The rest of the afternoon was spent reading against the soothing backdrop of the fountain and brook in the beautifully landscaped grounds of Les Jardins d'Epicure, where we stayed that night, an exceptionally pleasant hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant in Bray et Lu, a town set amid the rolling hills and wooded stretches of the Parc Naturel du Vexin.
Onions, 30, missed out on selection for the match on his home ground of Chester-le-Street then suffered a broken finger while playing for Durham.
Onions was on the fringes of the team for much of this summer's fixtures against Australia and New Zealand but failed to break into the XI, even when widely expected to do so at his home ground of Chester-le-Street for the penultimate Ashes Test.
Below ground, Haussmann oversaw the installation of les egouts, the city's complex sewage network.
Earlier this month, the art dealer Larry Gagosian opened a gallery for large-scale art in a 17,760-square-foot industrial warehouse built in the 1950s on the grounds of what was once Le Bourget airport.
Brown's style is often thought of as the antithesis of the style of André Le Nôtre, designer of the splendid formal gardens of Versailles, France, because Brown made use of the nature of the ground whereas Le Nôtre imposed an architectural pattern on nature.
Author of Les Fleurs du mal.
In the early 18th century Queen Anne's gardener, Henry Wise, designed the grounds of the palace in the formal style of André Le Nôtre's famed gardens for Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles in France.
Le Brévedent sits in the grounds of a Louis XVI hunting lodge, set in parkland with a lake and surrounded by woodland.
The elegant structure was designed to follow the historic lines of Le Petit Trianon, a French chateau on the grounds of Versailles completed in 1770 for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Her mother, Jacqueline Harper, had been born in America and brought up in France, in a château with gardens by Le Nôtre, who also designed the grounds of Versailles.
