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Château du Marais
"The prison, the manor house, and the mines -- they all were part of the land her stepmother owned,
and they all formed a unity that fed on the people's despair, a well for Camille's pleasure.
On these outskirts of civilization she had spun a tight, powerful web with herself holding all the threads.
And those who got entangled in it were doomed one way or another."
Unlike Bair Hall, Château du Marais is completely a figment of my imagination. We never see much of the house anyway, so I didn't want to go into too much details and kept the references to the manor rather vague on purpose. What I had in mind, though, was a slightly gothic, crumbling old mansion amidst a barren land, a timeless place of despair and destruction, and thus a fitting residence for the Black Widow.
The gardens of the château, by contrast, are Lillian's realm. They are wild and unkempt, yet filled with blooming life. While I wrote the garden scenes, I leafed through my book on the history of European gardens, and as with a patchwork quilt, I used bits and pieces of other gardens to put mine together:
"To their left, a lichen-covered Pan peeked out of the bushes, lounging on a bit of rock, flute raised to his lips as if
he were about to compete with the absent birds. Just visible under the dark green tendrils was one of the broad, powerful
shoulders, a hint of muscles bouncing in his arm."
The Pan in Camille's garden is modelled after the faun in the gardens of the Electoral Prince Carl Theodor
von der Pfalz in Schwetzingen, Germany.
"At the other end of the lake, near the hidden garden wall, an imposing formation of rocks rose out
of the water to form the mouth of a cave. At its entrance stood two proud horses of stone, nostrils flaring, and two men,
on their knees, were offering them bowls with water."
In the second half of the 18th century, the French garden architects took up the latest fashion from England: gardens
that resembled nature, complete with artificial lakes, streams, and grottos. At the same time, Italy was idolized as a place
of bygone glories, so many French gardens from this era are populated by statues of characters from Roman mythology. In the
late 1770s Richard Mique and the Count de Caraman planned a new garden for Queen Marie Antoinette, including a new Apollo
bassin: on a large rock beneath what looks like giant ruins the sun god sits enthroned and surrounded by his entourage.
Two of his sunhorses now stand at the entrance of the grotto in the garden of Château du Marais.
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"When the light flared up, it revealed the fantastic decorations,
mythic beasts in stone, springing from the walls and the ceiling."
The grotto itself is loosely based on the grotto in the garden of the Villa Medici in Castello, Florence, which was planned by Niccolò Pericoli in the 1540s. The imagery of the garden focusses on two themes, namely the life of nature and the glorification of the Medici family. Seventy years earlier, Botticelli had painted his famous LA PRIMAVERA, the allegory of spring, for the villa in Castello.
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