They were astounded, and assured us it was not necessary, it
was not possible. Indeed, it seemed that it was hardly legal to give one
small French house five American bathrooms. We fought the matter out,
and got them, however.
We determined to make the house seem a part of the garden, and so we
built a broad terrace across the rear of the villa. You step directly
from the long windows of the salon and dining-room upon the terrace, and
before you is spread out our little garden, and back of that, through an
opening in the trees, a view of the Chateau, our never-failing source of
inspiration.
The terrace is built of tiles on a cement foundation. Vines are trained
over square column-like frames of wire, erected at regular intervals.
Between the edge of the terrace and the smooth green lawn there is a
mass of blue flowers. We have a number of willow chairs and old stone
tables here, and you can appreciate the joy of having breakfast and tea
on the terrace with the birds singing in the boughs of the trees.
I have written at length in the other chapters of my ideas of
house-furnishing, and in this one I want to give you my ideas of garden
guilding. True, we had the old garden plan to work from, and trees two
hundred years old, and old vine-covered walls. Who couldn't accomplish a
perfect garden with such essentials, people said! Well, it wasn't so
easy as it seems.
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