PARIS GARDENS
Within a world capital, there are many beautiful gardens:
They were commissioned by Catherine de Medici, and named for the
tiles that were made from clay mined on this site.
The entrance to these gardens is so much more impressive when you enter them from the Place de la Concorde end. This will allow you to walk toward rather than away from the Louvre. The Tuileries Gardens, as you see them today, are the work of the famous French landscape architect Le Notre who stand to build them in 1664 at the order of Louis XIV's Minister of Finance Colbert. This is the same Le Notre who laid out the parks of Versailles and also who laid out St. James's park for Charles II of England. This garden replaced another, but vastly inferior garden, which Catherine de Medici had built there about a hundred years before Le Notre was commissioned to change and enlarge it. But even in Catherine's time, this garden was already known as the Tuileries Gardens. Just how many years it took Le Notre to finish his garden, history does not tell us, for gardens are not generally inaugurated. However, there can be no question about the amount of labor that has gone into making this area what it is today, especially when you take into consideration that before Catherine built her garden the area along the Seine, hereabouts, was the city's municipal dump. It was then outside the city walls. In 1563 Catherine de Medici had decided to build herself a palace a little distance to the west of the Louvre, which was to serve her as her own private residence. This palace closed off the end of the present Louvre and became known as the Tuileries. In order to provide easy access to the Louvre, Catherine had the Tuileries connected with the Louvre by a long gallery, an idea she, no doubt, obtained from the gallery which connects the Pitti Palace with the Vecchio Palace in her native Florence. The Tuileries Palace is no longer in existence, having been burnt out along with the connecting gallery during the Commune of 1871. The connecting gallery, which is now the end of the Louvre on the river side, was ultirrrately rebuilt, but the palace itself, having been too badly damaged, was dismantled. At the same time Catherine built her palace, she also built herself a garden. As the country thereabouts was still rather hilly, this was not a formal garden, but consisted mostly of grottoes, small lakes and fountains, and there also was a menagerie. This garden was open to the public and, naturally, very popular with the Parisians. It is, needless to say, even more popular today. Both the palace and the gardens derived their name from the tile kilns which had long occupied this area. Hence the name, Tuileries, for in French a tile is called a tulle. When Le Notre was commissioned to build the Tuileries Gardens he seems to have known exactly what he wanted to do. Both he and his father had been superintendents of the old garden and they had always lived in a little house right on the grounds. During the many years he had occupied this position he had, no doubt, many times dreamed of what he could do with a garden like that if he only had the money. And now, Louis XIV, thanks to his Minister of Finance, who seems to have been constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to beautify Paris, was to provide it. The first thing Le Notre did was to remove the hills in order to make the garden level. His first problem, therefore, was a soil moving problem, or what the modern excavation contractor would call a "soil-engineering" problem. In order to dispose of the soil from these hills, Le Notre built two long terraces along each side of the garden. Each of these terraces is supported by two walls, one on each side, with an avenue ,of linden trees on top of them. You can form a pretty good idea of the magnitude of this project when I tell you that each of these aerial avenues is about eighteen feet above the level of the gardens, sixty-five feet wide and eighteen hundred feet long, not counting the Place de la Concorde end, which is also walled in except for the entrance. The outside walls of these gardens thus form the longitudinal limits of the gardens, and would, to all intents and purposes, have made it a sunken garden, except for its one open entrance at the Louvre end. On the inside of the gardens, access to these terraces is gained by several flights of stairs placed at intervals, but also by two broad, heart-shaped inclines, wide enough for carriages, at the Place de la Concorde end. The entrance to these gardens, or if you wish, the exit, is between these two inclines in the exact center of the garden. It is at each side of these two inclines that the two Winged Horses I mentioned to you the day before yesterday are placed. At the Louvre end the entrance is on a level with the adjacent Place du Carrousel and, as I shall describe to you later, very far from being plain. On top of the wall, facing the Seine, is the Orangerie. On top of the wall on the opposite side is a similar building, known as the Jeu de Paume, by which we just came, and which, as I already pointed out to you, now houses the works of the French Impressionists. When this garden was still a royal garden the one was used as an orangerie and the other as a tennis court. In front of the latter you will also find a statue of CharlesPerrault (1628-1703) the author of our "Puss in Boots" and many other children's stories. However, his statue was, not placed there so much because he gave us some delightful fairy tales as for his effort to have this garden opened to the children of Paris. Incidentally, the terrace along the river side is known as the Terrace du Bord de l'Eau,. which ought to be self-explanatory; and the terrace along the Rue de Rivoli side is known as the Terrace des Feuillantes, from the Cistercian Monastery which used to stand nearby. And now, let us get off these aerial avenues and examine the avenues, or the allees, as they are called, on the ground. Directly inside the garden is an open space, about two short city blocks long, with an octagonal basin in the center. In keeping with the rest of the garden this basin is every bit of one hundred fifty feet across. Around the near end of the basin are four huge groups of sculptures, depicting the principal rivers of the ancient world. These are the Tiber, the Rhone, the Saone, the Nile, the Moselle and .the Rhine. On the other side of the basin, grouped around the beginnings of the allees, are four smaller groups .depicting the Four Seasons. Against the wall on the river side of this area is the beautiful "Femme Couchee by Maillol; and on the Rue de Rivoli side is a bust of Le Notre. This entire area is planted in roses, both in bush form and as standards. The famous allees, this time planted with chestnut trees, begin shortly after the octagonal basin. These allees extend for two long city blocks, all the way to within about seven hundred feet of the end wings of the Louvre. The center allee is bordered by three rows ,of huge, closely spaced, trimmed chestnut trees on each side of it and is known as the Grand Allee. On each side of this allee there are two other allees with three rows of trimmed chestnut trees on each side again. This makes a total of twelve rows of trees on each side of the middle ,of the Grand Allee, or a grand total of twenty-four rows of trees all the way across the gardens. And this is by actual count. I'll let you count the number of trees that are in each row lengthwise. These trees are in such perfect alignment that when one stands twenty feet from the first tree, one cannot see a single tree out of alignment. These allees are crossed at intervals, and with the same matheiaiatical precision, by other allees, thus forming a series of rectangles, which are known as quinconces. All of these trees are trimmed into the absolutely symmetrical shape you see so much in the formal parks of Paris, with the top perfectly flat and the sides perfect planes. However, on the inside row, bordering on the avenue, the trees are trimmed into an elongated arch. But even this is not allowed to touch, but has an open space of about three or four feet at the top, probably for the purpose of aeration. All this may not sound like a tree you would want to write a poem to, but when used in the formal setting I have just described, the effect is simply out of this world. The cost of maintaining such an avenue must be pretty well out of this. world too. In addition to the deep shade these allees furnish, the chief charm of these gardens lies, of course, in the hundreds of statues which are scattered throughout them. One simply cannot go into a park in Paris without seeing the female form displayed in marble and bronze. All through the quinconces isolated groups of sculptures are placed in appropriate settings. I don't think that even the City's Department of Parks knows how many statues are scattered through these gardens. There must be hundreds of them, but by far the greatest number of them are concentrated around the basin-a round one this time, and only a little smaller than the octagonal onethat you will run into when you come out of the deep shade of the guinconces and step out into the sunshine of the huge, open space immediately adjacent to the Louvre. Here we have a veritable Bulfinch's Age of Mythology carved out of stone. However, none of these statues are named, so that you will have to know your mythology to tell what they represent. There are, first of all, the large groups of Apollo and Daphne, Atalanta, and Hippomenes, at the end of the four quinconces. Then there are nymphs, dryads, nereids, fauns, warriors and just plain female figures, and all of them gloriously naked. Some of them are reproductions from Greek and Roman antiquities; others are, no doubt, originals. However, you will require no titles to identify Diana the Huntress, Acteon with his Hounds, Cupid and Psyche, Arethusa the wood nymph or Echo and Narcissus, for the unrequited love of whom Echo died and for the undue love of self Narcissus was turned into a flower. Who could possibly name or even count them all? And all around the bases of these statues, or else sailing their toy boats on the basin, are the hundreds of well behaved French children, while nearby their nurses keep an eye on them seated on little collapsible chairs. A children's paradise in a mythological setting.
Medici Palace. There is a carrousel, and
even an small-scale repila of the Statue of Liberty.
The Luxembourg Gardens and its associated palace are located at the farther end of the Sixth Arrondissement, and not too far from the Pantheon, except that the latter is in the Fifth Arrondissement, the Boulevard St. Michel forming the dividing line between the two. The main entrance to the gardens is at the Rue Auguste-Comte, but there is another and slightly smaller entrance to it diagonally across from the Rue SoufHot, up which we walked the other day. There is also a small entrance to it on each side of the palace. However, I much prefer to approach this garden from its end, that is to say, from the Observatory end. By doing so we will be able to walk into it by way of one or the other of the two splendid allies which lead into it from this end and were, at one time, part of the gardens. So, whenever I want to go to the Luxembourg Gardens, I tell the driver to take me to the corner of the Boulevard St. Michel and the Rue de l'Observatoire, and leave it to him how to get there. The Palace of the Luxembourg and its associated gardents were built at the order of Marie de Medici who, after the death of her husband, got tired of living in the Tuileries and wanted a palace of her own. She thus emulated Catherine de Medici who also got tired of the Tuileries and built herself the Hotel de Soissons near the Central Markets, After you have entered the garden through the ornamental iron gates at the end of the two allees-for the entire Luxembourg Garden is surrounded by a high iron fence, and is closed at night-you will be in the garden proper. Immediately to your left, and extending most of the distance along the left-hand side of the park, is an informal garden with winding paths, containing the statues of Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Verlaine, Heredia and others. The poet Heredia, as you may remember, was born in Cuba, and later came to France, where with such men as C:oppee, Yrudhornme, de Lisle, Mallarm6, Verlaine and others, he became one of that group of poets who became known as the Parnassians. Out in the clear, but still to the left of the formal gardens, is a Punch and Judy show, a carrousel and other things for the amusement of children. But if you think that you are going to see all this in the space of a half-hour's walk, you better guess again. This is only the section to the left of the formal garden and this section alone is over thirteen hundred feet long and about eight hundred feet wide. The gaily landscaped formal gardens start immediately behind the palace and consist of two terraces with balustrades around them and an octagonal basin, almost one hundred fifty feet in diameter, in the center. It is around this basin that France's future admirals sail their miniature sailboats, and a gay place it is, too. It is around the terrace which surrounds this basin that you will find the statues of the queens and other famous women of France. There are eighteen statues around these terraces of which I will mention only the few with which you might be acquainted. There is, for instance, Clotilde, the wife of Clovis; there is the famous Marguerite of Anjou, who married Henry VI and so became Queen of England. Also, quite needless to say, there is Saint Genevieve, the Patron Saint of Paris. There is Anne of Austria, who was the mother of the Grand Monarque, and there is Blanche of Castille, who was the mother of the saintly Saint Louis. There is Matilda, who was the wife of William the Conqueror, and, of course, it wouldn't have been fair not to include Marie de Medici who built the gardens and the palace. There is also a statue of the spirited Mademoiselle de Montpensier, whom we already met when we were at the Church of Saint Severin, and there is another one of Mary Stuart, who also had been a queen of France before she became Queen of Scotland. Her life was, perhaps, the unhappiest of them all. For good measure there is also a statue to Petrarch's Laura, which is here called Laura de Noves, though it is very doubtful whether anybody ever knew who Petrarch's Laura was. Conspicuous by their absence, and that sort of surprised me, is Eleanor of Aquitaine, who also was Queen of both France and England. Also, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, who was the sister of Francis I and the author of the well-knomn Heptameron. But then, of course, these statues were never intended to represent a complete history of France, though they seem to do very well as they are. Not of this group, but placed here and there in the gardens to the right of the center gardens, are statues of Flaubert, Stendahl, George Sand, and a few others. Most of the statues in this park were placed there during the reign of Louis-Philippe, and the park itself has, no doubt, undergone numerous alterations since it was first laid out. However, there is one monument that was placed in the park when the park was built, and that is the grotto known as the Medici Fountain. Its most attractive feature is the more than life-sized group of the cyclops Polyphemus surprising the nymph Galatea in the arms of the shepherd Acis. However, this group, which is by Ottin, was not added until 1863. This fountain is to the right of the palace, as you leave the park. It stands at the end of a long basin, in a shadowy grove of plane trees, and both the grotto and the basin are hoary with age, as they might very well be. Against the back of the grotto there is When you are ready to leave these gardens, you can do so by either going out through the gate that will lead you to the Rue Soufflot and the Pantheon, on your right, or you can do so by going out the gate to the right of the palace, past the Medici Fountain. This will bring you out on the Rue Vaugirard. There are a few more statues there, including the statue of Henry Murger, the author of Scenes de la Vie de Boh~me, who here still keeps track of any Bohemians who might enter this park without his permission. As you may know, it was on this book that PIICCini's opera, La Boheme, was based.
sporting clubs, and exquisite mansions.
these gardens feature a fountain
of cannons, with face the tower.
