With this pleasing picture, let us leave the gardens of Betz.
I continued to read the Coup d'oil sur les Jardins of the Prince de Ligne, whence are extracted the pretty things which I have just quoted, and I wish to reproduce the ending of this work, which is the whole philosophy of the English garden.
"Happy, finally, if I have been able to succeed (the Prince de Ligne did not content himself with writing about gardens; he had transformed a part of the park of Bel-Oeil in the new fashion), if, in embellishing nature, or rather in approaching her, let us rather say in making her felt, I could give taste for her! From our gardens, as I have announced, she would lead us elsewhere; our minds would no longer have recourse to other powers than her; our purer hearts would be the most precious temples that could be dedicated to her. Our souls would be warmed by her merit, truth would return to dwell among us. Justice would quit the heavens, and, a hundred times more happy than in Olympus, the gods would pray men to receive them among themselves."
In the midst of their philosophical and rural amusements, while they "embellished" the woods of Betz and purified their hearts by tasting nature, the Princess of Monaco and the Prince of Condé doubtless spoke similar words.
Nevertheless the omniscient gods remain in Olympus: they knew Cérutti and foresaw the morrow.
It is just this which gives a singular melancholy to the gardens which were laid out in France on the eve of the Revolution, a true melancholy, a profound melancholy, no longer the light and voluptuous melancholy with which the romantic "friends of nature" pleased themselves. It was scarcely five years after the Princess of Monaco had finished designing and ornamenting her gardens when it was necessary for her to abandon everything to follow Condé and partake with him the perils, the sufferings and the mortifications of emigration, to face the privations of the fife of the camp and the humiliations of defeat, to flee, always to flee across Europe before the victorious Revolution, and to learn at each stage of the bloody death of a relative or a friend. Such memories kill the smile awakened by the childishness of the structures scattered through the gardens of Betz; they communicate a touching grace to the allegories of the Temple of Friendship; they envelop the entire park with a touching sadness. [28]