When I did the first part of my now justifiably famous ‘lifestyles of the rich and French’, in which I gave you useful tips on how to live like a French king, I focused on how to build and decorate a house in the correct style. In this segment, we will focus on the outside of your new house…

It is important that your yard… or garden… reflect your status. The most obvious way to do this is with size… the scale should be on par with your new dwelling. In short, you should be able to stand outside your house and look in all directions and never see the end of your property. This will ensure that when your guests arrive to do you homage, they are suitably awed by the fact that it took them an hour of driving through a well-manicured landscape before they even reach your driveway.

Of course your yard will need to include many water features, and don’t skimp on the gold-gilded frogs and turtles… or the statues and expensive pieces of objet d’art.

Don’t just concentrate on the front and back yards either. The sides are just as important, and should also feature miles of well-trimmed hedges and shrubbery.

One of the main points to bear in mind is that, aside from impressing your guests with the vast scale of your yard, the yard itself should be designed in such a way that when you stop anywhere in the garden and gaze back at your big house, the view should highlight how big your house actually is, and in no way overshadow it.

Again, do not forget to utilize the most expensive artists you can find to throw in incredible pieces of art, even in the water features that are miles away from the house and will never be seen by anybody but the thousands of gardeners and groundskeepers that you employ. After all, you never know when a drunken guest might wander away from a garden party, become lost in the miles of hedge-mazes, and accidentally stumble upon one of these fountains, lakes, streams, ponds, rivers or waterfalls.

Remember, your yard is not really impressing anyone unless the only way to get from any one part of it to any other part of it requires a motor vehicle of some sort… or at least a carriage and some horses…

Don’t let that picture up there fool you! Your water features should never be this shade of green unless you have been dead for more than 200 years and the only people who ever visit your big house are working for the national park service or are tourists paying exorbitant prices to come and gawk at your past magnificence. This shade of green implies an algae buildup. Your water features should be blue… any shade of blue, no matter how unnatural it looks, and no matter how many chemicals need to be added… What do you care about the natural environment? You are living like a freekin’ French king!

See that water feature in the distance? That is an artificial lake, built so that guests can take boat rides on warm summer days. Those side branches are artificial rivers that lead to more huge round artificial lakes. All those statues and urns are much bigger than you might think from this picture. That giant horn-of-plenty artwork in the middle, you could drive a train into the mouth of that thing. Yes, it is a hideous abomination to the eyes… but you have to take into account the fact that it was done by absurdly overpaid famous artists most likely using insanely expensive materials. And this is just the backyard… where hardly anybody ever actually went… because they were too exhausted from the journey through the front yard. Man, those French kings knew how to do it right!

It is just a shame that the French national park service is too underfunded to keep this place up to the level of its former glory. You know those gold-gilded turtles and frogs were all spewing forth champagne back in the day.

And do not neglect to put a small, tasteful chapel off to the side of your big house to show how pious and holy you are.

If you follow the simple steps I have provided in this series, some day, long after you are gone, peasants will still flock to see how you once lived, paying a huge sum of money for the privilege of seeing it, and they will buy over-priced sandwiches and beverages and sit on the steps in your backyard, wondering what it must have been like to be you… you know… before the enraged peasants got fed up with the lavish lifestyle you lived while they were all starving, and came to your big house carrying torches and pitchforks, and dragged you away to your eventual execution…