Sketch for a comparison
Another text begs to be mentioned. Its author is a flamboyant personality, a pioneer of experimental science who influenced Francis Bacon. In 1563, the year following that of the publication of Microcosme, Bernard Palissy (c. 1510-1589 or 90) published his Recepte Véritable par laquelle tous les hommes de la France pourront apprendre à multiplier et augmenter leurs trésors.30 The whole second half of that book is devoted to the description of a garden. It may well have served as a piece of advertising, directed at Queen Catherine de Médicis, with its author aiming at becoming the architect of her garden at Chenonceaux.
The text is cunningly crafted. Palissy masters the power of the written word to enflame the imagination. His garden, in the explicit progeny of the Garden of Eden and thus in the medieval tradition, is both imaginary and real. As such, it has the character of a utopia. It is imaginary in its perfection. Moreover, its author presents it as an architectural project, which any of several thousand castles in France could well adorn itself with. It is real in the detail of the description that Palissy provides, of its location as well as of the various parts. Indeed, actual places were mentioned as possible locations, the castle at Chaulnes, in the pro-vince of Picardie, which Louis d’Ongnies rebuilt around 1555, and that at Troisse-reux, in the présent département of the Oise, whose owner when Palissy wrote his Recepte véritable was Jean de Marivaux, who might have used Sebastiano Serlio as an architect.31
My comparative analysis of both texts, Scève’s pithy and Palissy’s lengthy descriptions, will focus on the two architectural elements, vaulted tree branches and hydraulics in their castle gardens. Both belong with the concept of the artificial: Scève stresses it and Palissy relishes in it, to the point of turning his whole garden into a massive embodiment of kitsch for us, readers in the twenty-first century.
Palissy mentions (p. 147) “une grande hallée croisée” (a great alley with a crossing). He emphasizes (p; 162) plantations of “hommeaux” (elms) such that the trunks of the trees will be made to look like columns in an antique temple and “les branches feront un architrave, frise et corniche, et tympane et frontispice, en observant l’ordonnance de la massonnerie,” i.e., the trees will be grown and their branches cut and arranged32 to mimic the facade of a temple, complete with “architrave, frieze and cornice, and tympanum and front facade, with due respect to preserving the look of masonry.” Notice the contrast: where Scève’s image is that of a basilica, the Huguenot Palissy’s is that of a Greek or Roman temple. A few sentences below, Palissy emphasizes again “architecture et bastiments faits d’arbres,” “architecture and buildings made out of tress.”
With respect to water circulating in the garden, Palissy is intent (p. 146) upon taking “a spring … and spread it at my will in all the parts of my garden” (“prendre quelque source d’eau … pour la faire dilater à mon plaisir par toutes les parties de mon jardin.”) Just like Scève, he uses the verb distiller to describe water oozing from the rock. Another term, common to both texts in reference to water, is canal. Both texts also share the phonic connotation of running water, in Palissy’s (p. 184) “le murmurement de l’eau qui passera contre les pieds et les jambes des colonnes” (“the whisper of water which will run against the feet and the legs of the columns”). Palissy’s description, whether that of a garden that was actually built or that remai-ned a design, goes to the extent of devising hydraulic machinery to power a kind of musical organ or sets of whistles.