Biography and Autobiography

Another garden, another time...

OR


THE Final STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE



The following is what I like to call "the mother of all days slips". You are probably familiar with it. If you aren't, there's a flattering chance you'll be hooked by the subject, so proceed at your own imperil.

The story is so fascinating - and so lengthy - that it would take a long every so often old-fashioned to elaborate properly on all of its aspects. So, for now, I am just prosperous to put at your disposal some of the key elements - and I'll come back later, for the devote fine-tuning.




Versailles, August 10, 1901


The tenth of August - the day after la notte di San Lorenzo, as Italian folklore calls it, when wishes drop true if you wish upon the right stars (not that it has anything to do with our facts) - was, by all accounts, a hot and stormy day in most of Europe in the year 1901.

It was certainly hot and sweltering in the palace gardens at Versailles.
We don't know how many visitors were there on that day, but only two of them interest us anyway: Absent oneself from Charlotte Anne Moberly and her colleague Teenager Eleanor Jourdain, a couple of unusually hugely placed and very respected female educators - at Oxford, no less.

The gardens of Versailles are titanic - an entire day is seldom enough to explore them.
But their layout, standard of the French landscaping art of the 17th century, follows a very reasonable design (the design of the French mind, one is tempted to say). They are nothing like English gardens of the same era; they are not designed to get romantically "wasted" in them. In fact, you have to be quite absent-minded to at a tangent in a French garden (or in an Italian Renaissance garden, for that difficulty- but I digress).

And yet, on that hot summer's day in 1901, the two level-headed Oxford deans did at best that.
Looking for the way to the Petit Trianon, they found a decrepit garden access that led them where they never...

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