The Luxembourg Gardens

Why it matters

The Luxembourg Gardens are the great garden of the Left Bank, in the 6th arrondissement between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter. They cover about 56 acres of lawns, gravel, flowerbeds and tree-lined walks around the palace that gives them their name, and they are owned by the French Senate, which meets in the palace. Parisians call them le Luco, after the Latin name of the hill they stand on.

Where the Tuileries across the river are a formal promenade, the Luxembourg is a garden people live in: students reading on the metal chairs around the pool, children sailing boats, chess players, runners on the outer paths, and free concerts in the bandstand. For a visitor it is the easiest place in the city to sit down and watch Paris.

A queen's garden

In 1611 Marie de' Medici, the widow of Henry IV and regent for her young son Louis XIII, decided to build a palace in imitation of the Pitti Palace in her native Florence. She bought an existing mansion, the Hôtel du Luxembourg, commissioned the architect Salomon de Brosse, and in 1612 had two thousand elm trees planted. Her gardener Tommaso Francini laid out terraces and parterres on the palace's axis around a circular pool, in the manner she had known as a child.

The garden grew with each regime. Marie enlarged it in 1630; after the Revolution the Directory took land from a neighboring Carthusian monastery and extended it to about a hundred acres, and Haussmann's new Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue de Médicis cut into its northeast corner in the 1860s. In the nineteenth century it filled with statues: first the queens and famous women of France, then monuments to writers and artists, including a small model by Bartholdi of his Statue of Liberty.

The garden has seen war as well as leisure. In June 1944 the German occupiers turned the basin of the Medici Fountain into a summer swimming pool, and on the eve of the Liberation they dug trenches and machine-gun nests along its paths. On 25 August 1944 the French 2nd Armored Division forced the gates on the Rue Auguste-Comte and entered the garden.

What you see: the terraces and the pool

The heart of the garden is the parterre below the palace, a sunken lawn and gravel ground centered on the octagonal Grand Bassin, with a jet of water in the middle. Model sailboats and remote-controlled boats cross the water on most days, a tradition old enough that the model-boat pond in a well-known American park was loosely based on this one.

Raised terraces with balustrades wrap around the pool on three sides, and along them stand the statues of queens of France and famous women, each on her own pedestal under the trees, added in the nineteenth century. From the eastern terrace the view runs up the Rue Soufflot to the dome of the Panthéon.

What you see: the Medici Fountain

The Medici Fountain, east of the palace, is the loveliest corner of the garden. Francini designed it about 1630 as a grotto in the Italian manner. It fell into ruin in the eighteenth century, was restored in 1811 on Napoleon's orders by Jean-François Chalgrin, the architect of the Arc de Triomphe, and was moved to its present place in the 1860s, when the long pool shaded by plane trees was added.

In the grotto the giant Polyphemus crouches on the rocks above the lovers Acis and Galatea, about to crush them, carved by Auguste Ottin. Behind the fountain, on the street side, a smaller wall fountain of 1807 shows Leda and the swan.

What you see: the rest of the garden

The southwest corner is quieter and more rural: an orchard of apple and pear trees, trained into shapes, a teaching apiary, and the puppet theater, founded in 1933. Near them are a large playground and a carousel built to plans by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opéra, and opened in 1879; it inspired a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. In the northwest corner, near the Orangerie, twelve chess tables provided by the Senate are in use in every season.

The Orangerie on the palace's west side and the Musée du Luxembourg beside it, reopened as a museum by the Senate in 1979, show temporary exhibitions. The palace itself can be visited only on special occasions, since it is the working seat of the Senate.

How to visit

The garden costs nothing to enter; its opening times follow the daylight and are posted at each gate. A walk around the inside perimeter is about a mile and a quarter. It makes an easy half day with the Panthéon and the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, both a few minutes' walk away.

Take one of the green metal chairs, move it where you like, and sit; that is how the garden is meant to be used. For most of its history this was not free: chair attendants collected a fee for each seat, and the chairs became free for everyone only in 1974. In spring and fall the chestnut walks are at their best.

Myths worth setting aside

The garden is not a public park in the legal sense. It belongs to the Senate, which runs it and pays for its gardeners, though anyone may walk in.

And the palace is not named for the country of Luxembourg. It takes its name from the Hôtel du Luxembourg, the earlier mansion on the site that Marie de' Medici bought, which had belonged to François de Piney-Luxembourg, whose family was related only distantly to the ruling house of Luxembourg.