Tea at Trianon: The Garden at Monceau

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

The Garden at Monceau

From The Washington Post:

For academics, Monceau has long been a significant part of Old World garden history as an example, albeit an extreme and even unreliable one, of efforts in France to experiment with English pastoral or picturesque landscapes. The contemporary French model, by contrast, had status manifested in the grandeur of the artistic garden, with its formal terraces, parterres and clipped greenery.

Monceau was so fleeting that it may have been forgotten but for the fact its designer — Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle — created a lavish record at its completion, in the form of a book and the prospectus he wrote to raise funds for the book. The volume contains 18 engravings of the garden’s principle elements. Original copies of “Jardin de Monceau” sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but a new version, along with scholarly essays, has just been published in a collaboration between the Foundation for Landscape Studies, Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Yale University Press. If there’s a Francophile in your midst, “Carmontelle: Garden at Monceau” might make a sound holiday gift, at a price of $75.

[...]

At Monceau, Carmontelle reached into a bottomless bag of tricks. The elements included a colonnade and pool from ancient Rome, a faux woodland mausoleum, a minaret on a mound, an ornamental Italian vineyard and various newly built ruins. It took the period’s fascination with China and Islamic cultures to absurd lengths. Outside the Tartar Tent, appropriately costumed servants led a camel around.

Carmontelle was a creative polymath in the employ of the young, fun-lovin’ Duke of Chartres. He wrote plays, he designed stage sets, he penned verse, he painted portraits of the duke and his society circle. He designed a garden unmatched by any other, and he was skilled in what today we would call event planning.

The duke was of the House of Orléans, family rivals of King Louis XVI and the Bourbon throne. He was the embodiment of a dissipated aristocracy too self-engrossed to see the approaching revolution. He married a young wife for her riches, had dozens of mistresses, gambled madly and required constant stimulation. Within his set, these were the norms. Together, they lived in a world of gossip, intrigue and one-upmanship, but really only feared one thing: boredom. Carmontelle’s “primary responsibility” was to defeat it, writes Joseph Disponzio in one of the book’s chapters. (Read more.)