All of the summaries of the books we have read include (many) links. Links evaporate. I check them when I post the summary and randomly go back in over time to check. If you find a broken link, please let me know via a comment or a direct email. Let me know which link was broken and I will fix it, replace it, or remove it.
On June 4, we watched A Little Chaos, a fictional romance about a woman landscape designer who is able to build one of the Versailles gardens. Heavy on court intrigue and romance and light on gardening but the gardens are real although the filming was not done on site. Although there are clearly views of the real gardens… at least I think there are. The gardens are real, the male designer, Andre LeNotre, was real, and, of course, Louis XIV was real. The heroine was not real. Of course wikipedia has a rundown on everything about the movie. I was sure at least bits were filmed on site but apparently not.
I learned more about the gardens at the official Versailles website in English. The garden the heroine purportedly designed seems to be called The Grove. I’ve put in the Versailles link to open on
this page.
It has been my experience that, sometimes, if one is searching for something really French, the French websites have far more information than the English ones. I imagine this is true for all languages. There’s a French author who isn’t particularly well-known in English and when I looked him up in English it said something like – French author, dates, titles of many of his books. When I looked him up in French, however…
I had hoped to be able to show the movie via zoom for those who couldn’t attend in person; however, zoom is very smart and wouldn’t let me do that. It makes sense to me, what with copyright sorts of things, but it was a bit sad for those who wished to attend but couldn’t be there. Still, it is something to be aware of going forward when we have our next movie and pot luck.
