Temples and tombs and rocks and caverns,
The lesson of history and that of romance.
Models were not lacking. Without speaking of the parks created in England by Kent and his disciples, there existed the admirable examples of Ermenonville, belonging to M. de Girardin, Limours, to the Countess de Brionne, Bel-Eil, to the Prince de Ligne, Maupertuis, to M. de Montesquiou, the Little Trianon and Bagatelle, Le Moulin-Joli of the engraver Watelet.... And at the same moment when Madame de Monaco was undertaking the construction of her garden, the financier Jean Joseph de La Bordé was completing, upon the advice of Robert and de Vernet, the construction of the admirable park of Méréville. The chatelaine of Betz conformed to the rules of the type.
[Original]
Possibly some day some one will write the history of these English gardens of the eighteenth century: no study would be more suitable to acquaint us with the contradictory sentiments and the confused thoughts which agitated society in the years which preceded 1789. The lectures of M. Jules Lemaître and the penetrating book of M. Lasserre upon Romanticism have recently drawn attention to the disorders caused in the French body politic by the poison of Rousseau. To illustrate such remarks, nothing would be better than the plans and the structures of the parks composed in France from 1770 to 1789. We would there behold a mingling of pedantry and sentimentality, the most refined taste united to the most silly feeling, adorable reminiscences of classical antiquity mingled with the first abortions of romantic bric-a-brac. We would especially distinguish there the laborious artifices and the childish conventions in which the pretended lovers of nature became entangled. And I do not insist upon the prodigious disaccord between ideas and manners: for this I will send you to the charming discourse which the Count de Larborde puts at the beginning of his Description des nouveaux jardins (1808), where he shows the foolish and joyous guests of the fashionable parks, laughing in "the valley of tombs," quarreling upon "the bench of friendship" and bringing to the country the tastes and the habits of the city: "while praising the pure air of the fields, they rose at two o'clock in the afternoon, they gambled until four o'clock in the morning, and while they grew tender over the simplicity of country manners, the women plastered themselves with rouge and beauty spots, and wore panniers...."
To tell the truth, the men of this period retained too much delicacy of mind not to feel the ridiculousness of the inventions in which they found their delight. But fashion was master. The theorists of "modern gardens" endeavored to make headway against the excesses of the irregular type. In his agreeable poem, Les Jardins, which contains so many ingenious lines, the worthy Abbé Delille lavished the most judicious counsels on his contemporaries and endeavored to hold the balance equal between Kent and Le Nôtre.
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.