Keeping the peace at Versailles

The Vicomte Olivier de Rohan rushes through the clumped tourists at the Palace of Versailles, dangling a ring of keys cut in various centuries. He opens locked doors, points out a newly refurbished ceiling, the color of the brocade wallpaper, paintings that could use a cleaning -- a caretaker of one of France’s grandest properties giving a house tour.

And then the president of Societe des Amis de Versailles, the private fundraising arm of the government-supported palace, leads the way outside to what was once a secret garden. Imagined in 1677 by Louis XIV and realized by his gardener, Andre Le Notre in 1679, Le Bosquet des Trois Fontaines is a hedged-in, three-level garden with a cascading fountain on each of its gravel terraces. With its lack of statues and serene vista of trees and sky, it is an oasis from the grandeur of the sprawling 2,000-acre palace and grounds.

The bosquet disappeared a few decades after the French Revolution of 1789 left the palace in a state of disrepair. Until now, the ruin has been locked behind iron gates out of the sightline of passing visitors, no more than a missing gem on the multifaceted crown jewel that is Versailles. Starting Wednesday, the bosquet -- painstakingly restored to its former 17th century glory -- will be inaugurated with five days of champagne receptions, luncheons, dinners and a fancy-dress ball for 600 members of the American Friends of Versailles, a sister volunteer organization that has donated $4 million to reconstruct the Sun King’s beloved secret garden.

But a month before the inauguration, the bosquet was looking more like a construction site. Outside the gate, a large board thanked the American Friends of Versailles, with a reprint of a 1688 painting of the original bosquet in which angels in the foreground sweep the gravel. Inside, Senegalese and French workers smoked cigarettes and listened to Cuban music while stringing stone chips in varying shades of gold, amber and rose with thick copper wire. They hung them in overlapping rows using a technique that Le Notre borrowed from the Italians to create fountains that “sing” as the water pours through them and the stones knock together. A sloping dirt path was waiting to be covered with white Languedoc marble to re-create the ramp that the Sun King used to visit the gardens late in life in his wheelchair -- and respond to a modern need for access for the disabled.

Supervised by head architect Pierre-Andre LaBlaude, an army of electricians, plumbers, welders, excavators and other workmen and artisans are using unrealized archival restoration plans from the time of Louis XVI and period-appropriate techniques -- stringing stones, sealing water pipes with hand-ladled lead, not plastic parts -- to re-create the bosquet.

The American contribution of $4 million is a relative drop in the bucket for the overall restoration of the park, which will cost more than $100 million, and is part of a multimillion-euro indoor-outdoor restoration of Versailles going on until 2017. “It may not seem like a lot of money for a hospital in the United States or a symphony or the Metropolitan Opera,” says Catharine Hamilton, the president and founder of the American Friends of Versailles, by telephone, “but to raise that kind of money for people to give abroad, it’s a big thing.”

Overseas incentive

American generosity has always been aided by tax incentives, but such has not been the case in France, where many people feel that giving 60% of their income is charity enough. Versailles is a national treasure with a $42-million annual operating budget. But the state’s coffers are increasingly running short of funds to maintain the country’s national monuments.

Two million Americans visit Versailles every year -- more than any other national group -- and De Rohan says that he wanted to highlight the American participation as a way of inspiring his fellow countrymen to get more involved. Six million people, or one-tenth of the French population, tuned into a recent television documentary that aired on France 3 called “Versailles Secret,” which focused on the renovations and featured Hamilton as a kind of patron saint.

“The French are now concerned by what is happening thanks to the interest the Americans have for it,” De Rohan says. “If this had been done by a French group, they wouldn’t even mention it!”

A wealthy Texan Francophile who now lives in Chicago, Hamilton went to Versailles for the first time at 17, on a high school graduation trip around Europe with her mother. “I fell in love with Versailles,” she says. “It was the most exquisite, incredible place I had ever seen. It made history and art come to life for me for the first time.”

She studied art history and fine arts in college, worked at Sotheby’s for nine years, and has a special interest in 18th century French furniture and boiserie. Hamilton and her family have spent 18 summers here; when her children attended the American School in Neuilly, the family spent as many as five months a year in France.

Several years ago, De Rohan was walking Hamilton and her husband, David, a garden historian, around Versailles, where they had come for advice on trimming hedges on the grounds of their Normandy chateau. “We came in front of the bosquet and I said, ‘You know I sometimes have what I think are impossible dreams,’ ” says De Rohan, who is both naturally and professionally charming. “But I think only Americans have those kinds of dreams. We French are too reasonable.”

A cultural bond

In 1998, Hamilton founded the American Friends of Versailles, calling acquaintances from New York to Palm Beach to La Jolla to join in her effort. The group has hosted fundraising events on both sides of the Atlantic. Those attending this week’s festivities travel at their own expense and pay from $5,000 to $25,000 per ticket to attend the ball and other social events. Similar balls were held in 1999 and 2002.

“We didn’t think we’d have to do a third ball to raise the final funds,” Hamilton says. “But we’ve had the Kosovo war, the Iraqi war, the Afghan war, the fall of the dollar to the euro, 9/11 and of course most recently the problem at the U.N. with the French and the Americans. So it hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would have been.”

Nevertheless, Hamilton, who makes no secret of being a Bush-supporting Republican, is doing her best to keep politics out of the conversation. “The French and the Americans have never seen eye to eye exactly,” she says, adding that she had to talk a few Americans into grudgingly coming to the ball. “But we have never been at war with the French -- we have always been allies, and we will always be allies. We love France, and we were saddened by what happened with the French-American relationship. But we come together in a cultural arena.”

Argentine American Sandy de Yturbes and her cousin, Anne-Marie de Gany, two Paris socialites, are on the French fundraising board. Lately, they have been taking time away from running their chateaus outside of Paris to persuade friends and acquaintances to donate champagne and host lunches, dinners and cocktail parties for the Americans.

Smoking American cigarettes in her lavish Left Bank apartment, De Yturbes says: “To say ‘Hello, would you be kind enough to have 36 people to lunch at your house?’ It’s embarrassing, that. They say, ‘Oh, I hope they’re not going to ruin my rug.’ But they do it!”

She and her husband, Jean, are hosting an evening at their 16th century Chateau d’Anet, which Henri II built for his mistress Diane de Poitiers (Princess Michael of Kent, who is writing a book on the famous mistress, will give a lecture).

The bosquet project is the most important American donation to Versailles since John D. Rockefeller sponsored restoration work from 1923 to 1936 that included putting a new roof on the Hall of Mirrors. He made the gesture after visiting a war-ravaged Versailles in the 1920s, in part to thank the French for their financial support during the American Revolution.

“It was a real Marshall Plan for culture,” says De Rohan, who wanted to revive that long tradition of French-American cooperation when he asked Hamilton to join the board of Societe des Amis de Versailles in 1990. She is only the second American to have that honor, after Florence Van der Kemp, whose husband, Gerald, was the chief curator of Versailles from 1945 to 1980. Steven Rockefeller, great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, is an honorary board chairman.

The state pays for the roof these days, De Rohan points out. But it can always use more help in the garden. And it is precisely the dramatic exercise of bringing back the bosquet that makes it a perfect and symbolic showcase for American generosity. “The bosquet had disappeared for such a long time, it’s so unobvious to do it,” he says.

Nevertheless, he says he hopes it is just the thing to encourage the kind of renewed patronage that will revive the 17th century splendor of Versailles’ gardens -- and keep it alive for generations to come. “This is going to be emblematic, to give the whole idea of what we want to do. Le Notre has disappeared, but his spirit is coming back.”