Jardin des Tuileries

DAY 2 of a week in Paris - Monday

Le Louvre et Champs-Elysées

• BREAKFAST: la patisserie below the apartment
• Le Louvre
• LUNCH: Angelina tea salon. 226 Rue de Rivoli (between Rues d'Alger and de Castiglione)
• Tuilleries - TODAY'S POST
• Madeleine Church & Place de la Concorde
• Place Vendome
• Arc de Triomphe - view Paris (daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.)
• Champs-Elysées
• DINNER: La Boutique à Sandwiches. 12 Rue du Colisée (between Rue de Ponethieu and Ave des Champs-Elysées)
• Buddha Bar (8 rue Boissy d'Anglais, near Place de la Concorde)

In most of my trips to Paris, I have sought to stay near the center of the city so that every day's jaunts end up back here, at the Tuileries gardens. It's beautiful in the morning, as the sun rises behind the Louvre, and it's more beautiful in the evening as the sun sets behind the Arc de Triomphe and the obelisk at Place de la Concorde (the direction of the top photo).

At the end of a long day of walking, I feel like the fellow in the statue above - utterly spent and ready for sitting in one of the green metal reclining chairs by a fountain.



There is great people watching, especially the kids who rent toy sailboats and push them around the pool with their sticks.



Of course the flowers are fabulous, as are all the flowers in Paris. I've noticed year after year that the garden designers around the city do unique things each year. One year I was surprised and pleased to see thistle in the Luxembourg gardens. Wonderful!

But each visit there have been irises.



You can buy an ice cream.



You can sleep in the shade.


You can bring your lunch and eat with a friend.






Above is me, and below is my sister Nancy, in 1997, the year our mother passed away with Alzheimer's. We treated ourselves to two full weeks in Paris - my first visit since I studied abroad in college in 1975.




I can't say that after resting in the Tuileries we necessarily felt like doing Pilates, but it was nice to watch this lady doing hers with the Louvre in the background.



I leave you with this final sketch by Fabrice Moireau, from his book Paris Sketchbook.

Color

I long for color. So I'm posting this of the toy sailboats at the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens from May.

Liberty Enlightening the World (La liberté éclairant le monde)

Tensions between France and the U.S. have not always existed. For one, there's the help with the American War of Independence.

For another, there is the Statue of Liberty. I have seen two Statues of Liberty in Paris. The top image is the one in the Luxembourg Gardens. The other is a figurehead on a boat in the Seine. Perhaps there are many more?

I did not see the most famous one in Paris, which is mounted next to the Pont de Grenelle, a bridge crossing the Seine, 1.5 km south of the Eiffel Tower.

The Statue of Liberty Revisited edited by Wilton S. Dillon, 1994, page 155 (as quoted here):

"On July 4, 1889 the American community in Paris offered the French people a gift of a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty; it still stands now, on an island in the Seine River, downstream from the Eiffel Tower. In a symbolic sense, this recently restored American gift closes the circle of gift giving that was launched by the French in the 1860's with the gift of Miss Liberty. In a deeper sense, though, the American replica in Paris serves to extend and strenthen the chain of reciprocity between the two peoples that has existed since before the founding of the American Republic and that promises to continue well into the future.

This magnificent exchange of gifts illustrates a declaration delivered by French ambassador Jule J. Jusserand on the occasion of the 1916 ceremony at which Liberty's torch was first lighted with electricity: 'Not to a man, not to a nation, the statue was raised. It was raised to an idea - an idea greater than France or the United States: the idea of Liberty.'"

Tuileries Gardens

Please click on images for larger views.

view toward rue de Rivoli

The Tuileries Gardens are where you go to rest your feet after a long, tiring day. That is not to say the gardens are not a prime destination in and of themselves. But the location is so central, it's impossible not to want to sit and rest there after walking Paris. They begin where the Louvre leaves off, and stretch all the way to Place de la Concorde.

Looking toward the Louvre and the Arc du Carrousel. You can rent a sailboat and push it with a stick around the fountain.

Many mythological figures overlook the Tuileries

There is always ice cream.

And lunch breaks.

And naps.

Hemingway in Paris

Hemingway's passport photo

The Moveable Feast was written by Ernest Hemingway soon before he died in 1961 about his expatriate years in Paris in the 1920s.

Hemingway's apartment at 74 rue de cardinal Lemoine

It is an interesting account of life in Paris with wife Hadley and his relationships with other expatriates referred to as "The Lost Generation" by Gertrude Stein, including Ford Madox Ford, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda.

I spent some time in May retracing Hemingway's steps between his apartment at rue de cardinal Lemoine and Gertrude Stein's apartment on the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens, 27 rue de Fleurus.

Gertrude Stein's apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus

Ernest and Hadley spent quite a bit of time with the daunting Stein in her apartment filled with original artwork by their contemporary Picasso and others. Stein told Hemingway to invest in art, though he had barely enough money to keep his wife and himself fed.

Here is an excerpt from A Moveable Feast:

"Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness."

Place Contrescarpe in May


Players of a game similar to bocci ball called petanque in the Luxembourg Gardens, which lay between Stein's and Hemingway's apartments

Louis XIV, the Louvre and Bernini

Click on photos to see enlarged view.

Sculpture of King Louis XIV by Bernini, outside the Louvre

If you study the history of the Louvre (now the world’s largest museum at half a million square feet, but previously French monarchs' royal residence) you will get a pretty good summary of the history of France and Paris.

I, for one, am overwhelmed by all the kings named Louis and queens with “de Medici” at the end of their prenom. It will take time to study it all, but I want to start here with this beautiful sculpture outside the Louvre of Louis XIV by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Some random bits of information:

- The Louvre was first a moated castle with towers on a site called “the Louvre” (origin unknown, though there are theories) commissioned by King Philip Augustus (also known as Philip II, 1165-1223).

- Centuries later Louis XIV (1638-1715), the “Sun King” or “grand monarch,” ruled France 72 years! This is the longest reign of any French or other European monarch in history. It was under this Louis’ long reign that France’s presence was extended to the Americas, Africa and India.

- The sculptor and architect, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) came to Paris from Italy for a few months to design a new east wing of the Louvre for Louis XIV, but the task ended up being completed by architect Claude Perrault. Bernini’s most famous work, perhaps, is in St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.

I’m sorry that’s all I have time for at the moment. It’s not much, but now I know a little more about the Louvre, one Louis, a sculptor named Bernini and his connection with Paris and the Louvre.

New tidbit found today (5-24-06) at http://artchive.com/artchive/B/bernini.html about the statue pictured here:
"the ostensible reason for [Bernini's] visit, was discarded and his great equestrian statue of the king [at top], eventually delivered at the end of Bernini's life, was dishonoured. Louis did not like it, got one of his hack sculptors to turn it into Marcus Curtius Hurling Himself into the Flames, and relegated it to the garden. There it slowly deteriorated until, in 1980, vandals damaged it so badly that it took eight years to restore. Three copies were made, one for the garden, one for the Louvre, and one for Jackson, Mississippi. The original is so weak it is stored away. Happily, Bernini knew nothing of these insults, dying in an odour of sanctity, having just sketched a projected Christ, which he did not live to sculpt. His chisel had not been idle for seventy five years."

Pavillion of the Louvre, at the end of the Denon wing

Etudes: French blue

Nautical blue I

Nautical blue II

Wish I had some of those

Irises in the Tuileries seem to watch tourists

Where to put it?

Blue, with hot sauce

Luxembourg Gardens: Women in and out of their element

Today I met Catherine from Toronto (after seeing but not meeting her yesterday at a restaurant on the Champs Elysees), both of us feeling a bit lonely traveling unaccompanied in Paris for a week, strange women in a strange place (so why does it feel so much like home?).


Luxembourg Gardens

When I met Catherine I was walking toward the Luxembourg Gardens, getting away from diesel fumes on the busy quais along the Seine. I needed quiet, fresh air, and sprawling gardens with birds, men playing bocci ball petanque and kids toddling around, where a palace was built for a non-French-French queen who herself was out of her element.


Luxembourg Palace

Marie de’ Medici, married to French King Henry IV, was from Florence and did not feel at home in France. After her husband was assassinated (1610), she wanted to leave her residence at the Louvre and asked architect Salomon de Brosse to design and build this Florentine-style palace (like her childhood home), now home to the French Senate.


Henry IV's boot and spur on statue of him at Pont Neuf

She was an Italian woman adjusting to Parisian life, but apparently she influenced French culture, from fashion to food. Some say she is the mother of French cuisine!

One of the few surviving remnants of her commissions is the Fontaine de Médicis, in the photo below.

Currently in the still water of the Medici fountain, dusted with seeds floating down from the surrounding plane trees, there is a woman definitely out of her element. (No, I did not photoshop her in. I searched the Web for information about this sculpture, without luck; ParisDailyPhoto informed me that this sculpture was created by Lotta Hannerz of Sweden.) What would you name her? Do you love her or hate her? (Apparently Marie de’ Medici had lots of reasons to be hated.)


Sculpture in Medici fountain at Luxembourg Gardens

I think I love her. She is a woman learning to breathe in an element not her own. I have no problem breathing in Paris (until I get too many diesel fumes), but Marie did, many women must, and whoever this woman is, it seems that all she does is breathe.


Update: Thanks to ParisDailyPhoto, the artist's name is Lotta Hannerz, from Sweden.