263
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_28
Chapter 28
The Consolations of a Château
28.1 A Distinctly Indoor Paradise
In Latin, castellum, castle; in Old French, chastel; the chatelaine, its mistress, living
rapturously in her fine country estate. Country, one of the most abstruse and elongated etymologies in the English language. It fixes in our minds all that structure
overlooking, or opposite to, landscape. A place of undefined forest stretches, dragons (in Arthurian romance), of places all under the authority of the Crown and,
hence, the opposition by those who poached on those lands. Poaching in general,
forgetting class warfare, simply the archaisms of culling for one’s own foodstuffs.
Chalk-and-fen country, baronies, and tribal chiefdoms. Almost at once a linguistic
repository of various patriotisms and battlefronts. In Diderot, it is either the dungeon or the château. Ballad poetry and romance, or the drudgery of human existence
at its lowest ebb. Conversely, a structuralism aggregating our most fervent needs to
escape others, at least until we become deathly ill (Fig. 28.1).
In France, he that can afford to “bids farewell to the landscapes copied by painters, that he may enjoy the real landscape of the good Creator, the eternal landscape
which returns each year with the spring-roses, always younger and more smiling.”
1
That Homeric landscape, as John Ruskin applied it in his Modern Painters, “which
even an immortal might be gladdened to behold.” With foaming white waters,
“long-tongued sea-crows,” and “meadows full of violets and parsley.” Sweet
cypress, groves of alder, grapes in bloom, and copious rocks.
2
And in the very central thickness of those perennials and hazy vistas “a record of history,” the Rev.
G. N. Wright described the Château of Blois, a monument that “can excite none but
1 France Illustrated, Comprising a Summer and Winter in Paris, Drawings by M. Eugene Lami,
Descriptions by M. Jules Janin, Supplemental Vol. IV, Peter Jackson, Late Fisher, Son, & Co.,
London and H. Mandeville Paris, 1840, pp. 178–179.
2 “Of Classical Landscape,” Modern Painters, Volume III, Of Many Things, John Ruskin, Merrill
and Baker, New York, Illustrated Cabinet Edition, 1890, p. 233.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_28
Chapter 28
The Consolations of a Château
28.1 A Distinctly Indoor Paradise
In Latin, castellum, castle; in Old French, chastel; the chatelaine, its mistress, living
rapturously in her fine country estate. Country, one of the most abstruse and elongated etymologies in the English language. It fixes in our minds all that structure
overlooking, or opposite to, landscape. A place of undefined forest stretches, dragons (in Arthurian romance), of places all under the authority of the Crown and,
hence, the opposition by those who poached on those lands. Poaching in general,
forgetting class warfare, simply the archaisms of culling for one’s own foodstuffs.
Chalk-and-fen country, baronies, and tribal chiefdoms. Almost at once a linguistic
repository of various patriotisms and battlefronts. In Diderot, it is either the dungeon or the château. Ballad poetry and romance, or the drudgery of human existence
at its lowest ebb. Conversely, a structuralism aggregating our most fervent needs to
escape others, at least until we become deathly ill (Fig. 28.1).
In France, he that can afford to “bids farewell to the landscapes copied by painters, that he may enjoy the real landscape of the good Creator, the eternal landscape
which returns each year with the spring-roses, always younger and more smiling.”
1
That Homeric landscape, as John Ruskin applied it in his Modern Painters, “which
even an immortal might be gladdened to behold.” With foaming white waters,
“long-tongued sea-crows,” and “meadows full of violets and parsley.” Sweet
cypress, groves of alder, grapes in bloom, and copious rocks.
2
And in the very central thickness of those perennials and hazy vistas “a record of history,” the Rev.
G. N. Wright described the Château of Blois, a monument that “can excite none but
1 France Illustrated, Comprising a Summer and Winter in Paris, Drawings by M. Eugene Lami,
Descriptions by M. Jules Janin, Supplemental Vol. IV, Peter Jackson, Late Fisher, Son, & Co.,
London and H. Mandeville Paris, 1840, pp. 178–179.
2 “Of Classical Landscape,” Modern Painters, Volume III, Of Many Things, John Ruskin, Merrill
and Baker, New York, Illustrated Cabinet Edition, 1890, p. 233.