It was at this Trianon that Marie Antoinette spent her happiest days. "The Queen," writes Madam Campan, "spent sometimes an entire month together at the Little Trianon, where she had established her pianoforte and tapestry frames." There were but few apartments in the château of the Little Trianon and although Madame Elizabeth usually accompanied the Queen here, the ladies of honor could not be accommodated, and unless by special invitation from the Queen it was the rule to come from Versailles only at the dinner hour. The King and the Princess came regularly to sup. A white muslin and a straw hat was the accustomed dress of the princesses, and the pleasure of running about the little village to see the cows milked and to fish in the lake, enchanted the Queen, and with every successive year she showed less inclination for the stiff etiquette of the Court. Here on the 5th of October, the news was brought her of the arrival at the Court of the crowd of women from Paris, and she was forced to go immediately to Versailles to meet them, never again to see her little domain. [Illustration: PLATE XXXII "THE MILL," PETIT TRIANON] English Carved Fireplaces In adopting the Renaissance style as a motive in interior decoration, England lagged behind the Continental nations. Such English mansions and furniture as remained after the Wars of the Roses were all of the Gothic type; and with no other models available, it was but natural that the first efforts of English workmen, after art began to revive, should be Gothic in feeling. Moreover, for a long time most of the carved wood-work and furniture in the new style with which England was supplied, was imported from Holland, and it is in some measure to Dutch example that the heavy character of the Elizabethan style in furniture and carving must be attributed. The style was, therefore, neither Classic nor Gothic, but a mixture of the two, tinged with Dutch and Flemish influence; and yet, mongrel as it was, it had an individuality of its own--a certain, royal, dignified and stately charm. The first distinguishing feature of Elizabethan ornamental carving is "strap-work," a term which exactly describes this elaborate tracery,--an imitation of straps and buckles, varied sufficiently to atone for the meagreness of the type, and relying for its decorative value upon its repetition and symmetry. There are many rooms in old English houses where this strap-decoration is carried out with so delicate and fanciful a use of the interlacing line as to be nearly as satisfying as the Saracenic work of the same type; but it is, after all, nothing but a play of line, and, while allowing the greatest scope to the individuality of the artist, requires genius to properly develop it. Too frequently it is but the merest medley of uninteresting sequences; and when the shield-work (and pierced shield-work at that) was superadded, it sometimes became mere confusion.