Château de Sceaux

His embellishments to the grounds extended the formal terraced layout, the bones of which remain, and excavated the Grand Canal, a kilometre in length, along the valley bottom.

Le Nôtre laid out a main axis centred on the château and descending in a series of terraces to the valley bottom, then rising on the far side.

Sceaux was sold in 1699 to Louis's illegitimate son, Louis Auguste, Duke of Maine, whose wife, Anne, Duchess of Maine made it the setting for her glittering salon in the first decades of the eighteenth century, which reached its apogee in the Grandes Nuits of 1714–15, sixteen fêtes of music and opera-ballets that unfolded every two weeks and drew the best musicians of France, under the direction of Jean-Joseph Mouret.

The Duchess of Maine had the pavilion of the Ménagerie built, to designs by Jacques de La Guépière, and gave it a garden setting, to the north of the château; only its foundations remain.

The duc de Trévise, son of Napoleon's Maréchal Mortier, who had married the daughter of M. Lecomte, inherited the domaine and set to restoring the park and the pavilion and Orangerie.