[Illustration: HOUSE OF H. W. POOR, TUXEDO PARK, N. Y.
“He [Hardouin Mansart] was ignorant of his business. De Coste, his brother-in-law, whom he made head architect, knew no more than he. They got their plans, designs and ideas from a designer of building named L’Assurance whom they kept, as much as they could, under lock and key. Mansart’s cunning [his name was probably assumed for what we would call in America an ‘ad.’] lay in coaxing the king by apparent trifles into long and costly enterprises, and by showing him incomplete plans, especially for the gardens, which instantly captured his mind, and caused him to make suggestions: then Mansart would exclaim that he never should have thought of what the king proposed, went into raptures, declared he was a scholar compared to him, and so made the king tumble whichever way he planned without suspecting it.”
“He made immense sums out of his works and his contracts, and all else that concerned his buildings, of which he was absolute master, and with such authority that not a workman, contractor or person about the buildings would have dared speak or make the slightest fuss. As he had no taste, or the king either, he never executed anything fine, nor even convenient for the vast expenses he incurred.”
The episode about his bridge at Moulins that floated down the river to Nantes is excruciatingly funny as told by Saint-Simon, but I must not appropriate the space necessary for its relation.
I cannot think, however, that the damage of an occasional Hardouin Mansart in France or a Mr. Pecksniff, I may say, in England, to the architecture of either country has been anything like as great as that done American Renaissance by their numerous colleagues upon this side of the water. That our modern architecture is as good as it is, is no less than remarkable, considering, too, how we are always trying to make it pay financially. And when at last there comes a scintillating opportunity where an architect is no longer obliged to turn out a rent-trap, a manufacturing plant, or something else that will pay a given percentage upon the investment, as happens in the case of a large country house, the marks of our national trade are very apt to obtrude themselves in a hundred amusing ways. The commercial habit cannot be relinquished in a moment, and thus, unconsciously, we betray ourselves.