French Places - the culture, history, monuments and art of Paris, the cities and regions of France - Luxembourg Garden
Jardin du Luxembourg
Jostling our way through the eddying river of students, glassed-in crèpe stands and smouldering bins of roasting chestnuts, we stepped as if by magic through the iron gratings into what seemed less like a “jardin publique”, or public park, than a bucolic tableau, full of vistas and perspectives, alleyways and secluded corners. As we advanced, the illusion of reality, in this quintessential jardin à la française, was further enhanced by the sound and feel of wind-blown leaves crunching underfoot. White statues of the Queens of France stood all around the huge central pond, gesticulating elegantly against their backdrop of chestnut trees.
Yves explained that the name of this work of art, “Jardin du Luxembourg”, was, once more, the result of custom, ignorance and stupidity. The land on which its centerpiece, the Palais du Luxembourg, was built in the early 17th century was bought from a nobleman called the Duc de Luxembourg, and for ever after the Parisians went on calling it by his name rather than that of the person who created it.
She was the Italian wife of King Henri IV, known to the French as “Marie de Medicis”. As a product of the cultivated Medici family, she detested living among the uncouth occupants of the Louvre Palace, where her insatiable husband humiliated her with his infidelities. To get away from it all, she set about creating a more dignified retreat that reminded her of her homeland, on the slope overlooking the other side of the Seine.
After dislodging the Duke for whom the domain is still so unfairly known, she had a palace built in the style, although not on the scale, of the Palazzo Pitti of her native Florence. But after the King’s assassination by a religious fanatic, the cursed Ravaillac, Marie was expelled from France for political intriguing. Yves felt that this was rather ungrateful, since the late Henri IV had only married her in the first place for the huge dowry, with which he paid off his many debts.
Cruelly, too, the only thing that bore her name in the park was a pond surrounded with statuary hidden away under the trees to the east of the palace. It was known as “La Fontaine Medicis”, even though it had to wait until the 19th century to become a fountain.
When the renovator Haussmann carved his rectilinear streets through the Latin Quarter, broad swathes of the park were sacrificed, along with an Italian-style “grotto”, a make-believe cavern decorated with allegorical figures. This sort of stone theatre set, originally intended to cut off the view of the neighbouring street, was re-assembled closer to the palace, and enhanced with a long, narrow pond surrounded with urns on pedestals.
Since then, Yves explained, the “fountain” had become a meeting place for friends and lovers, who rested on the metal chairs by the pond to escape from the turmoil of the city. With snow on the ground, there were few to be seen, but the next autumn my own lover and I would have lunch there with our cheese and paté sandwiches and bottle of wine. We loved to linger among the shadows, the mossy fauns and the Greek gods, with our feet propped up on the edge of the pond, and gaze into its dark green water flecked with the sunlight that filtered down through the leaves.
But the “garden” was so beautiful that it even looked good in winter, without leaves on the chestnut trees, without the mosaics of flowers in the artistically shaped beds, even without the shrieking children sailing boats on the great octagonal pond. To think, sighed my friend, that “the green jewel of Paris” was invented by an italienne who was driven out of France to live out her days as a penniless exile!
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