At the far end of the pond, incidentally, you will often nowadays see little boys fishing. Not for fish, however. There are magnets on the end of their strings, since tourists find it difficult to resist throwing coins in fountains, and many French coins are made of stainless steel. The lads make a good living.

Such enterprise would have rejoiced the heart of the nineteenth-century eccentric Henry Murger, the author of ‘Scènes de la Vie de Bohème’ (source of the Puccini opera) and the hero of the students and other bohemians of the district, and whose statue stands on a corner of the lawn by the fountain. When it was announced that Murger was to have a memorial, the students were overjoyed; when it was further announced that tickets for the unveiling and the ceremonial banquet would cost six gold francs each, they rebelled and held their own unveiling three hours earlier, and went off to their own banquet, costing 95 centimes and consisting of black pudding and chips. The monument had to be hurriedly re-veiled in time for the arrival of the President and the bigwigs. You are looking, in fact, as the President pointed out in his speech, at the only monument in Paris – perhaps in the world – to have been inaugurated twice in the same day.

Just a little more....

In the fifteenth century there was a pleasant town house in the Rue de Vaugirard (longest street in Paris), owned by a nobleman called the Comte de Luxembourg because when he wasn’t in Paris he was ruling the county of Luxembourg. The house, therefore, was called the Hôtel de Luxembourg, because the word Hôtel simply means a big house in a town.

Then, in the sixteenth century, King Henri IV ran out of money. All the money in France had been spent on the Wars of Religion, which Henri IV, as leader of the Protestants, had brought to a sudden end by turning Catholic. Now he did what French Kings always did when strapped for cash; he married a rich foreigner. The richest people in the world after a long war are always the bankers, and the richest bankers were the Medici of Florence. Henri therefore took to wife Maria de’Medici, who thus became Marie de Médicis, Queen of France.

After Henri died, Marie was still rich in her own right, and acting as Regent for her son Louis XIII, who was still a ninfant. She decided to build a Palace where she could live in her retirement – rather as old people nowadays buy a bungalow at the seaside. She bought the Hôtel de Luxembourg and a large amount of land to the South, to form a garden. That was in 1612. In 1615 an architect called Salomon de Brosse began work on a palace next to the old house, with a chapel and a convent at the other side. In 1621 Rubens was called in to help with the interior decorations, painting a series of 24 monstrous pictures on the subject of Her Majesty’s life; her arrival in France, her Regency, her quarrel with her son, her exile, their reconciliation, etc. They’re in the Louvre now, and monumentally horrendous, though it’s quite fun trying to sort the bits Rubens actually painted himself from the vast areas he left to his apprentices. By 1630 the palace was habitable, and in 1631 Marie had another row with Louis XIII, who resented his mother’s interference and exiled her to Cologne, where she died in poverty eleven years later.

The Palace and gardens remained in Royal hands until the Revolution, being used mainly by minor royalty or the girl-friends of major royalty. Some of them opened the gardens to the public, though under Louis XIV the Duchesse de Berry closed them, not wishing the public to observe the goings-on to which she was partial.

At the Revolution palaces were not much in demand, but there was a shortage of prisons, so this palace became a prison. Among those incarcerated here were General de Beauharnais and his wife Joséphine, whose subsequent widowhood was to be consoled by the acquisition of a somewhat more illustrious second husband. Since then the palace, suitably altered, has been the Upper House of the French Parliament, whenever the Constitution has demanded such a body. The original house, now called the Petit Luxembourg, is the official residence of the President of this body, the Senate.

The GARDENS – much smaller than they used to be – are formal in the Italian manner, though there are corners called English and French gardens, and a rather superior supervised playground for tiny tots. There’s also a GUIGNOL – a puppet theatre – and tennis courts and that sort of thing. You can ride a donkey round the pond, or hire a toy boat to sail on it. 

This crowded park has nearly as many stone people in it as real ones. Since the reign of Louis-Philippe, statues have been springing up in the Luxembourg at a tremendous rate. On the terrace overlooking the pond, you’ll find two series of ladies; one of Famous Women, the other of Queens of France – including Mary Stuart, who was Queen of France long before she became Queen of Scots.

The wide open spaces of these gardens were useful at the end of the eighteenth century to some of the first men ever to fly. The great pioneers, the Montgolfier brothers, gave demonstrations of their hot-air balloons in the Jardin des Tuileries and the Champ de Mars, but their followers came to the Luxembourg (where, malicious rumour had it, the proximity of the Senate guaranteed a constant supply of hot air). Some had more luck than others, a certain Abbé Miollan less than any. He arranged to demonstrate that a balloon could be steered like a ship, and constructed a hot-air job 32 metres high for the purpose. He booked the Luxembourg for Sunday July 12th 1785, and sold tickets at high prices. The flight was due at midday, people began to arrive at dawn, and when at five in the afternoon the thing still wasn’t fully inflated, the crowd began to get impatient. First they shouted, then they started to throw things, then they charged. At this point, with a sense of timing that can only be admired, the balloon caught fire. Miollan escaped in the confusion.

The next year, 1786, a man called Testu-Brissy tried out a hydrogen balloon in the same place. He remained airborne eleven hours, floated off into the countryside, landed safely and was beaten up by angry farmers for frightening their cows. A year again, undaunted, he did it all again on horseback. Yes, mounted on a horse, in a basket, under a balloon.

At the southern end of the garden is the AVENUE DE L’OBSERVATOIRE. This dates from the time when Longitude could be measured, not merely from Greenwich, but from Paris. This avenue, from Saint-Sulpice to the Paris Observatory, runs along the Paris Meridian. A standard METRE was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, via this avenue. 

Original statue in Musée d'Orsay