“A garden for a kingdom”, by Gwenaële Robert, Les Presses de la Cité, 208 p., €20, digital €14.
In the Carnavalet Museum in Paris we find, on the first floor, in the Raguenet gallery, a painting from the 18th century.my century of Charles-Léopold Grevenbroeck. It represents a View of Paris from the heights of Belleville. A landscape of groves, orchards, small plots, with a mill, a farm or rather an inn and people sitting at tables. A chalk path descends towards the outskirts. Farmers push their animals. The city is in the distance, the towers of Notre-Dame shimmering in the mist rising from the river. Readers of Dreams of the lonely walkerby Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you will recognize a little in this period landscape that of the famous second walk of the philosopher who went to plant plants one afternoon in 1776. We would like to close our eyes for a moment and open them again, just once. , in this decoration from before. As if it were possible to suspend time. But nothing is the same anymore. Almost everything is now upside down, covered, lost, erased.
Gwenaële Robert’s new book is about Rousseau, his meditations, his daydreams and his loneliness. Of landscapes and emotions rediscovered. Memories of places and moments, of loved ones. Of the flight of time. A garden for a kingdom It is the intimate chronicle of a trip to a strange country, in the wasteland and thickness of a childhood land abandoned for too long. Rediscovered and revealed.
We forget ourselves without even realizing it. There is always something more important. In this case it is the children. The narrator of the novel has dedicated more than twenty years of a very or very busy life to her family. And so they left, leaving her in a kind of somewhat pathetic void. So, in order not to sink into a harmful boredom, a conventional old-age depression, he decides to take up his abandoned university thesis. “On the influence of botany on the late writings of Rousseau”. She really doesn’t fall for the pretext. It happens that the author of Confessions He lived the last months of his life with the Marquis de Girardin, in Ermenonville. The farm is located just an hour’s walk, between fields and forests, from the small Valois village where he grew up. Going to Ermenonville (Oise) to work on Rousseau is entering into collusion. Putting the steps on paths of memory, where everything comes together and merges.
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