From childbirth to death, the life of the monarch at Versailles was performed in public. That is one of the reasons Marie Antoinette created a separate life in her domain of the Petit Trianon, her refuge from court protocol. With its gardens and artificial lake edged by a higgledy-piggledy thatched-roofed hamlet, Trianon was designed to allow the young queen to ‘return to nature’, its working farm and dairy providing her with wholesome opportunities to educate her children, all in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Enlightenment philosophy. Of course, though far less formal than Versailles, Trianon was nevertheless all design: its cottages’ rustic exteriors concealed richly decorated interiors in which the queen could entertain her friends. And it also contained her own private theatre. Marie Antoinette’s was an age in which ‘theatre-mania’ was rife, with small society theatres sprouting up within fashionable chateaux and stately homes. But at the same time stagecraf