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Updated: May 18, 2025
The humble offices, and the corn-yard in which I had rejoiced to mingle in rural occupations and frolic, were near; and nothing was wanted to realize the scenes of my youth, save the presence of the venerable patriarch and my mother, and their little ones grouping around their knees, or at the frugal board. But the illusion was short-lived. A holly tree, in the adjoining parterre, caught my eye.
Here and there, instead of the exquisite parterre, there should be some miserable patches of potatoes and beans, and some squalid clothes hung out to dry. Two ill-dressed children, but of delicate features, should be playing about an ugly neglected pool that had once been the basin to the fountain.
"Ah, dear!" he cried, "you have made us too beautiful; you have wandered off again to dreamland yes, as in the days, do you remember, when I used to scold you for putting there all the fantastic flowers of the Unknown?" And he pointed to the walls, on which bloomed the fantastic parterre of the old pastels, flowers not of the earth, grown in the soil of paradise. But she protested gayly.
'Well, young man, said he, 'we have played some pretty tableaux vivants for your amusement, and you can thank me for that nice seat in the front row of the parterre. 'I am under a very deep obligation to you, sir, I answered, struggling between my gratitude and my aversion. 'I hardly know how to thank you. He looked at me with a singular expression in his ironical eyes.
"The débutante, be she whom she may, should feel flattered by such an unexampled assemblage of all the ton of Paris." Orchestra, balcony, galleries, amphitheatres, lobbies and parterre were packed; every portion of the vast edifice, in short, was thronged except a few of the loges and baignoires, into which every moment brilliant companies were entering.
Some, by way of coquetterie, trace upon the scalp a complicated network, showing the finest and narrowest lines of black wool and pale skin: so the old traveller tells us "the heads of those who aspire to glory in apparel resemble a parterre, you see alleys and figures traced on them with a great deal of ingenuity."
And so they went out, and through a clipped, covered walk to another door in a wall, which opened on the west side the very old part of the house and suddenly she saw the Italian parterre. Each view as she came upon it she tried to identify with what she had seen in the pictures in Country Life, but things look so different in reality, with the atmospheric effects, to the cold gray of a print.
"The music of the French," he says, "is indeed very properly adapted to their pronunciation and accent, as their whole opera wonderfully favors the genius of such a gay, airy people. The chorus in which that opera abounds gives the parterre frequent opportunities of joining in concert with the stage.
"This is the place," was the word to the chauffeur as we swept up a grade in the misty darkness. Stretched from trunk to trunk of the trees beside the road were canvas screens to hide the transport from enemy observation. Passing between them had the effect of going through the curtains into a parterre box.
Nothing could be grander than the bird's-eye view of the garden of the Tuileries on the evening of this auspicious day, the grand parterre, encircled by illuminated colonnades from arch to arch of which were festooned garlands of rose-colored lights; the grand promenade outlined by columns, above which stars glittered; the terraces on each side filled with orange-trees, the branches of which were covered with innumerable lights; while every tree on the adjoining walks presented as brilliant a spectacle; and finally, to crown all this magnificent blaze of light, an immense star was suspended above the Place de la Concorde, and outshone all else.
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