Jardin du Luxembourg

“ It looked out over the sweet green peace of the Luxembourg Gardens with their winding paths and their clumps of trees and shrubbery, their flaming flower-beds, their groups of weather-stained sculpture. A youth in labourer's corduroys and an unclean beret strolled along under the high palings, one arm was about the ample waist of a woman somewhat the youth's senior, but, as ever, love was blind. ”

“ The Luxembourg Gardens have always retained their hold over my imagination. I never visit Paris without spending several hours there, sometimes in the bright morning light, sometimes in the late afternoon, when the military band plays dolent tunes, usually by Massenet, sometimes a spectator at one of the guignols and, very often in the autumn, when the leaves are falling, I sit silently on a bench before the Medici fountain, entirely unconscious of the passing of time. The Luxembourg Gardens always envelop me in a sentimental mood. ”

“ The prodigality of littleness, the excess of ornament, the superficial gloss, the studied neatness, are carried to a pitch of the romantic. The Luxembourg gardens are more extensive, and command a finer view; but are not kept in the same order, are dilapidated and desultory. This is an enclosure of all sweet sights and smells, a concentration of elegance. The rest of the world is barbarous to this ‘paradise of dainty devices,’ where the imagination is spell-bound. It is a perfectly-finished miniature set in brilliants. It is a toilette for nature to dress itself ”

“ I like, on these sunny days, to look into the Luxembourg Garden: nowhere else is the eye more delighted with life and color. In the afternoon, especially, it is a baby-show worth going far to see. The avenues are full of children, whose animated play, light laughter, and happy chatter, and pretty, picturesque dress, make a sort of fairy grove of the garden ”

“ I had no mind for the studio, after all, and went instead to the Luxembourg gardens, there, among the sparrows and the statues and the falling leaves, to cool and clear my head. It is a garden I have always loved. You sit there in a public place of history and fiction. Barras and Fouché have looked from these windows. Lousteau and de Banville (one as real as the other) have rhymed upon these benches. The city tramples by without the railings to a lively measure; and within and about you, trees rustle, children and sparrows utter their small cries, and the statues look on forever. ”

“ There is, perhaps, in all Paris no more exquisite corner than the Garden of the Luxembourg. At every season it is beautiful. The winter sunlight seems to linger on its stately Italian terraces after it has ceased to shine elsewhere. The first lilacs bloom here in the spring, and when midsummer has turned all the rest of Paris into a blazing, white wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the heart of turbulent “Bohemia,” a bit of fragrant nature filled with the song of birds and the voices of children. ”

“ No: but what is there above the sun? God.
On June 6, 1832, at about eleven in the forenoon, the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was delicious. The quincunxes and flower-beds sent balm and dazzlement into the light, and the branches, wild in the brilliancy of midday, seemed trying to embrace one another. There was in the sycamores a twittering of linnets, the sparrows were triumphal, and the woodpeckers crept along the chestnut, gently tapping holes in the bark. The beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies, for the most august of perfumes is that which issues from whiteness. ”

“ The garden had a door in it leading out on the Luxembourg and the Chamber of Peers, the key of which Cambacérès lent Harel on the strength of his having once been his secretary. The result was that we had a royal park for the discussion of our dessert. Gardens of classical architecture, like Versailles, the Tuileries and the Luxembourg are very fine seen by night and by the light of the moon. Each statue looks like a phantom; each fountain of water a cascade of diamonds. ”

“ They consist chiefly of military men and young fashionables, who go to admire the pretty women, and elderly and middle-aged ones, who meet in knots and talk politics with all the animation peculiar to their nation. Children do not abound in the walks here, as in the Luxembourg; and those to be seen are evidently brought by some fond mother, proud of exhibiting her boys and girls in their smart dresses.
The Tuileries Gardens, so beautiful in summer, are not without their attractions in winter. ”

“ A baby can't do better than to spend its spring days in the Luxembourg Garden.
There are several ways of seeing Paris besides roaming up and down before the blazing shop-windows, and lounging by daylight or gaslight along the crowded and gay boulevards; and one of the best is to go to the Bois de Boulogne on a fete-day, or when the races are in progress. This famous wood is very disappointing at first to one who has seen the English parks, or who remembers the noble trees and glades and avenues of that at Munich. ”

“ The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest, with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting feminine bonnets ”

“ The gardens of the Luxembourg form another of those favourite Paris playgrounds for nursemaids and their charges. It is claimed that the [Pg 157] children are all little Legitimists in the Luxembourg gardens, whereas they are all Red Republicans at the Tuileries. One has no means of knowing this with certainty, but it is assumed; at any rate the Legitimists are a very numerous class in the neighbourhood. Another class of childhood to be seen here is that composed of the offsprings of artists and professors of the Latin quarter, and of the active tradesmen of the neighbourhood. ”

“ If a young Englishman in London, instead of an old Frenchman in Paris, was to addict himself to such untimely recreations, he would probably be cut off with a shilling.
When the heat and smoke of the café become too much even for French students, they drop off by twos and threes, and seek the fresh air. The Luxembourg Gardens are close by, and here they principally congregate. Amusing figures they look, too, in their present style of costume, which is a burlesque upon that of the Champs Elysées, which is a burlesque upon that of Hyde Park. ”

“ Of the museums, see the Luxembourg first, because, while the gardens are beautiful, they are not so well kept nor to be compared with those of the Louvre or Versailles. The works of art are placed in the Luxembourg gallery during the lifetime of an artist, if his works merit that honor; if his fame lives for ten years after his death, they are transferred to the Louvre. Hence it is in the Luxembourg one will find the best works of living artists. ”

“ There are men too who have trifles to sell, and they talk loudly of the glories of modern art, and the necessity of a British Luxembourg.
That France should have a Luxembourg is natural enough; that we should have one would be anomalous. We are a free-trading country. I pass over the failure of the Luxembourg to recognise genius, to save the artist of genius a struggle with insolent ignorance. What did the Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro? ”

“ The attic in which I found it my fate to dwell was very high in the air, set in one of the peaked roofs of the quarter of the Luxembourg, in a very narrow street, populous, and full of noise, in which people of all classes, except the rich, were to be found—in a medley of artists, students, fruit-sellers, workers in bronze and ivory, seamstresses, obscure actresses, and all the creators, male and female, of the thousand and one airy arts of elegant nothingness which a world of pleasure demands as imperatively as a world of labor demands its bread. ”

“ Passing from thence up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the émeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the picture-gallery of modern French artists, whom government thinks worthy of patronage. ”

“ Afterwards I pass by the Seminary of the Jesuits, a kind of terrible Vatican, from which emanate floods of psychic force, whose effect may be felt from far, if one may believe the Theosophists. I have now reached my goal, the Garden of the Luxembourg. From the time of my first visit to Paris in 1876, this park has exercised a mysterious influence over me, and it was my day-dream to be able to live near it. This idea was realised in 1893, and from that time on, although with interruptions, this garden has become part of my recollections, and so to speak, of my personality. ”

“ Hastings was not far away. The Luxembourg is within five minutes' walk of the rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there he sat under the shadow of a winged god, and there he had sat for an hour, poking holes in the dust and watching the steps which lead from the northern terrace to the fountain. The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty hills of Meudon. Long streamers of clouds touched with rose swept low on the western sky, and the dome of the distant Invalides burned like an opal through the haze. ”

“ When you visit the Luxembourg you will see multitudes every where of bouncing demoiselles, with nymph-looking faces, caps without bonnets, and baskets in their hands, traversing the garden from all quarters, running briskly to their work in the morning, and strolling slowly homewards towards evening—These are the grisettes. They are very pretty, and have the laudable little custom of falling deeply in love with one. They are common enough all over Paris, but in this classical region they are as the leaves in Vallambrosa. ”

“ It is a curious sight to a man fresh from Oxford or Cambridge to observe these poor students sunning themselves, at mid-day, in the gardens of the Luxembourg—with their sallow, bearded faces, bright eyes, and long hooded cloaks, which, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, "circumstances" have not yet enabled them to discard. Without stopping to inquire whether there really be any thing "new under the sun," it may be certainly assumed that the garments in question could not be included in the category. ”

“ They are beautiful gardens. The Renaissance fountain is the work of Jacques de Brosse. The statues we see on every side among the lawns and the flower-beds, in the shady alleys, most of them the work of noted sculptors, show us famous men and women of every period of French history from Ste-Bathilde and Ste-Geneviève to our own day.
The Petit Luxembourg is also due to Marie de’ Medici, built a few years after the completion of the larger palace. From the day of its inauguration by Richelieu it knew many inhabitants of note: Barras, Buonaparte and Joséphine, etc., sojourned there. ”

“ But the extent and magnificence of the public buildings, palaces, gardens, parks, boulevards, etc., are enough to atone for the dirty streets. The general view of the city, from one of the centre bridges, (the atmosphere being wonderfully clear and transparent,) is grand and imposing in the extreme. The luxurious and superb architecture of the Louvre, Tuilleries, Luxembourg, and Palais Royal, and the immense extent, as well as the great beauty and elegance, of the gardens and parks, connected with these places, must astonish even the most sanguine. ”

“ These are in too great a hurry between their amusements and frivolities, [43] their dress, their precarious triumphs, their fugitive passions and idle loves, the consuming cares of social ostentation and rivalry, to understand Paris, to seize the thousand-and-one delights of its streets and squares and river-bends, to realise how much enjoyment may be got out of an hour in the Luxembourg or Tuileries Gardens, of a penny run down the river to Auteuil, and from Auteuil to Suresnes. ”

“ The latter, moodily aware of this, said nothing, but leading the way into the Luxembourg Gardens installed himself upon a bench by the northern terrace and surveyed the landscape with disfavour. Elliott, according to the Luxembourg regulations, tied the two dogs and then, with an interrogative glance toward his friend, resumed the "Gil Blas" and the discreet smiles.
The day was perfect. The sun hung over Notre Dame, setting the city in a glitter. ”

“ South of these is the Luxembourg Palace, whose charming Renaissance gardens, unhappily, owing to the erection of the Observatory in 1672, reduced by more than one-third of their former extent, are the delight of the Parisians of the south bank of the Seine. The old Orangery, restored and enlarged, is used as a public museum of contemporary French art, chiefly painting and sculpture. Here are exhibited the works of modern artists which have been deemed worthy of acquisition by the State. ”

“ The two pictures, it seemed to me, teach a useful lesson. It is that men are to be saved through love, and not through fear. Let men see God's beauty and loveliness, and you will more surely win them from error than by showing them the horrors of hell.
The origin of the Luxembourg palace was as follows: about the middle of the sixteenth century, one Robert de Harley erected a large house in the middle of the gardens. In 1583 the house was bought and enlarged by the duke of Luxembourg, and in 1612 Marie de Medicis bought it for ninety thousand francs, and then commenced the present palace. ”