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The windows were closed, but had it been early morning, one could easily have imagined that the pseudo villagers were asleep behind the shuttered casements, and that soon the Queen, in some charming déshabillé, would come out to breathe the sweet morning air and to inhale the perfume of the climbing roses on the balcony overlooking the lake, wherein gold-fish darted to and fro among the water-lilies; or expect to see the King, from the steps of the little mill where he lodged, exchange blithe greetings with the maids of honour as they tripped gaily to the laiterie to play at butter-making, or sauntered across the rustic bridge on their way to gather new-laid eggs at the farm.
I was to find her at the house of her aunt, who lived in my neighborhood, and who, to my surprise, turned out to be the proprietress of the Laiterie I frequented. Here we were to breakfast, and afterwards take the proper conveyance to our destination, which I think was Belleville.
We used to go to work at six in the morning, draw two hours and then go to a little laiterie and take our bowl of café au lait and a small loaf of bread, and then draw till noon, when we went home for the second breakfast.
Most of my days were spent on the opposite side of the Seine; and, as I crossed that river, by the Pont Royal, at about five o'clock, every evening, on my way to the Laiterie, at which I usually took what I called my dinner, I always stopped to buy a bunch of flowers, of violets in their season, of a charming little flower-girl, who had her stand, on the Quai Voltaire, and who, by the time my turn to be served came, had usually disposed of nearly her whole stock.
Here Marie Antoinette had a laiterie, a milk house, where she is said to have made butter and cheese. Here she caused to be built twelve cottages after the Swiss fashion, and filled them with poor families whom she tried to make happy. We went into her dairy. It was fit for a queen to make butter in.
Here she built a number of little rustic cottages, where she and the ladies of her court, dressed in calicoes, played at being milkmaids. They had a little cottage called the "Laiterie," where the white cows with their gilded horns were brought in to be milked. Here, too, little plays were presented in a tiny theater where only the members of the court were admitted.
Louis XVI built vast commons and outbuildings, all with some architectural pretence, to house the appanage of the royal hunt, and also built the Laiterie de la Reine and the model farm where, in 1786, he established the first national sheepfold.
"And I shall say then as I say now. I will make any bargain with you, so long as it is a bargain which benefits us both." "Ah, you are a Normand, you hedge!" she laughed, but he was serious. They walked all around the laiterie, and all the time she was gay and whimsical, and to herself she was saying, "I am unutterably happy, but we must not talk of love."
The grove of lindens is remarkable in every respect, the ornamental waters are gracious and of vast extent, and the Laiterie and the Ferme are decidedly models of their kind; but the Chaumière des Coquillages, a rustic summer-house of rocks and shells and questionable débris of all sorts, is hideous and unworthy.
In the frame was a photograph of Prince Giovanni Della Robbia as a boy of eighteen; but so little had eleven years changed Vanno, that Nathalie recognized the picture at once. "Ah," she exclaimed, "surely that is the handsome, tall young gentleman who walks over often to look at the Villa Mirasole, near our laiterie: the brother of the prince who is coming soon to live there."
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