3.6
The Automated Gardens of LunéVille
From the self-moving landscape to the circuit walk1
And it might have been yet improved by a thought taken from one of the most flagrant perversions of taste that ever was exhibited to publick view. Stanislaus titular King of Poland, and little better than imaginary duke of Lorrain, contrived, at his fine palace of Luneville, in one of the richest and most delightful countries in Europe, full of real pastoral objects and rustic images, to degrade them by sticking up clock-work mills, wooden cows, and canvas milk-maids, all over his grounds; to the no small admiration of the Lorrainers, an honest race, better fitted for the enjoyments of a mild and equitable government, than for the relish of works of taste.2
The eighteenth-century architect James Stuart is discussing improvements to Cavendish Square in London when he calls up the contemporary example of Stanislas, ‘imaginary duke of Lorrain’, and the mechanical and artificial embellishments of his garden at Lunéville. While clearly demonstrating his disdain for Stanislas’ works, he nevertheless goes on to present Lunéville as a model for a more appropriate treatment of rus in urbe, with ‘painted sheep’, a ‘pasteboard mill’ and ‘tin cascade’ recommended for the London square, in place of real animals and structures. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Stanislas Leszczynski, father-in-law of Louis XV and twice-exiled king of Poland, enjoyed a curious reputation lodged somewhere between fact and fiction. He appears in Voltaire’s Candide, as one of the ‘forsaken’ kings spending carnival in Venice.3 At the same time, he was busy establishing himself as the king who does good, the roi bienfaisant, in his titular estate of the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar. Stanislas was a prolific writer who corresponded with key Enlightenment figures, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, and whose own work traversed utopian fable, political tract and instruction on agricultural economy.4 He was also renowned for his capricious material creations. These ranged from the invention of the baba-rhum, a rum-soaked pudding, to fauxmarbre paintings on glass, illuminations and tricks of light for garden entertainments, as well as mechanical contraptions that included self-propelling boats and a three-wheeled carriage. The garden structures built for Stanislas at Lunéville, none of which has survived, displayed the irreverent and playful use of materials and the borrowing of techniques associated with the theatre and pleasure grounds. So it is no surprise that Lunéville could be compared, at the time, to a ‘painted and corrupt Vauxhall’ and received with both admiration and contempt by contemporary visitors.5 Stanislas’ endeavours in the representational field have mostly been regarded by historians as symptomatic of the games and amusements of a dissolute court.6 Yet he attended to the connections between kingship, Utopia and society with particular sincerity and intensity in his gardens at Lunéville. His efforts to exploit the new Enlightenment conditions to create an exemplary kingdom promoted an as-if domain that was part theatre and part experiment.
Lunéville
In 1737, Stanislas had initiated a building programme in the gardens of Lunéville with the construction of the Kiosk, a small pavilion for theatrical entertainments, inspired by his time in Bender, in the Ottoman Empire. From 1741, his programme became more ambitious. He created the Bas Bosquets, or the lower garden, by draining the marshland surrounding the chateau and diverting the river Vesouze. This vastly improved the conditions of the estate and, according to Montesquieu, rendered the air healthy.7 The new land between the river and the canal was then arranged into a series of plots, with cottages called the Chartreuses, a name derived from the dwellings of the Carthusians, an order of monks known as ‘gardeners’ for following their own programmes of cultivation.8 A year later, in 1742, Stanislas built the artificial village of the Rocher, on the opposite bank of the canal. The Rocher was an extra ordinary assemblage of eighty-six life-sized wooden automata powered by water, set in a landscape of grottoes. The two ideal villages or miniature kingdoms, the Chartreuses and the Rocher, established an experimental territory in the Lunéville gardens (Figures 3.6.1 and 3.6.2). This was the setting for elaborate theatrical events, scientific demonstrations, game playing and promenades, but also intellectual discourse and an exploration of social status and courtly life.
Chartreuses
Each cottage–pavilion of the Chartreuses village consisted of a room for dining and cooking, three further rooms, service pavilions and a small formal garden for growing vegetables, surrounded by trellis walls. The tenants for the cottages were chosen by the king from among his favourite guests and courtiers and would reside there during La Belle Saison, tending their gardens.9 The king would give each of the villagers the honour of hosting him once a month, when he would expect to sample dishes prepared from produce grown and harvested by the courtier–gardeners. He would keep his courtiers in suspense by not giving any potential host more than 3 hours warning before arriving. The whole situation was, of course, staged, with real gardeners, servants and cooks doing all of the work. Stanislas was inspired by Fénelon, author of the Telemaque (1699) and royal tutor, to write his own instructive utopian text, the Entretien, and also to imitate Fénelon’s entertaining theatrical procedures for the instruction of royal princes. In one of his letters to his grandson Louis, the dauphin of France, Stanislas gives an account of the staged rural scenes, infused with affective and political content that Fénelon had fabricated for the Duke of Burgundy’s education.10 The Chartreuses village has the character of this kind of experimental demonstration in a fictional landscape. In scenes strangely reminiscent of Fénelon’s Télémaque, where artisans are transplanted from the city in order to create an agricultural paradise, the courtiers here are transferred from the château and, as forced residents of an ornamental, pocket Utopia, made hostage to a princely game.
Figure 3.6.1 (left) Painting of Lunéville by an unknown artist. One of the Einville gallery panels formerly at the Musée du Château, Lunéville, but destroyed in the fire at the château on 2 January 2003
Source: © Inventaire Général – ADAGP, Musée du Château de Lunéville. Photograph D. Bastien 1990
Figure 3.6.2 (right) ‘Carte topographique du Château Royal de Lunéville et des Bosquets.’ Map of the Lunéville estate by André Joly, July 1767
Source: © Inventaire Général – ADAGP, Musée du Château de Lunéville
The role-playing evident in the Chartreuses, with its comic protocol, was endemic to the life of the court at Lunéville and calls up the continuity between ludic theatre, the possible reality of a Utopia and psychological experiment. The situations of the Chartreuses overturned the prevailing social order, presenting the king as a guest hosted by his own courtiers, the courtiers in turn taking the place of gardeners and servants in creating a meal for the king. The possible scenarios of the Chartreuses, whereby Stanislas’ mistress could play the role of a dairy maid, or his secretary could be found tending a garden, bear an uncanny resemblance to Locke’s account of the prince waking up in the body of a cobbler.11 Such reversals and role-playing dominated eighteenth-century deliberation on the place of the individual in society, as is shown in concern for the status of the actor in the writings of Diderot and Rousseau.12 Eighteenth-century theatre provided, not only a target for ridicule and satire, but also the vehicle of speculation regarding shifting social orders. The inversions and oscillations of status deliberately inscribed in the topography at Lunéville cannily blurred the distinction between beneficiary and benefactor, performer and spectator, servant and king. As an interlude between political realities and imaginative fictions, the Chartreuses not only serve as a commentary on Versailles, the prevailing model of court life, but also anticipate the later transformation of this model in the Hameau of Marie-Antoinette.13