Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (4 page)

A Day in the Park: The Luxembourg Gardens

[Y]ou shall meete some walkes & retirements full of Gallants & Ladys, in others melancholy Fryers, in others studious Scholars, in others jolly Citizens; some sitting & lying on the Grasse, others, running, & jumping, some playing at bowles, & ball, others dancing & singing; and all this without the least disturbance …

—J
OHN
E
VELYN’S
diary, April 1, 1644

he gardens shall be open from sunrise to sunset all year, but never before seven a.m.” So reads one of the nine articles of the Règlement du Jardin du Luxembourg, that most sublime of Paris parks that greens the Left Bank between the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse. Like countless enthusiasts who’ve visited the gardens in the past four centuries, I’ve stood at dawn before the wrought-iron gates waiting for the keepers of the castle to let me in. On warm summer evenings, when the sun and moon meet in the canopy of horse-chestnut trees west of the Palais du Luxembourg, I’ve hidden in the shadows, savoring the dusky light, until the guards have ushered me out of those tall, uncompromising gates.

You are denied sunrises and sunsets at the Luxembourg (and the pleasures of the night) but little else worth mentioning. In their own way, the gardens are a perfect world: sixty acres of terraced woods and walks, fountains and pools, with sweeping perspectives along alleys of surgically clipped trees. There’s an old-fashioned music stand, two quaint cafés, a restaurant, and several snack bars. City and country embrace to seduce you. A day spent loitering here teaches you more about Paris and its inhabitants than many a scholarly tome.

Some Parisians make a science of studying people’s behavior in the Luxembourg gardens. A friend of mine once boasted that he could tell the time of day by the breathlessness of the before-work joggers, the ruddiness of the lunchtime loafers, and the decibel levels of the babies, maids, and beaming young mothers out for an afternoon stroll. I challenged his boast but had to admit that, though I’d been to the gardens many times (they’re only a half-hour’s walk from where I live), I’d never actually spent a day there. And I resolved to do just that.

I arrived at the park from Place de l’Odéon one spring morning and walked straight to a wooden kiosk. A handful of these are scattered around the gardens. Displayed are a map and a poster showing the species of trees—elm, sycamore, ginkgo, giant sequoia—that grow here, with names in French and Latin, for the benefit of budding botanists. You also find a brief history, in four languages, of the Luxembourg palace and its grounds.

Legend has it that the gardens stand over the ancient Roman encampment of Emperor Julian the Apostate (
AD
331 to 363). But there’s no trace of it. From Julian’s day to the eleventh century, the area was farmed. The farms are also long gone. In the 1200s, Louis IX—known as Saint Louis—gave part of the neighborhood to the Carthusian monks. Alas, the monastery is gone, too.

As for the flower-spangled, sun-washed gardens we know today, their life began in the early 1600s as a green garland adorning the palace built by architect Salomon de Brosse for Henri IV’s widowed queen, Marie de Médicis, née Maria de’ Medici, a Florentine. She wanted an Italian-style palazzo to remind her of the Pitti Palace back home. Instead, she wound up with rusticated stonework grafted onto the archetypal Île-de-France château, surrounded by formal French gardens.

Jostled by joggers, I strolled from the kiosk to the Fontaine de Médicis and sat beside it. This oblong pool is flanked by twin ranks of tall sycamores draped with ivy bows, a living garland motif. No matter what the season, it’s cool and damp here. The moody setting seems to attract a soulful breed of visitor. On one side of the pool sat a solitary young man pretending to read
Le Monde
. Across from him posed a comely young woman, the real object of his attention. She looked wistfully at the white marble sculptures of Acis and Galatea enlaced rapturously in the fountain’s grotto. Above them lurks the menacing Polyphemus, a greenish bronze monster twice their size. The young woman’s eyes swept over the pool to the ivy garlands, to the half-opened newspaper, and finally to the young man’s handsome face. Each time her gaze fell upon him,
Le Monde
trembled.

My thoughts returned to the luckless Marie de Médicis, who so loved this fountain. She moved into her palace in 1625 while the plaster was still wet and was expelled from France shortly thereafter by her thankless son Louis XIII. The name of the Duc de Tingry-Luxembourg, the property’s former owner, was revived, and Marie de Médicis’s was forgotten. The palace then passed through the hands of the Duc d’Orléans, the Duchesse de Guise, Louis XIV, and several less illustrious heirs. The only notable incidents in the gardens during these centuries seem to have been the visits of Watteau, who painted many a sensual canvas here, and the late-night summertime orgies of the Duchesse de Berry. She had all the gates but one walled up so she could frolic “with the sort of abandon that requires accomplices and not witnesses.”

I was just about to leave Marie’s fountain when along came a teetering octogenarian, led unsteadily by her young grandson. “Where are the goldfish?” demanded the boy, waving a stick. “They must be at the other end,” whispered the woman. They shuffled along together, side-stepping the nervous young woman and attracting the attention of the man reading
Le Monde
. He folded his newspaper then edged around the pool. “Aren’t you Sylvie?” he asked. She said a friend of hers was named Sylvie. Perhaps they’d met at Sylvie’s house? “Yes,” replied the eager young man. “That’s it … Shall we have a coffee? It’s damp by this fountain.” And the two walked awkwardly toward the park café in a nearby grove of flowering horse-chestnut trees.

Meanwhile, there were no goldfish to be found at either end of the fountain. The elderly woman and her grandson headed toward the so-called Great Octagonal Pool—the garden’s centerpiece—facing the rear of the Palais du Luxembourg. I followed, settling into an armchair to sniff the sea of flowers and watch the world go by.

It’s hard to imagine this place as a prison. Yet during the Revolution’s darkest days, the grounds were sealed and hundreds of royalists and sympathizers interned. Guests included Danton, the painter David, and Tom Paine (who had the effrontery to vote against the execution of Louis XVI). Paine spent many a day wandering the gardens’ alleys, looking for a way out, and by luck escaped the guillotine. Few others did.

Revolutionaries also ransacked the palace. A series of monumental paintings by Rubens depicting the life of Marie de Médicis that had hung here for more than a century were packed off to the Louvre, where you may admire them to this day.

Since then, with brief interruptions, the building has housed the French Senate. The grounds were expanded under Napoléon I, who destroyed the Carthusian monastery, and were reduced in the 1860s under Napoléon III, who ordered his prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to rebuild the neighborhood from scratch. Haussmann would have paved the gardens over had not twelve thousand angry citizens poured into the streets to stop him. Instead he moved the Fontaine de Médicis to its present location and ran a road or two across the grounds.

But Haussmann and his team did bequeath the park its handsome round music stand, gingerbread cafés, beekeeper’s bungalow, and most of the compound’s other charming nineteenth-century elements. For years my favorites were the battered green metal garden chairs, about which I developed a theory long ago. Each of the four distinctive types of chair seemed to have its own personality and attract people of corresponding character. Some chairs were upright and grave, others slung back at a suggestive angle, still others had generous round seats decorated with delicate pinhole patterns and armrests shaped like arabesques. These I thought of as grandmother chairs, and sadly they have disappeared. They were comforting and weathered, appealing to thoughtful, mature strollers with a nostalgic twinkle in their eyes.

On weekday mornings, when the gardens aren’t too crowded and there are plenty of chairs to go around, you can still guess what kind of person will choose what kind of chair, where. Sun gods and goddesses lope down the gravel lanes then drape themselves over the low-slung variety, usually in the vicinity of the
orangerie
, a heat sink dotted with orange trees and outsized potted palms. Chess players favor a combination of one upright, armless chair (for their boards) faced by armchairs. They set up in the grove of paulownia trees and in spring play under a rain of mauve blossoms. Amorous couples prefer secluded lanes, leaning two armless chairs side by side. The empty chairs, left as arranged by their last occupants, tell of trysts, duels, and roundtable talks.

From my comfortable old armchair by the octagonal pool, I watched as children played with weathered wooden sailboats, prodding them with long wooden sticks. A sinister-looking man of middle age with a radio-controlled submarine chortled as his U-boat prowled just below the surface.

The wizened woman who rents the sailboats displays dozens of the battered little craft on the cart she wheels out rain or shine. She is known to be fierce, defending her boats from the abuse of rambunctious children. Every once in a while, a submarine or powerboat rams a sailboat and she flies into a rage.

Children often misuse the wooden sticks she supplies and take a poke at the pool’s enormous old carp. Witness the fish-hunting grandson I’d seen earlier at the Fontaine de Médicis: the boat woman has summoned a park guard and ordered him to subdue the child and confiscate his stick.

As the grandmother and her chastened grandson slunk off, I remarked to a neighbor in an upright chair that the
gardien
was perhaps too strict.

“Monsieur,” my neighbor remonstrated, “the rules must be enforced.” A chorus of Gallic voices agreed. “Rules, rules, rules,” echoed the stiff chairs.

With that mild reproach coloring my cheek, I stole away to the park café, installed myself under the leafy horse-chestnut trees at a wobbly metal table, and soothed my pride with a sandwich and a beer. The beer was cool and refreshing, the sandwich tough as rubber and the prices extortionate. Still, a brass band was playing under the music stand’s canopy, the sun slanted through the budding grove, and I couldn’t help enjoying myself.

I hadn’t been there five minutes when a battalion of
gardiens
appeared for their break. Paunchy and of indeterminate age, the men ordered rough red wine and soon it was flowing like the Médicis fountain. The
gardiens
wear dark blue uniforms with brass buttons and matching képis. In winter, they wrap themselves in dark blue overcoats or heavy black capes and look like avenging angels. They carry walkie-talkies and whistles and are not shy about using either. Peep-pee-EEP—get off the lawn! Peep-peep-pee-EEP—don’t pick the flowers! Put away that camera—no photos allowed with a tripod!

Some afternoons, the birds can’t compete with the
gardiens
’s shrilling. But now, as they ate and drank and smoked luxuriantly, they seemed entirely human. Every kingdom must have its rules and someone to enforce them.

Later, as I wandered around the romantic English garden west of the main esplanade, I reflected upon this simple fact. Without the
règlement
, would the Luxembourg lose its magic? As it is, no one pilfers the pears grown by botanists on the pocket-size orchard’s espaliered trees. Or throws smoke bombs at the beehives kept by the Société Centrale d’Apiculture, whose courses on beekeeping, devised to bring Parisians into contact with nature, have been a fixture since the 1860s. Were they allowed on the lush yet delicate lawns, would the gleeful thousands of students from the Lycée Montaigne facing the park soon wear the grass thin? One nineteenth-century chronicler remarked that so many high school and college students have always come here that if the trees were full of parrots, the parrots would speak Latin—though the current language of choice seems to be Franglais, that admix of French and English, spiked nowadays with Arabic.