I have long wanted to jot down some thoughts about some of my favour­ite places in Paris. Mean­ing to even­tu­ally present these as an appro­pri­ately geor­e­fer­enced set with appro­pri­ate nav­ig­a­tion, for now I thought I would add them as simply blog entries. When I thought about where to start, it took me all of a second to ecide to begin with one of my abso­lutely favour­ite spots: The Lux­em­bourg Gardens.

There are a pleth­ora of won­der­ful gar­dens in Paris, but the Lux­em­bourg is a favour­ite for a vari­ety of great reasons:

  • Con­veni­ent
  • Adja­cent
  • Sus­tan­tial
  • Gor­geous
  • Clean
  • Safe

The gar­dens and the Pal­ais de Lux­em­bourg date the sev­en­teenth cen­tury and the con­struc­tion of the palace and sur­round­ings for Marie de Medici. The garden is sur­roun­ded by a wall and the garden/park itself is inter­sec­ted by ped­es­trian aven­ues or crushed stone. It is centred on a fountain/large grassy area (I can’t remem­ber which guise it is in right now). There are polite city forests and won­der­ful statu­ary sur­round­ing the main prom­en­ades.
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What I like most par­tic­u­larly about the gar­dens are the won­der­ful seats. They can be dragged to any place one desires and come in three fla­vours. There are the stand­ard upright, like a stand­ard chair type (really great in com­bin­a­tion with oth­ers for your feet), slightly reclined ones and the best: full reclined spa­cious metal lounges that are not unlike a Parisian ver­sion of an Adiron­dack deck chair. Get­ting to the garden early enough means you get your pick of both chair and spot and you can find a won­der­fully sheltered spot close to the wall around the cent­ral water, and spend the day read­ing, writ­ing and simply tak­ing in the ambi­ance of this very spe­cial envir­on­ment.
The cent­ral ‘plaza’ area always had this won­der­ful, huge wad­ing pool in which chil­dren ren­ted little sail­ing boats and pushed them about. Just a really nice ‘park’ kind of thing to do. How­ever, if I am to believe Google Maps (after the Kat­rina thing I am ever so slightly skep­tical), it looks as though this area has been filled in and is just a grassy area now. Maybe its a sea­sonal, annual thing…I sure hope that is the case.
The area around the Lux­em­bourg also makes it superbly situ­ated. In the Latin Quarter, near the Sor­bonne and the Pan­theon, it is also near the entrance to the Cata­combs (about them in a fur­ther entry). There are all sort of won­der­ful eat­ing oppor­tun­it­ies in the area, many of which re great takeaway food that you can return to the park with. I really like this little Japan­ese yakatori place, a three minute walk from my seat in the park.
On a more somber note, the wall to the north­east is the site where Mar­shall Michel Ney (the Bravest of the Brave) was executed in 1815 for his part in Napoleon’s return to power. This tragedy is not without its con­tro­versy, both due to the cir­cum­stances of Ney’s court mar­tial as well as the per­sist­ent rumours that he was able to escape to the United States fol­low­ing Napoleon’s second abdic­a­tion and lived out his days as a rural school mas­ter.
The Lux­em­bourg Gar­dens are eas­ily accessed, both by foot walk­ing south from the Seine hav­ing crossed the Pont Neuf, or via the Lux­em­bourg Metro sta­tion which depos­its you right at the north­east gate of the park.