Les Parcs de Paris

Favorite Parks in the City of Light

In “A Free Man in Paris,” Joni Mitchell sings of feeling “unfettered and alive.” That is how you feel when you allow yourself to be free in the country or in a city, especially one as beautiful as this one is. One reason is the city's parks—480 in all—scattered throughout the city’s arrondissements, which number 17 (consolidated in 2020 from the traditional number of 20). Whether formal or fashioned to seem wild, they offer a green embrace and breathing space, usually within a few blocks of wherever you might be.

Every time I visit Paris, I try to find a park that is new to me and special. So I’ll be adding to this list.

I.

Parc Montsouris

In Parc Montsouris, in the 14th Arrondissement, wild grasses grow tall and thick at the edge of the lake, a mallard motors so vigorously across the water that he seems to be walking on it, and a pigeon skims low along the surface and rests, with five others, on the length of something I cannot see: they seem to be roosting uncharacteristically single-file atop the lake itself.

The sun is scorching, but a cooling breeze plays across my skin. The sky is a soft cerulean. High white clouds sail above. Across the lake, circling its perimeter six ponies bear a procession of six six-year-olds. Behind me, a toddler chants as her older sister, dressed in a Disney Snow White costume, approaches her father. They speak in French, but I’m guessing their heritage is Algerian, part of the vast melange of Black, Arab, South Asian, native French, Anglais and Americans who populate the diverse neighborhoods nearby.

Outside, breaking the quiet cadence of voices and birdsong, a train rattles past. Above, a helicopter appears, its blades churning in a loud, rhythmic crescendo.

As train and helicopter pass, I move to the shade for a different perspective. At a table near La Bonbonniere, the resident cafe, a coven of elderly ladies in bucket hats converse in the low tones so characteristic of the French, as the six ponies and their riders clip-clop by on the paved carriage road. In English, a father and grandfather caution Ethan to watch out for the pony poop. “Poop” may be a universal language, but “merde” is not: I wonder if he stepped in it. No matter: a songbird lifts a single beautiful note on the breeze, consigning this incident to its proper inconsequential importance in this perfect day.

Parc Montsouris is, as it was meant to be, a country respite within the city: I feel as far removed from the formal monuments and mannered landscape of central Paris as I could possibly be.

In Parc Montsouris, as in other Paris parks, “STOP Aus Rats” signs encourage visitors not to litter, not to leave food, to bus-in-bus-out. I haven’t seen similar signs in Central Park, but it is not urban legend to say that the DNA differs between New York’s uptown and downtown rats, so who knows. Score one for science.

Hailing from New York, I can’t help but be curious about how this park compares to Central Park, Manhattan’s great place of respite. More than 20 of Parc Montsouris would fit inside its American cousin, which totals 843 acres. This Paris park is the same size as Central Park’s “forever wild” Ramble, its lake a tenth the size of Central Park’s. Nonetheless, opening within a year of each other (1875 and 1876), these two green spaces arose from the same impulse—to provide beleaguered city dwellers with a much needed escape into nature, their landscapes designed with lakes, hills, specimen trees, shrubs, and flowering plants, open fields for play and picnics, and hefty, rusticated concrete railings, fashioned to imitate tree branches edging their pathways and bridges. Central Park is New York’s one massive green space: Paris has many, its largest being the Bois de Vicenennes—at 2,459 acres, it is slightly smaller than New York’s Pelham Bay Park, 2,765 acres. But who’s counting.

Anyone who has a garden—even a small touchstone with nature—knows the delight it can bring.

II.

Parc Monceau

In a sophisticated quarter of the 8th Arrondissement, Parc Monceau is a thing to itself. A semi- public park created in 1785, it is not the city’s oldest public park—that distinction goes to the Jardin des Tuileries, created in 1564 for Catherine de Medici, redone by Andre Le Notre in 1664, and opened to the public in 1667. Nor, at about 20 acres, is it the city’s largest. But it is one of the most interesting.

One morning in July, I entered Parc Monceau through its ornate, towering, black-and-gilt gates, part of the wrought-iron fence that surrounds it, a reminder that it is only open to the public at certain times: at others, the park is private, accessible only to a select few who live nearby. Next to the gate, the park’s original royal rotunda stood sentinel, its private, upper-level apartment, designed for the Duke, now occupied by a 5th-generation watchman. (A tribute to the practicality of Paris, the restrooms are on its main level tucked behind the colonnade.)

Once inside the gate, a wide avenue opened before me. A few feet in, two women stood stock- still, caught in the wide-eyed wonder of the tourist. I ask if they were visitors and Americans— my intuition was right: they’re friends from Rhode Island and Atlanta visiting Paris for the first time. “We’re leaving today,” one said. “This is our last thing before we go to the airport.”

I have a feeling they’ll be back. I know I will.

Like other parks, this verdant, well-groomed urban oasis welcomes its fair share of joggers, readers, bench and lawn sitters, nannies with their charges and mothers with their kids, but it is something else too. Its creator, Philippe d’Orleans, Duke of Chartres, an avid Anglophile and friend of English king George IV, had the idea of making on his land an English garden that would contain an assemblage of follies. In the English landscape tradition, a folly was (and is) a picturesque, even exotic, structure set at some distance in the landscape, providing those who stroll its grounds with a destination for their walks.

 “It was not at all an English garden that was intended at Monceau, but... to put together into one garden all times and all places. It is simply a fantasy, to have an extraordinary garden, a pure amusement,” noted Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, a writer and painter, the park’s designer.

Though some have been lost to history, original follies remain: the Roman colonnade set by the diminutive water lily pond, its surface reflecting blue sky, white clouds, and the willow that overhangs it. There’s the graceful arched stone bridge, the Egyptian pyramid, the vestige of a Chinese pagoda, remnants of the temple of Mars, and freestanding Corinthian columns. The park’s “enchanted grotto” of massive weathered rock seems just that. Surrounding them all are towering specimen trees, clad in the full, rich greens of high summer. And, as a paean to the arts as well as architecture, neoclassical statues depicting writer Guy Maupassant, composers Frederic Chopin and Charles Gounod, and other creators are set within its lawns and along its paths. To top it all off, an old-fashioned merry-go-round is the pièce de résistance for children and the young at heart.

Carmontelle’s paintings of the structures, which you can find online, are wonderful, but he was not the only one to be captivated by the beauty of this place: Monet painted it several times in the 1870s, and others have captured it in painting and in photographs.

When I visited Parc Monceau, I saw a handful of tourists and many Parisians. Outside on the street, busy traffic flowed, and the sound drifted in, but the mood inside the park was quiet, peaceful, and restful. In keeping with the romance of the setting, a young couple exchanged kisses on one of the many dark green cyma-curved benches that rim the wide paths, while a fedora-hatted woman read a book on another. A few joggers flowed past, going slowly, breathing easily. Children played or strolled under the watchful eyes of their grandparents, mothers, or nannies from the Philippines or Senegal. A jacket-less businessman with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up talked earnestly on his cell phone as a young Asian boy circled endlessly on a pint-sized bicycle. A bearded man in a red T-shirt sat on the base of a statue, his posture imitating Rodin’s Thinker. And a girl dressed in a skirt of turquoise tulle, a flouncy blouse, and a mushroom-shaped red polka-dot hat hurried by until she found a place on the lawn to settle.

Not far from the entrance gate, the park’s old-fashioned carousel turned slowly, children poised on the fanciful creatures within, their imaginations supplying a text known only to themselves. Maybe one day as adults, they will remember this and the feeling it gave them. And maybe they will make something tangible from their fancies thanks to the seeds—the follies, the statues, the gardens—planted by others in Parc Monceau two centuries ago.

III.

Place des Vosges

Place des Vosges is a jewel-box of a place, magically unhurried, uncrowded, and quiet except for birdsong, the splash of its four fountains, and the muted cadence of human conversation. Few motorized vehicles intrude, and the sounds of the city are muffled by the brick buildings that surround it. A statue of King Louis XIII presides over broad paths rimming green lawns, their formal design allowing for children to romp, visitors to sprawl on the grass, senior citizens to relax on its benches. At its edges, over a hundred linden and horse chestnut trees add color from spring through autumn and flower, honey-scented, in May and June. But what sets Place des Vosges especially apart is the colonnade that surrounds it, providing a home for boutiques, art galleries, and cafes with a roof for outdoor tables.

 Located in Le Marais, in the 4th Arrondissement on the cusp of the 3rd, a few blocks in from Rue de Rivoli, and measuring just 140-by-140 meters in size, this is said to be the oldest planned square in Paris. King Henri IV first envisioned it in 1603: in 1604, he commissioned a royal pavilion to replace the circa 1388 Hotel de Tournelle palace, which Henry II’s widow and queen, Catherine de Medici, had demolished after moving the royal family to the Louvre.

As monarch, Henri IV inherited a flagging economy still feeling the impact of decades of Catholic-Protestant religious warfare. Credited with reuniting France and restoring its prosperity, his idea for this new urban square was an unorthodox one. With an eye to the exorbitant cost of imported Italian silks and to commercial competitors in Italy, he envisioned the Place Royale as a locus of the French silk trade. Around the square, the brick buildings were designed to house shops on the ground floor, manufacturing on the middle floors, and housing for workers on the upper floors, even as the colonnade protected wagons holding raw and finished silk goods from rain and snow.

Henri IV didn’t live to see the square’s completion: following his assassination in 1610, his son Louis XIII inaugurated Place Royale in 1612. Its only royal resident seems to have been Louis XIII’s future wife, Anna of Austria, before their marriage in 1615. The square’s name was changed to Place des Vosges in 1793 in honor of the Voges Department, the first to pay taxes to the new revolutionary government.

With its refined loveliness and royal associations, the square was so desirable that French aristocrats eventually supplanted the manufacturing class and claimed it as their own. One of its residents was writer Victor Hugo whose home was in one corner. Now a museum preserving that moment in time and the richly layered interiors of the late 19th century, it contains its own wonderful, uncrowded cafe, replete with courtyard and its own fountain.

From Victor Hugo’s apartment, you can look down on the square, imagining the writer there. What you see is not much different from what he would have seen. And if you are yourself a writer or keeping a journal of your travels, you would not be alone in claiming a spot below to commit your musings to paper.

© Gladys Montgomery 2023