The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth-century French formal gardens

Abstract

According to Saint Simon, Louis XIV on his deathbed expressed regret about the pain caused others by his overwhelming passion for building and war. For Saint Simon, this is only a passingly sympathetic moment. He is more concerned about the suspect moral character of a king who would inflict so much suffering on his people to follow his own passion and who would wait until death to renounce his weakness. The deathbed confession is followed soon in Saint Simon's diary by the descriptions of the general glee in France and throughout Europe that followed the announcement of the king's death a mirror, we suspect, of the author's own elation.1