“A garden for a kingdom”, by Gwenaële Robert: traces of Rousseau

At the Carnavalet Museum, in Paris, we find, on the first floor, in the Raguenet gallery, a painting from the 18th^e century of Charles-Léopold Grevenbroeck. It represents a View of Paris from the heights of Belleville. A countryside of groves, orchards, small plots, with a mill, a farm or rather an inn and people seated at tables. A chalk road descends towards the suburbs. Farmers push their animals. The city is in the distance, the towers of Notre-Dame haloed in the fog rising from the river. Readers of Reveries of the solitary walkerby Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 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 reopen them, just once , on this decor from before. As if it were possible to suspend time. But nothing is the same anymore. Almost everything now is turned upside down, covered up, lost, erased.

In Gwenaële Robert’s new book, it is about Rousseau, his meditations, daydreams and solitude. Of landscapes and emotions rediscovered. Memories of places and moments, of loved ones. Of the flight of time. A garden for a kingdom is the intimate chronicle of a journey into a strange country, in the wasteland and thickets of a land of childhood neglected for too long. Rediscovered and revealed.

We forget ourselves without even realizing it. There is always more important. In this case, it is the children. The narrator of the novel has devoted more than twenty years of a very or too busy life to her family. And so they left, leaving her in a somewhat pathetic form of emptiness. So, in order not to sink into harmful boredom, a conventional depression of old age, she decides to resume her abandoned university thesis. “on the influence of botany in Rousseau’s latest writings”. She’s not really fooled by the pretext. It just so happens that the author of Confessions lived the last months of his life with the Marquis de Girardin, in Ermenonville. The estate is just an hour’s walk, between fields and forest, from the small village in Valois where she grew up. Going to Ermenonville (Oise) to work on Rousseau is to enter into collusion. Putting one’s steps along memory paths, where everything comes together and merges.

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