Château de Choisy

He was called in before the few existing buildings were swept away and found the site too closed in by dense woodlands: "There one only saw the riverbank as if through a dormer window,"[3] he told the king—who passed on the remark— and advised Mlle de Montpensier to begin in this "vilaine situation" by "laying low all the woods that were there".

The château passed in 1693[6] to le Grand Dauphin, who had some interior modifications executed (Kimball 1943 p 51) before exchanging it in 1695 for Meudon,[7] more accessible from Versailles.

In spite of the loss of the immediately surrounding woods in favor of parterres with the Seine as backdrop and bosquets punctuated by statuary, the hunting was good in the neighboring forest of Sénart, the king's original motivation for purchasing Choisy.

[8] A bathing pavilion was added, and above all a Petit Château (illustration, right) was designed to provide an intimate refuge for Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour.

Works continued in a series of campaigns as late as 1777, though Louis XV lost interest in Choisy after Pompadour's death,[9] but there is precious little documentation of the interiors, save a section by Gabriel, dated 1754, of the circular Salon and Vestibule in the Pavillon Particulier du Roi, the Petit Château: "it shows a sober character' Fiske Kimball reported: 'the overdoor is an unbroken oval crowned with shellwork and scrolls, but draped...with the newly fashionable garland of husks" (Kimball p 207).

[14] Louis XV installed at Choisy the portrait he commissioned from Drouais of Marie Antoinette as Dauphine, in 1773[15] In 1777, when the Queen wished to build at Versailles a little theatre for private performances in which she joined, she instructed the architect Richard Mique to take for his model the theatre at Choisy built by Gabriel for Mme de Pompadour; as a result, the Théâtre de la Reine, finished in 1779, though it is modest and fully Neoclassical on the outside, has an interior unexpectedly rococo for its date.