[continued from previous post]
The Bas Bosquets and the Chartreuses
The Chartreuses were a series of garden structures built between 1741 and 1744 in the Bas Bosquets in the area between the great oval basin and the newly reconfigured Grand Canal. The assemblage resembled a small village of cottages each with its own garden. The Trèfle, which already stood at the end of the northern arm of the canal, was incorporated into the group. The intention was to lease out the properties to individual Courtiers and guests, to allow them a fashionable taste of the simple life.
 Contemporary plan of the Bas Bosquets c.1750 |
| https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/memoire/IVR41_20165410760NUC2A |
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| Anonymous view the Bas Bosquets with the Chartreuses in the foreground. |
The idea was not entirely novel. The name "chartreuses" - derived from the dwellings of the Carthusian order, where each monk was required to tend his own garden - was a popular designation for a hermitage or garden retreat; the duchesse du Maine had her "chartreuse" at Sceaux which Stanislas visited in May 1743 (Luynes, Mémoires, v., p.5) His immediate model was probably Mansart's pavilions at Marly, which were also orientated towards an axial canal.
Each cottage-pavilion was large enough to accommodate a dining room, three cabinets and a kitchen, with service pavilions to support them. The gardens, a mixture of practical jardin potager and pleasure garden, were two to four arpents in size, separated by trelliswork fences. The exteriors appeared to be brick or masonry with slate roofs, but, in reality, the details were largely painted on. They were frequently repaired or reconfigured. Initially there were eight in total, but by 1753 this number had risen to a dozen; later it fell back to seven. For a long time La Galaizière commanded a larger hermitage than his neighbours, whilst Stanislas's mistress Mme de Boufflers enjoyed a double plot which included a dairy, chicken pens and grain store. The Trèfle itself was assigned to the Grand Masters of Stanislas's household, the Duke Ossolinski and, after his death, the prince de Beauvau-Craon.
The "tenants" were chosen personally by the King and obliged to reside during the Belle Saison. They were supposed to tend their gardens personally. Stanislas would dine with each once a month in order sample dishes prepared from the homegrown produce. To keep them on their toes, he did not give more than three hours notice of his pending arrival. As Pierre Boyé comments, "In order to amuse Stanislas, dapper Seigneurs, a prince of the Church, a valiant soldier, an indolent marquise, wielded spade and rake, trained fruit trees and washed lettuces." (p.74-75) In reality servants did most of the actual work and the simple exterior of the cottages concealed elaborate interiors. The Chartreuse of marquise de Boufflers in particular, boasted a reception room, with a tribune in the entresol for musicians, and a boudoir which featured a sofa that could be transformed into a bath.
The terms under which the Chartreuses were held is not recorded in the literature, but it would have been typical of Stanislas to have made his courtiers pay an onerous rent to sample the dubious pleasures of the simple life. A document from the departmental archives preserves a set of detailed and restrictive regulations regarding maintenance of the enclosure walls, grass walkways and so on. (The only trees allowed to be cut back were the three chestnuts trees belonging to the Mme de Boufflers, which otherwise threatened to deprive her of sunlight.) See: Pascale Debert, "Incroyable règlement de copropriété des Chartreuses de Stanislas,", Couleur XVIIIe - Lorraine des Lumières [Blog], post of 26.06.2017.
By all accounts, the "insulaires des Petits Bosquets" were their most spirited in the last years of Stanislas's reign, when Madame de Boufflers presided over regular convivial and light-hearted gstherings. The company baptised the area l'Isle-Belle and Stanislas's secretary, the genial poet François Devaux, "Panpan", was playfully proclaimed prior. His verses declare that the "bons chartreux" had indeed found true sanctuary away from the usual boredom of court life (Boyé, p.75).
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| Maquette of the Chartreuse of Mme de Boufflers,created by Christian Huré for the Musée du château in 2019 https://www.ch-maquettiste.com/museographie.html |
What remains?
Of the Grand Canal only the southern part remains, considerably reduced in width. The Quai des Petits Bosquets runs alongside it. The original "grand basin" has entirely disappeared. However, the site which the Chartreuses once occupied, between the canal and the river, is clearly visible in the aerial view:
The former Chartreuse of Mme de Boufflers, which was lived in by François Devaux between 1767 and 1780, survives at 39 Quai des Petits Bosquets. There are several photos on the Base Mérimée and in 2017 and 2019 Pascale Desbert posted some evocative pictures on her blog. Even then, it was in a pretty ruinous state. To judge from Google Maps, nothing much has happened since, but at least the site has not been built over. The Base Mérimée also has photographs of second example (below right), sadly destroyed in the 1970s.
References
Pierre Boyé, "Les châteaux du roi Stanislas: Lunéville [suite]", Revue Lorraine illustrée, Vol. 2 (1907): p. 64-80 ( p.70ff.)
Base Merimée:
Ensemble de pavillons de jardin dit les Chartreuses"
Pascale Fourtier Debert, on Couleur XVIII [blog]:
"Dépendance d’une ancienne chartreuse de Stanislas", post of 06.09.2015
"Que reste-t-il des chartreuses du roy Stanislas ?", post of 17.05.2017
"Panpan, gardien de “Mon tempé”, chartreuse de Madame de Boufflers". post of 09.06.2017
"Il faut sauver la Chartreuse de Stanislas !" , posts of 01.07.2017 and 22.11.2019
The Rocher
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| André Joly, Château de Lunéville, view of Le Rocher. Musée Lorrain, Nancy https://musee-lorrain.nancy.fr/les-collections/les-oeuvres-majeures/oeuvre-majeure/le-chateau-de-luneville-vue-du-rocher |
Close to the Chartreuses, was to be found the Rocher, the most ambitious - and certainly the most curious - of Stanislas's landscape features. Set out against the northern terrace of the château was a giant moving tableau, featured no less than eighty-six life size automata, laid out as if in a model village. An elaborate artificial landscape had been created from blocks of stone specially brought in from the Vosgnes mountains, with paths, streams and bushes, plus mills, cottages, and workshops. An elaborate hydraulic system animated multivarious scenes of pastoral life. There were also musical accompaniments and sound effects, even a "hydraulic organ" which imitated the cries of the animals. The thing was huge - 250 metres in width.
The duc de Luynes has left us the following description:
A real rock has been created with great care and at great expense. On it are arranged various painted figures which represent a village: peasant cottages, women spinning, cocks and hens, goats, sheep, young boy, a bar with a drunkard, sawyers, a cat and rat, pigeons; the whole effect is very realistic. There is also a penitent in the hermitage, striking his chest. All these figures are moved by means of water; the cocks crow, the sheep graze; the smoker smokes, with smoke seen coming from his mouth; the goats fight, the cat chases the rat, the drunkard drinks, and, from above, his wife throws water down on him; the hermit strikes his chest; the carter guides his cart through a sort of mountain; sawyers saw, a woman spins, and another is on a swing. It is a prodigious piece of work and a most ingenious conception.
Mémoires sur la cour de Louis XV, vol. 6 (1744-45) 1891, p.91-92.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VFkvAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA91#v=onepage&q&f=false
The automata themselves were of painted wood. Presumably they were only 2-D representations, but the artistry was said to be of a very high standard, the faces portraits of real individuals copied from the bourgeois of Nancy. In a world without moving images and recorded sound, onlookers were readily were taken in by the appearance of life. (Two marching sentries who were added in 1752, were reported to have caused particular confusion.)
The Rocher, the "merveille de Lunéville", soon came to represent the high spot of any tour of the park. It was showed off by Stanislas in 1744 when the royal family - Louis XV, Marie Leszczyńska and the dauphin - came to visit. Messdames, Stanislas's granddaughters, who visited more frequently, were also said to have taken great pleasure in the spectacle. It could be viewed either from a boat or on foot behind the canal, or from above in a specially constructed loggia to the right of the tableau, where the viewers seemed to merge into the illusion.
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| Laurent Charpentier, Fête at Lunéville in 1742. [Wikimedia] |
The rationale behind the Rocher eludes us. It is a fair deduction that the construction in some sense to mirrored the ideal society presented by Stanislas in his Utopian writings. His biographer Anne Muratori-Philip, noted that Stanislas spent long hours contemplating the creation: "The Rocher was not just "le jouet du roi" as the Court wags would have it. This magical universe where everyone lives in harmony is an image of the pastoral society dreamed of by Stanislas" (Muratori-Philip, Le Roi Stanislas (2000) p.194). The idea that the gardens of Lunéville as a whole express Stanislas's philosophical and political ideas has been explored in several recent works by Renata Tyszczuk, Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. [See References below]
Contemporaries, however, confined themselves almost exclusive to admiration for the ingenuity of the mechanism and the power of the illusion created.
Scholarly Jesuit journalists cited Classical precedents:
"This piece is one of the most singular works that art had ever undertaken and executed. If the Ancients admired the machines of Ctesibius of Alexandria, whose power was limited to forcing wood and bronze to make some noises by the means of water and air, what would they have thought of his Rocher, where 66 life-size figures perform different movements, and deceive the ears and the eyes....? Journal de Trévoux, January 1752
The conception also recalled the automatons of the Renaissance gardens of Italy and Austria, which were still to be found in the 18th century though reduced in scale. Among Stanislas's immediate contemporaries, the Rocher seems closest in spirit to the mechanical marvels beloved by Augustus of Saxony. (Another suggestion relates the Rocher to the vogue for automata created by Vaucauson in the late 1730s, with its attendant scientific speculation that mechanics might replicate nature. However, there is no real documentary evidence to support this.)
What remains?
Sadly the Rocher was systematically dismantled after Stanislas's death and no physical trace remains. The Marie-Antoinette Forum's "Monsieur de Coco" informs us that an inhabitant of Lunéville is said to possess two of the automata, but there are no more details given [post of 14.12.2017].
The known documentation is equally meagre, consisting only of Héré's engraving and description, the paintings by Joly and Charpentier and a few scattered recollections by visitors. There are no available technical drawings or explanations of the mechanisms, nor any circumstantial accounts of its creation. However, more information may soon be forthcoming: Albert Kozik of the University of Warsaw, who is currently completing a major four-year research project, tells us that he has uncovered further resources and hopes to publish his results in an accessible journal in due course [See References below]
References
Pierre Boyé, "Les châteaux du roi Stanislas en Lorraine - Lunéville [suite]", Revue lorraine illustrée, vol. 2 (1907), p. 64-80 ( p.74-75.)
Notice for Le Rocher on the Base Mérimée:
Description in the Recueil of Héré:
Renata Tyszczuk, "Vérité fabuleuse: the Rocher at Lunéville, 1743-45" in Deterritorialisations - Revising landscape and politics, edited by Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose, 2003, p. 201-211 [Available on Academia]
Albert Kozik, "King of Engineers": website of a research project based at University of Warsaw. The aim of the project is to provide a detailed description and interpretation of Le Rocher in context of the revived interest in automata in the 1730s.
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