ORO Editions

dismantling goes further than the destruction of preconceived ideas, including in the garden field, and appears, on closer inspection, to be a real aesthetic debacle:

It was, in the twilight, something frightening. The rock, like a mountain, occupied the lawn, the tomb was a cube among the spinach, the Venetian bridge a circumflex accent over the beans, and the hut, beyond it, a large black spot, for they had burned its straw roof to make it more poetic. The yews, in the shape of deer or armchairs, followed each other up to the tree struck by lightning, which stretched transversely from the bowery to the arbor, where candied apples hung like stalactites. A sunflower, here and there, was spreading its yellow disc. The Chinese pagoda, painted red, looked like a lighthouse on the vine. The beaks of the peacocks, struck by the sun, reflected back fires, and behind the clearing, cleared of its planks, the flat countryside ended the horizon.2

The disorder that reigns in this garden comes from the eclectic mix made possible by the grammar of an artistic production that offered too many possibilities. The cataloged garden explodes any unity, thus becoming an involuntary parody of the original intentions.

Both experiments imagined by Goethe and Flaubert are based on a common subtext, namely the syncretic language, which took center stage in the landscape garden from the second half of the 18th century. However, it is possible to indicate a specific site as well as a specific object that served, if not as a model, then at least as a conceptual background to the aforementioned disaster. Indeed, the direct (for Goethe) and indirect (in the case of Flaubert) shadow cast over these failed literary gardens is, paradoxically, that of a garden that has known astonishing success and fame: the garden of Wörlitz in Germany. The object in question, it goes without saying, is a mountain, or better yet, a fake volcano named Stein (stone) or Insel Stein (stone island). Moreover, its double inauguration took place in the same year, 1794, during which in Paris and all over France other mountains imposed themselves for a brief moment, as we have seen, as symbols of the Supreme Being.

While the Revolution was built and disseminated its neo-Parnassus, a German prince, close to the Enlightenment, was impressing his visitors with his miniature volcano. Its inauguration took place during a highly spectacular power-up. Both in the summer of 1794, to celebrate the visit of King Frederick II of Prussia (a very cumbersome neighbor), and in November of the same year, when Goethe participated in the rehearsal of the event, the mini-volcano of Wörlitz—still 17 meters high—was lit and “exploded” with considerable pyrotechnical means.

The garden of Wörlitz on the banks of the Elbe is the work of Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau. The latter, sometimes referred to by his contemporaries simply as “Vater Franz,” was like his fellow landscape gardener in Ermenonville, the Marquis de Girardin; a “damned original,” as Napoleon called him. The two shared both an excessive love for the new “fashionable” gardens, studied on site in the United Kingdom, and an enthusiastic veneration for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the Prince had visited him in Paris on November 16, 1775). Both used enormous means for their garden “madness” and worked for a long time on the composition of their respective works. Wörlitz, the very first picturesque garden on the continent, also paid homage to Ermenonville with the creation of a Rousseau Island modeled on the Isle of Poplars with Rousseau’s tomb. The originality of the Prince, who had very early on abandoned the military world he abhorred, also manifested itself in a flippant lifestyle; he had thus decided not to live with his wife, Princess Louise, in the estate’s castle, but with the daughter of his gardener Schoch in a house, the future Gothic house (Gotisches Haus), less restrictive and closer to his “natural” concerns (gardening, arboriculture, pastoral life). For several decades, in Wörlitz, as in Ermenonville, an ensemble of great complexity was created, to the point of transforming over time the entire small Principality of 700 square km into a Gartenreich, a garden kingdom.

The center of the landscaped park was occupied by a lake designed, like a large collage, in several stages from the remains of the Elbe river system. This generous body of water, created especially after the terrible floods of 1770, is both an image of destruction (the permanent danger of floods) and of creation (the victory of reason). The lake is located in the middle of a series of gardens: to the south, the Schlossgarten (the castle garden, redesigned in a picturesque style); to the southwest, Neumarks Garten, with a nursery and orchards; to the northwest, Schochs Garten with, among others, a nymph and a small mound; and in the eastern part the Neue Anlagen, or new constructions. All these gardens