Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The beautifully restored
Grand Trianon Palace
is as sumptuous as the main palace, but
much smaller. With its pastel-pink colonnade and more human scale, this is a place you'd
like to call home. Nearby are the
French Pavilion,
Marie-Antoinette's
Theater,
and the oc-
tagonal
Belvedere
palace.
You can almost see princesses bobbing gaily in the branches as you walk through the
enchanting forest, past the white marble
Temple of Love
to the queen's fake-peasant
Ham-
let
(leHameau)
.Marie-Antoinette'shappiest dayswerespentattheHamlet, underabonnet,
tending her perfumed sheep and manicured gardens in a thatch-happy wonderland.
Despite her bad reputation with the public, Marie-Antoinette was a sweet girl from Vi-
enna who never quite fit in with the fast, sophisticated crowd at Versailles. She made the
Petit Trianon,
a masterpiece of Neoclassical architecture, a place to get away and re-cre-
ate the simple home life she remembered from her childhood. Here she played, while in the
cafés of faraway Paris, revolutionaries plotted the end of the
ancien régime
.
