Saint-Dié was rebuilt without delay on the best conceived of plans, with the wide, clean, spacious, strictly aligned streets that we see today. The layout reproduces the regular beauty of Nancy and, with its modern pavements and continually flowing fountains, makes this one of the most attractive town in the Vosges.
Charleton, Les Vosges pittoresques et historiques (1841), p.225.
A search for traces of King Stanislas in Lorraine takes us, rather unexpectedly, to Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, ninety kilometres to the south-east of Nancy. Under Stanislas's benevolent gaze, after a devastating fire in 1757, this little town deep in the Vosges Mountains became the site of a noteworthy essay in Enlightenment urban planning.
