Coup d'œil at Belœil and a great number of European gardens

Abstract

Charles-Joseph, seventh Prince de Ligne, Field marshal, Grandee of Spain, Knight of the Golden Fleece, sovereign of the minuscule county of Fagnolles in the Ardennes, and author of the Coup d'Oeil sur was born in 1735. Claiming descent from Charlemagne, intimate with royalty from Paris to Vienna to St. Petersburg, he traveled widely, associating with such luminaries as Madame de Stael, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Rousseau until the eighteenth-century douceur de vivre came to an abrupt halt with the French Revolution. Forced to flee his Belgian estates, he became an exile in Vienna, where he died in 1814, having attempted to support himself by writing. But Ligne's real passion was for his garden at Beloeil, which he described as he lay dying as 'the handsomest garden in Europe ...if it weren't for Versailles'. This new critical edition presents the 1795 version of Ligne's masterwork, his garden treatise on Beloeil and the great gardens of Europe. Designed by Wolfgang Lederer and elegantly illustrated from sources Ligne himself might have known, this extensively annotated translation will introduce a new generation of readers to Ligne's intelligence and wit as well as his ideas on gardens. The charm and vivacity of the Prince's anecdotes and pithy observations lead one through his own beloved gardens to a Grand Tour of European culture in the eighteenth century. 'These pages were composed in happy days, when the world was not sullied with crime and when our blood and tears had not been shed. I wrote names then that I no longer have the strength to utter. Now everything is altered. But that does not change the intent of my work, which was simply to give counsel and example to others. These are not the tales of a traveler but rather the precepts of a gardener' - Preface to the first edition.

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