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For the court, a country setting, life in harmony with nature, promised a release from the unpleasant reality of existence. An expression of this attitude can be seen in the buildings of Richard Mique for marie-Antoinette in the park at Versailles. A peasant farm complete with mill and dairy, complemented of course by a theatre, library, and a temple of love, makes up this fantasy scheme. Ideas which had been formulated in English landscape gardening were now taken up in French architecture. But the idyll was deceptive: these were the last building projects at Versailles before the Revolution. Only a few years later Mique and his patron ended up on the scaffold.
The picture shows the mill.
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