Everything is beautiful: the rows of flowers, the spreading trees, the vivid green hedges. To me, though, the garden is not truly alive. I’m looking at nature whipped into submission. The hedges are sculpted so precisely it is as if every leaf and twig were trimmed with individual shears. Though I see no streams or other sources, the air bursts with the noisy white spray of many fountains, as if to proclaim Versailles’ superiority to nature: we control the water itself.
