 Vicq-d’Azyr, Félix, 244 Victoria, queen of England, 263 Vigée Le Brun, Elisabeth-Louise, 179, 203; Petit Trianon portraits, 203 – 206, 253; Portrait of Marguerite Baudard de Saint-James, marquise de Puységur, 191, 193; Portrait of Marie-

Antoinette “en chemise,” 203 – 204, 205, 206, 208, 248; Portrait of Marie-Antoinette with Her Children, 248, 249, 250; Portrait of the Duchesse de Guiche, 203, 204 Vila, Anne, 173 Villa: as building type, 21 – 22, 23, 31, 35 – 39, 41, 61; as therapeutic health retreat, 13, 38, 65, 129 – 130 Village Bride, The, 155, 157 Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, The, 130 Villeggiatura, 35, 36 Virgil, 7, 168; Eclogues, 41; Georgics, 12, 41, 70, 170, 171 Vitalism, 131; vitalist school of medicine, 130, 136 Vitruvius, 36, 44 Vivant-Denon, Dominique, 238 Voltaire, 18, 130; and Pythagorean diet, 136 Voré, château de, 104 – 105; decorative panel painted for, 106 Wachsmann, Anton (after Friedrich Gilly): The Dairy at le Raincy, 228 Warburg, Aby, 47 Wars of Religion, 30, 49, 52, 62, 71 Watelet, Claude-Henri, 5; dairy of, 16, 271n26; Essai sur les jardins, 16 – 17 Wedgwood, Josiah, 217, 237, 239 Wedgwood ware, 211, 229 Wertmüller, Adolf Ulrich, 211, 248; Portrait of Madame Aughié, 213 Wet-nursing, 164, 246 – 247, 254 Whey. See Petit lait Wille, Pierre-Alexandre: Women from the City Going to Drink Milk in the Country, 173, 174, 195 Windsor Home Park: royal dairy in, 263 Winnowing of Grain, The, 59 – 61, 60 Woburn Abbey, 9 Worley, Michael Preston, 235, 236 Zerner, Henri, 45 Zodiac: twelve signs of, 45 – 47, 46. See also Astrological decoration Zorach, Rebecca, 56

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