Désert de Retz

Those buildings included a summer house (the "colonne brisée", or ruined column), in the form of the base of a shattered column from an imaginary gigantic temple, an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, an obelisk, a colonnaded temple dedicated to Pan, an open-air theatre, a ruined Gothic Chapel and a Chinese pavilion.

However, the société owning it changed the statutes, forcing the authorities to resume the procedure to have the Désert finally classed as a monument historique, which came with a decree of 9 April 1941, against the owners' wishes.

The 1785 plan in Monville's hand mentions: To this list may be added: There are theories that the landscape was designed to allude to intellectual concepts and mysticism, specifically Free Masonry, although the evidence is inconclusive.

Monville's friend, Louis Philippe II, Duc de Chartres and d'Orléans, was a leading Freemason in pre-revolutionary France who apparently incorporated into his garden at the Parc Monceau in Paris an initiatory route complete with Masonic symbols.

Diana Ketcham's opinion is that the physical layout of the Desert de Retz makes the Masonic connection implausible as it is "a small open valley, where nothing is hidden, the site is not conducive to a ritual progression where the initiate views only one scene at a time".

The American Ambassador to France, later President Thomas Jefferson visited in September 1786 with Maria Cosway, he was so inspired by the internal planning of the ruined column that several of his architectural projects show strong influences.

[1] In the 20th century, many famous persons became interested in the Désert and visited the garden: artists Salvador Dalí, Louis Aragon and Hans Arp in 1927, Raymond Lécuyer in 1938, Cyril Connolly in 1945, author André Pieyre de Mandiargues in 1946, Osvald Siren in 1949, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1950, André Breton and 23 other surrealists in 1960, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1979, former US President Jimmy Carter in 1983, French President Mitterrand in 1990, and the architect I. M. Pei in 1994.

In 1923 French director Abel Gance used the Desert de Retz as a decor for his film Au Secours!, starring Max Linder.

In June 1994 the director James Ivory used it for scenes in his film Jefferson in Paris, starring Nick Nolte, Greta Scacchi and Jean Pierre Aumont.