The spell of the heart of France: the towns, villages and châteaux about ParisHallays, André
History
The spell of the heart of France: the towns, villages and châteaux about Paris
Hallays, André
France -- Description and travel; France -- History
In his Essai sur les jardins, the modest Watelet, the creator of Le
Moulin-Joli, recalled to good taste the constructors of park buildings,
and pronounced it ill that one should build a mausoleum to the memory of
a favorite hound (an allusion to a grotto in the gardens of Stowe which
Lord Granville Temple had consecrated to the memory of Signor Fido,
an Italian greyhound); unluckily, he judged that a perfect, simple and
"natural" structure for a park would be the true monastery of Héloïse,
and he imagined the inscription which it would have been necessary to
carve "upon a myrtle"--if the climate 'permitted it--in order to move
young lady visitors.... Morel, the landscape architect of Ermenonville,
did not like fictitious constructions which assemble in a single
locality, all centuries and all nations. But, on the other hand,
Carmontelle, the designer of the fantastic constructions of Mousseaux,
found that Morel's conceptions were deplorable: and neither of them
was wrong. Horace Walpole, in his Essay on Gardens, praised the English
gardens, but made fun of the abuse of buildings, of which hermitages
seemed to him particularly inappropriate: "It is ridiculous," said he,
"to go to a corner of a garden to be melancholy," and he deplored that
the hypothesis of irregularity should have brought people to a love for
the crooked. Baron de Tschoudy, author of the article Bosquet, in the
supplement to the Encyclopédie, wrote in regard to tombs, inevitable
accessories of all English gardens: "A somber object may not be
displeasing in a landscape by Salvator; it is too far from the truth to
sadden us; but what is its excuse? Do we go walking to be melancholy?
Indeed, I would like much better to raise the tendrils of the ivy from
the base of an overturned column, to read a touching inscription! How
my heart would expand at the sight of a humble cabin, filled by happy
people of my own kind, who would gayly spade their little enclosure and
whose flocks would gambol about it! With what ecstasy would I listen to
their songs in the silence of a beautiful evening! For is there anything
more sweet than songs caused by happiness which one has given?"
But all this did not discourage the proprietors of English parks from
building hermitages, tombs, Gothic chapels, Tartar kiosks and Chinese
bridges.... In rambling through the gardens of Betz we will meet these
structures and many others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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