It was built on a little mound, which human ingenuity had exalted into a hill, and its parade looked into the waters of the Seine.
In point of style it owed something to almost every age and nation--a great point with the architects of the day, who, equally rejecting all pedantic classicism, and all rococo prettiness, strove instead to make everything they put their hands to as complicated, bizarre, and incongruous as possible.

It was not enough that the garden itself should stand on an island, but it was surrounded by an artificial stream meandering in the most masterly style in every direction, and with all sorts of bridges thrown across it, from an American suspension-bridge to a rustic Breton bridge, composed of wood and bark, and covered with ivy.
And each of these bridges had its own warden, with a halbert across his shoulder, and the wardens had little sentry-boxes to correspond with the style of the bridges, some like hermitages, others like lighthouses, and their own peculiar trumpets to proclaim loudly to approaching guests over which of the bridges they ought to go to reach the castle.
Beyond the bridges extended the winding ways of the English garden, which in those days had quite thrown into the background the earlier taste for stony, wall-like, rectilinear alleys.

A man might now wander helplessly about for hours among densely foliaged trees without being able to find his destination.

He would see the beds beside him everywhere thickly planted with flowers in full bloom, and at every turn he would come upon arcades of jasmine with idyllic benches underneath, or marble statues of ancient divinities overgrown with creeping gobaeas, or pyramids of modish flowers piled one on the top of the other.

In one place he would behold masterly reproduced ruins, with agaric and cactus monsters planted amongst them.