Mail Club Letter 001 · Le Seuil

Letter 001 · Le Seuil

Versailles, 1665. A garden that had to be read.

Below the terrace at Versailles there was once a labyrinth of thirty-nine fountains, each one a fable by Aesop, worked in more than three hundred painted lead animals. Water came out of their mouths — that was how they spoke. At the entrance stood two figures: Aesop with a scroll, and Love holding a ball of thread. A century later the labyrinth was pulled up. It survives only on paper.

The man who designed that garden as a text is the one you already know for Cinderella and Puss in Boots. Charles Perrault wrote fairy tales in the evening and ran the iconography of the King's palace by day, and almost nobody remembers the second half.

INSIDE THE ENVELOPE

— A letter, written to you from the Jardin.

— Charles Perrault, redrawn. My own portrait of him, with the labyrinth on his hat and the garden behind his shoulder. His history on the back.

— The story of the secret storyteller — the labyrinth, the fables, and how it disappeared, with an archival engraving from the 1677 royal edition.

— A recipe from his century. Real, dated, and stranger than you expect: they cooked it at court while the fountains were still running. Try it, or read it and be glad you live now.

— The specimen. A signed, numbered print of my own work — the key to the Jardin. This is the piece the whole letter was built toward.

Printed, numbered and folded by hand in a small studio in Ohio. Sent flat in a wax-sealed envelope.

Contents may shift with each story.