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A Little Chaos: who was André Le Nôtre?
Louis XIV's head gardener is the star of Alan Rickman's new film A Little Chaos. But the real story of his life is more interesting than the movie version
At the turn of the millennium, a colloquium of scholars met to share what they knew about André Le Nôtre, principal gardener to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the presiding genius behind the creation of the gardens at Versailles.
The year 2000 was auspicious because it was the tercentenary of the gardener's death. After the experts had conferred, they published a book with the title Le Nôtre, un inconnu illustre, which roughly translates as Le Nôtre, an Illustrious Unknown, or - to push it a little further - a Well-known Unknown.
Like Shakespeare, he is one of those historical figures we seem to know well through their works, but know very little about as people.
Now, in A Little Chaos, a film directed by Alan Rickman, who also plays Louis XIV, André is thrust forward as the romantic lead in a period garden romp.
As far as anyone knows, Le Nôtre led a blameless life, and stayed faithful to his wife Françoise, who bore him three children, all of whom died when very young. Rickman peps the story up by introducing a fictitious assistant, Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), who becomes professionally and emotionally entangled with a hunky but reticent Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts).
It is a pity that writers and filmmakers feel the need to invent such liaisons for Le Nôtre, when the most interesting thing about him is how a man so unassuming and modest could have thrived at Versailles, a court permeated with rivalries and jealousies.
Le Nôtre was relatively low born; his father had also been a royal gardener - a jardinier ordinaire - in the gardens of the Tuileries. Yet André rose to become, not only Louis XIV's master-gardener, but also Contrôleur Général des Batiments, a senior member of the administration.
When Louis ennobled him in 1675, he was asked what he would like on his coat of arms. He replied: "Three snails and a head of cabbage - but I must not forget my spade, for it is due to my spade that I am the recipient of all the kindness with which your Majesty honours me."
There are many tales of Le Nôtre's self-effacing humour, and even the waspish Duc de Saint-Simon, whose gossipy diaries are an entertaining source of information about life at court, had nothing bad to say about him.
He noted that "the King liked to see him and talk to him", which was surely the entire secret of his success. If it makes any sense to talk about a demiurge having friends, then Le Nôtre was the Sun King's friend, and it was a friendship built upon a mutual love of gardening.
Le Nôtre (left) thrived at the court of Louis XIV (right)
Le Nôtre was already in his mid forties when he got the first big breakthrough of his career.
In 1657 he was recruited by Nicolas Fouquet, Louis's corrupt finance minister, to design the gardens for his new chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte. In terms of its design, with its skilful use of terraces and its ingenuously hidden canal, the garden at Vaux is arguably superior to the gardens at Versailles, which are sprawling by comparison.
Fouquet, who saw himself as the King's future first minister, intended Vaux to be a showcase for his wealth, taste and patronage, but he seriously miscalculated. If Louis was already suspicious of his minister's ambition, the party that Fouquet threw at Vaux on August 17, 1661 must have confirmed his worst misgivings.
The lavish celebrations included a dinner served on plates of gold and a play performed by Molière and his troupe and culminated in a firework display during which an enormous man-made whale made its way up the canal, launching rockets across the water.
Fouquet was arrested the following month and after a trial that lasted three years he was imprisoned in an Alpine fortress for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, Louis commandeered Fouquet's entire design team, the architect Le Vau, the artist and interior designer Le Brun, and the garden designer Le Nôtre, and put them to work at Versailles.
Louis had married Marie-Thérèse of Spain in 1660 but was never faithful to her. A large part of his reason for developing his father's old hunting lodge at Versailles was his need to get away from his wife and the prying eyes of his mother so that he could pursue a love affair with the tomboyish and outdoorsy Louise-Françoise de la Vallière.
At the start of his reign, Versailles was a young man's party house, but Louis's vision for it grew and grew and it became his permanent residence in 1677. Five years later he would move the whole court there.
From Le Nôtre's perspective the site was not a promising one. It was little more than a bog.
Saint-Simon was prone to exaggeration, but he wrote that Versailles was "the saddest and most barren of places, with no view, no wood, no water and no earth, for it is all shifting sand and marsh, and the air consequently is bad".
The gardens of Versailles as they look today
To tame the site Le Nôtre had two main weapons - earthworks and geometry. He took the formal geometry of axes and symmetry, brought to France from Italy, and applied it to the flat agricultural landscape of the Île de France.
The topography limited the scope for grand Italian-style cascades, but it offered opportunities for large reflecting basins, mirror pools and canals.
Louis was also wildly enthusiastic about fountains, a taste that would cause all sorts of problems later on. To excavate these water features and to create terraces, huge amounts of earth had to be shifted. Everything was dug by hand, and it was usually the military, during the intervals between their campaigns, who were burdened with the task.
The Swiss Lake, for example, is so called because it was dug by Louis's elite Swiss guards. The excavations were dangerous because of landslips but also because of disease. They blamed "miasmas" but the real killer was malaria, to which northern Europe was prone in the 17th century.
Mme de Sévigné wrote of the "prodigious mortality of the workmen", whose bodies were discreetly taken away at night in wagons so as not to alarm those still engaged in the works.
In the early 1680s there was a complete change in the administration, and the Marquis de Louvois, a former war minister, took over as Superintendent of Buildings. He became Le Nôtre's new boss, but he was not a supporter of his work.
The ageing gardener's influence gradually waned - while that of an architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, was on the rise. Mansart's inclination was to fill the gardens with marble buildings.
For Le Nôtre, the garden, a creation of plants, water and stone, was the architecture, while for Mansart it was just the background for his buildings. There was nothing the gardener could do about it, because the architect also had the monarch's ear.
Le Nôtre's most painful defeat was the obliteration of his delightful Bosquet des Sources to make way for Mansart's Colonnade.
When Louis asked Le Nôtre for his opinion of the latter, the old man replied "Well, Sire, what do you want me to say? You have turned a mason into a gardener and he has given you a sample of his craft." It was probably the closest Le Nôtre ever got to falling out with the king.
Ultimately there were more than 2,400 fountains at Versailles (as well as 230 acres of ornamental terraces) but there was never enough water to get them all to run at once.
Whenever Louis took a walk, the fountaineers had to turn them on as the king approached and turn them off again when he moved on. This did not fit with Louis's idea of himself as absolute king, and he went to extreme lengths to bring more water to the gardens.
The most extraordinary project was the Machine de Marly, a contraption driven by 14 giant water-wheels that employed 221 pumps to lift water from the Seine up to the level of the gardens. This monster was a hazard to shipping and had a dreadful reputation for crushing and maiming the workers who served it, yet still it did not deliver enough water.
The incredible Machine de Marly that transported water from the Seine to the gardens of Versailles
Louis's next plan was to divert waters from the River Eure, which was 100 miles away.
This meant building a canal, which had to be carried across Madame de Maintenon's country estate on a giant aqueduct. This was to have been a huge structure, worthy of the Romans, and several regiments were dispatched to build it. Once again the problem was malaria - soldiers died in their hundreds, if not their thousands. It was never finished.
In 1686 the outbreak of the War of the League of Augsburg meant that the troops were needed elsewhere, so the Sun King never got his fountains to run all day.
After a lifetime of cheerfulness, temperate habits and innumerable long walks around vast gardens, Le Nôtre retired from official duties in 1693 and became a robust and energetic pensioner. His home was a house built in the corner of the Tuileries gardens, where he avidly collected paintings, sculptures and medallions.
Le Nôtre's protégé, Claude Desgots, recorded an incident towards the end of his master's life that reflected the esteem in which Le Nôtre was held by the King.
The old gentleman, who died in 1700, was invited to view the gardens of the new royal palace at Marly, five miles from Versailles. Louis climbed into his covered chaise, carried by his Swiss Guards, and then invited André to be seated in a similar conveyance. This was a stupendous honour for the elderly gardener, but what made it sweeter was that his old rival Mansart was left to follow on foot.
"You can imagine," wrote Desgots, "how touched a loyal subject must have been by such an act of kindness", but Le Nôtre had not lost his wit. Turning to the King, he remarked: "In very truth sire, the bonhomme who was my father would stare to see me in a carriage alongside the greatest King on earth. It must be said that Your Majesty treats his mason and his gardener well."
Dr Ian Thompson is a Reader in Landscape Architecture at Newcastle University and the author of 'The Sun King's Garden,' (Bloomsbury, 2006)