Jardin des Plantes, Salpétrière
The Jardin des Plantes was founded under Louis XIII, as the JARDIN ROYAL DES HERBES MÉDICINALES. It was started by the King’s doctors, Hérouard and La Brosse, and became a school for pharmacists, with 2,500 different plants. From 1650 it was open to the Public.

It was in the Eighteenth Century that the garden expanded to its present extent, when the great naturalist BUFFON was in charge for fifty years. It became the JARDIN BOTANIQUE DE PARIS, and plants were imported from all over the world. One or two of the trees date from that time. After the Revolution the ZOO was opened, using what had been the King’s private collection of animals, and the place, no longer purely

botanical, was renamed the MUSÉUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE – still its official title. Parisians of course, take no notice of anything official and continue to call it the Jardin des Plantes. More animals arrived in 1795, looted from the royal zoo of Holland. The elephants were a sensation.

There are many buildings in the park, several of them Museums. At the entrance are the galleries of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, containing nothing but bones; downstairs a large selection of present-day animal skeletons, including Man, Woman and Child, and upstairs fossilised bones including a cast of the American Diplodocus and a fine collection of the larger dinosaurs.

Over to your right (if you’re walking down the main avenue) is the ZOO.

It’s an old-fashioned zoo, being very cramped for space, but has an excellent reptile house. The crocodiles, displayed behind curly 19th-century ironwork, are worth a visit; very large and very toothy. The big, modern zoo is, of course, at Vincennes, but that’s officially a branch of this one and specialises in large mammals and birds; the rest are here. Lovely snakes, horrible insects. A selection, too, of camels, deer and so on. France’s first giraffe was brought here in 1827, a present from the Pasha of Egypt. This was the same Pasha who gave Obelisks to the Kings of France and England. As the English lost Cleopatra’s needle at sea and broke it on land, it will come as no surprise to learn that the English giraffe died in transit.

At the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 the zoo had a bad time. Napoleon III, under the impression that his army was the best in the world, declared war on Prussia and discovered how wrong he was. Within weeks the Prussians were at the gates of Paris, which they besieged for six months. By the end of that time the population was a bit hungry. There were no sparrows left, and rats and mice were selling for a good price to anyone who could stand them So at Christmas 1870 the zoo went to the dinner table. Roast bear was popular, elephant considered tough, and snakes made excellent hors d’oeuvres.

Enough of this gastronomy. At the end of the garden furthest from where you came in is a lecture-hall and a nice children’s playground (see-saws especially recommended), and behind that a hill with a spiral path, optimistically called a labyrinth, winding up it. At the top is a tree – a Cedar of Lebanon brought to France by the naturalist Bernard de Jussieu. Legend hath it that the precious seedling travelled all the way in Jussieu’s hat. Actually, Bernard de Jussieu never went near Lebanon; he bought the plant in England (Kew, where else?) and the pot broke at the entrance to the garden. The tree spent about five minutes in the famous hat before being planted.

Ah well, it was a good legend while it lasted.

  

  

     

  

 

GROUPE HOSPITALIÈRE DE LA PITIÉ-SALPÉTRIÈRE

– one of those Parisian names that contains a potted history of the building. We are just across the river from the BASSIN DE L’ARSÉNAL, and indeed there used to be a considerable arsenal in this district. The ingredients for gunpowder need, for obvious reasons, to be stored separately, and it was the saltpetre store that Louis XIII had pulled down to make way for his PITIÉ – a workhouse basically, rather than a hospital. It was divided into four sections; for old girls, good girls, bad girls and mad girls. Only old girls were allowed to have their husbands with them; each of 250 couples had a tiny cubicle in one of three dormitories. The good girls – 1600 of them – did the work of the place and slept, five to a bed, in more dormitories. Not surprisingly, infectious diseases carried off quite a few of them every week. The bad girls lived on bread and water, slept on a thin straw mattress – each! – and were allowed one blanket. Bad bad girls were confined in a dungeon four feet high, wide and long. After a law of 1684 any husband displeased with his wife or father with his daughter, could send her of to join them. Them were the days. The mad girls lived in the basement by the river, which was nice and cool in the summer, but in winter the sewers flooded, the basement got a trifle damp, and the rats moved in.

Just before the Revolution there were 8,000 people in all living in this charmingly charitable institution. In 1792 the revolutionaries decided to let the bad girls out, but 45 of the good and mad were massacred in the process.

The CHAPEL, under a fine octagonal dome dating from the time of Louis XIV, has four separate naves, so that the old, the good, the bad and the mad could worship together without actually meeting.

The place became a Hospital under the First Empire, early in the 19th Century. Its most recent claim to fame came when Diana, Princess of Wales, died there.