ABSTRACT
In 1737, Stanislas Leszczynski had initiated a building programme in the gardens of Luneville with the construction of the Kiosk, a small pavilion for theatrical entertainments, inspired by his time in Bender, in the Ottoman Empire. The two ideal villages or miniature kingdoms, the Chartreuses and the Rocher, established an experimental territory in the Luneville gardens. The role-playing evident in the Chartreuses, with its comic protocol, was endemic to the life of the court at Luneville and calls up the continuity between ludic theatre, the possible reality of a Utopia and psychological experiment. On the opposite side of the canal, the Rocher theatre-grotto of automata presented an alternative model of village life: a kingdom of even more exceptionally well-behaved and loyal subjects. The circuit walk, as a way of observing, came to dominate the subsequent history of eighteenth-century gardens, and museum culture generally.
