page_title: René de Girardin
section_title: Garden at Ermenonville
hierarchical_section_title: René de Girardin / Garden at Ermenonville
caption_attribution_description: Ermenonville. Ile des peupliers. Cénotaphe de Jean-Jacques Rousseau
context_page_description: René Louis de Girardin, Marquis of Vauvray, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's last pupil. He created the first French landscape garden at Ermenonville. It was inspired by Rousseau's ideas. De Girardin was the author of De la composition des paysages, which strongly influenced the style of the modern French landscape garden.
  Girardin was descended from the old Florentine Gherardini family. In 1762 he inherited his title of Marquis of Vauvray and his mother's fortune. The inheritance included 300,000 livres and the 800-hectare estate of Ermenonville. His estates brought him an income of about 100,000 livres a year.
  Girardin became an officer in Louis XV's army and served until the end of the Seven Years' War. He then left the army and went to Lunéville, where he joined the Polish Court of Stanislas Leszczynski.
  In 1761 he married Cécile Brigitte Adélaide Berthelot, daughter of the maréchal des camps et armées of Lorraine. They had four sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Cécile Stanislas-Xavier, was the godson of King Stanislas and became an important political figure during the French Revolution and a member of the French National Assembly from 1791 to 1792.
context_section_description: In 1762 he settled at Ermenonville and began to design a new garden to illustrate his philosophical and social ideas about the place of man in nature.  The garden was laid out along a small river, the Aunette, where a series of ponds had been overgrown by nature. It was composed to show idealized nature, decorated with symbolic pieces of architecture, such as the Temple of Philosophy. It was left unfinished to show that the search for knowledge is never complete.
  He brought one hundred workers from England and a Scottish gardener to help him with the work, and he himself made many drawings of the effects that he wanted. Hubert Robert also came to Ermenonville and helped. Robert is described as the architect of Rousseau's cenotaph and possibly also of the Temple of Philosophy.  The garden was largely laid out by 1776.
caption: Jean Jacques Rousseau's grave at Ermenonville
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