Coup d'œil sur Belœil -- Écrits sur les jardins et l'urbanisme (review)

Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne was one of the leading socialites and cultural tourists of late eighteenth-century Europe. He inherited in 1766 a great formal garden created by his father at the family seat at Belœil near Tournai in Belgium, to which he added an English style landscape garden, working with the architect François Bélanger, between 1775 and 1791. His memoir, Coup d'œil sur Belœil, is a testimony to the gardenmania of the eighteenth century, containing descriptions of his own gardens at Belœil and of other gardens visited by this most European of figures. This volume presents all known versions of the Coup d'œil sur Belœil, manuscript, 1781, 1786, 1795, and other of de Ligne's writings on gardens and town planning. The Coup d'œil is an exemplary record of the ideas of de Ligne and of taste in gardens of the late eighteenth century. De Ligne is an important figure in that, like Girardin, he was an amateur of gardens, had his own garden built and wrote significantly on garden theory. The four versions of the text published here show the evolution of de Ligne's ideas and his accumulation of knowledge over a period of about twenty-five years. The earliest known existence of the manuscript can be dated to the autumn of 1770. The tone of each version of the Coup d'œil is light-hearted, the style is precise. In general, the evolution of the manuscript shows revisions of detail, wording and the addition of accounts of more properties visited by de Ligne. The most significant changes occur in the third and final printed edition, of 1795, written after the occupation of the Austrian low countries by French forces, obliging de Ligne to move to his other property at Vienna. Here, the tone becomes more moralizing, without being severe, and the irony more subtle. De Ligne becomes more self-conscious of the role he is playing as a writer on gardens and is gently self-mocking. Vercruysse and Guy, in the introduction to this edition, cite Casanova's appraisal of de Ligne's writing: 'Dans son traité sur le jardinage, le Prince de Ligne crée pour nous un vrai jardin, grâce à son style fleuri qui est aussi souriant, grave, amusant, et toujours instructif — qu'il loue ou qu'il critique — toujours impressionnant, mais sans prétention et jamais pédantesque' (p.55). De Ligne's material is informed by the Ancients (Virgil, Horace, Ovid) and by contemporary theories and evocations of gardens (Duhamel Du Monceau, Rousseau), but most of all by his own experiences of gardens. Each printed version of the Coup d'œil is headed by a verse addressed to the Abbé Delille, author of the influential poem Les Jardins (1782): 'Je voudrais vous montrer moi-même mon Belœil'. The edition includes other verses by de Ligne inspired by Delille. The writings on town planning focus particularly on Paris and Vienna. This is not the only version of the Coup d'œil currently in print, but the detailed apparatus and the inclusion of all versions of the text make it an important edition of de Ligne's most significant work on gardens and a significant contribution to material in print on eighteenth-century garden history.