Not to diminish in any way Jardin des Plantes, the grand park just a few yards right down our own street, but the two most famous parks in central Paris are Luxembourg Garden, where Hemingway took his oldest son to play a century ago, and the Tuileries, where French kings played until two centuries ago. On a beautiful early autumn Saturday, we walked them both. Plus the length of the Louvre.
Altogether, Lynn figured out it was about 5 kilometers, although I think it was closer to five miles, considering we walked the entire length of the Louvre and the Tuileries.
Luxembourg Garden was built starting in 1612 by Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV, to remind her of the green spaces she had grown up with in Florence. The original palace, now Petit Luxembourg and a small museum, was temporary quarters until she could finish the larger Luxembourg palace, which now serves as the French Senate.
Nothing had much changed since we were last there. It’s a wondrous place. The grounds and flowers are still beautiful, despite the advanced season; the children love to sail their petites bateaus, moving them with a long bamboo stick when they are not wailing in the water at the fish and the ducks; adults sit along the Grand Bassin catching the last sunshine before the cold, gray, wet Parisian winter comes in not too far ahead.
Somewhere, the ghost of Hemingway is catching a pigeon with Bumby to take home and eat. Or at least that was his story.
Our plan was to walk down from Luxembourg to the Batobus stop at St. Germain des Pres, then boat around to the Louvre. Well, that was the plan, anyway. By the time we reached the Seine, we had gone almost to the Louvre, so we simply walked down rue Dauphine past the two hotels where we once stayed, crossed the Pont Neuf and over to the back door of the Louvre.
We turned down rue de Rivoli, the shopping street that parallels the Louvre, in search of a new retail center that Phannette had described. We never found that, and we never really found much of anything new. The souvenir shops still offer scarves for 4 euros (three for 10), berets (7 euros), aprons, umbrellas, postcards, Eiffel Tower statuettes, t-shirts, sweatshirts, trays and other assorted items that bear the name and images of Paris. But this year there were no customers. The arcaded street was virtually empty.
Once we passed the Louvre, we gave up on rue de Rivoli and walked across the street to the dappled sunlight of the Tuileries, the spectacular elongated garden that was home to French kings until it was burned in the riots of 1870. (Imagine that–it survived the French Revolution but not the Commune!) Like Luxembourg, the Tuileries was built by a Medici, this one Catherine de Medici in 1564. She commissioned a Florentine landscape architect to create an Italian Renaissance garden. Funny how those Florentine queens longed for their home in Italy and did what they could to recreate it in France.
Like Luxembourg, the Tuileries hosts a large grand bassin, where parents rent little sailboats for the kids, and dozens of statues stand guard all along the shaded walks. Unlike Luxembourg, the Tuileries offers four separate concession stands, really outdoor restaurants, and we chose one of them that offered table service. As in the past, we ordered the charcuterie plate, which was plenty enough for the both of us, washed down with cold, tasty, 1664 beer.
Properly fed and watered, we walked down to the end of the park and the Place de la Concorde, perhaps one of the most stunning intersections in the world. But now we wanted our Batobus, and Lynn spied both the boat and the stop from the bridge. We hustled to make sure we made the boat on time. Once I saw that the line of passengers was fairly long, I knew we would make it, as we only had to show our pass sanitaire to board.
Donning our obligatory masks, we took our seats on what we hoped would be the shady side of the boat. But in mid-afternoon, there is no shady side of the boat. Our masks were suffocating in the sun, warmed further by the plexiglass canopy above us. We watched wistfully at the other excursion boats steaming up and down the Seine full with unmasked and comfortable passengers, many of who were packed like sardines on the upper open-air decks waving at us with their bare faces in the sun.
This boat trip was much more crowded, since it was Saturday and families were out with their small children to give them a view of Paris and a chance to torture adults by banging the folding chairs in the center to their delight and our audible misery. Jardin de Plantes stop could not come soon enough.
Desembarking our Batobus, we did not waste time wandering through a third park this day but made straight for our apartment and well deserved naps. Dinner would be pizza and more delicious French wine. We may spend as much as 5 euros on the next bottle.