A homesick Florentine queen planted Paris's Luxembourg Garden with 2,000 elms
In 1612 Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV, set out to recreate the gardens of her Florentine childhood beside a new palace in Paris. Four centuries on, her park belongs to the French Senate, children still sail model boats on its octagonal pond, and a small early model of the Statue of Liberty stands among its trees.
Marie, then regent for the young Louis XIII, bought the Hôtel du Luxembourg in 1611 and had Salomon de Brosse build a palace modelled on Florence's Pitti Palace. She planted 2,000 elms and hired the Florentine Tommaso Francini to lay out terraces and parterres. In 1630 she extended the grounds and brought in Jacques Boyceau, an early theorist of the formal French garden, who added squares along an east-west alley, flowered parterres and a central octagonal basin aimed at the site of today's Paris Observatory.
Later kings let it slide, and in 1780 the future Louis XVIII sold off the eastern section for housing. After the Revolution, the Directory seized neighbouring Carthusian land and enlarged the park, and Jean-François Chalgrin, architect of the Arc de Triomphe, restored it and drew a long vista from palace to observatory. Napoleon III's rebuilding of Paris cost the park about seven hectares in 1865, while Gabriel Davioud added gates, brick garden houses, an English-style garden and a diagonal alley framing the Panthéon.
Today the garden covers 23 hectares in the 6th arrondissement, and Parisians nickname it le Luco, after the Latin name of its hill. Just over a hundred statues, monuments and fountains dot the grounds, including twenty queens and notable women commissioned by Louis Philippe in 1848 and Bartholdi's first model of Liberty Enlightening the World from 1870. The grotto-style Medici Fountain, dated to 1620 in one account and 1630 in another, was rescued from ruin on Napoleon Bonaparte's orders in 1811 and moved in the 1860s. The Musée du Luxembourg, which opened to the public in 1694, is described as France's first public museum.
Writers kept returning. Victor Hugo has Marius and Cosette meet here in Les Misérables, Henry James gives Lambert Strether his moment of self-recognition here in The Ambassadors, and Faulkner ends Sanctuary in the garden. Patrick Modiano learned of his 2014 Nobel Prize while walking just beside it.
Source: Jardin du Luxembourg
