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A tout venant le Coeur vend des Carreaux. He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Fountain Saint-Victor, skirted the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the quay. There he turned round. The quay was deserted. The streets were deserted. There was no one behind him. He drew a long breath. He gained the Pont d'Austerlitz. Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.
From now on French gardens were divided specifically into the potager and verger. The potager was virtually a vegetable garden within the walls which surrounded the seigneurial dwelling, and was of necessity of very limited extent, chiefly laid out in tiny carreaux, or beds, bordered by tiles or bricks, much as a small city garden is arranged to-day.
Les enfants des Petits-Carreaux Se font pendre cornme des veaux*. * The children of the Petits Carreaux let themselves be hung like calves. The illustrious wine shop of "Eve's Apple" was situated in the University, at the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue de la Batonnier.
It was then that the chiens de faience, which the smug Paris suburbanite of to-day so loves, were born. By the seventeenth century the equalized carreaux of the early geometrically disposed gardens were often replaced with the oblongs, circles and, somewhat timidly introduced, more bizarre forms, the idea being to give variety to the ensemble.
In their highest expression these early French gardens, with their broderies and carreaux may well be compared as works of art with contemporary structures in stone or wood or stuffs in woven tapestries, which latter they greatly resembled. Under Louis XIV and Louis XV the elaborateness of the French garden was even more an accentuated epitome of the tastes of the period.
The first gardens were the vergers and preaux, little checker-board squares of a painful primitiveness as compared with later standards. These squares, or carreaux, were often laid out in foliage and blossoming plants as suggestive as possible of their being made of carpeting or marble.
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