Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

down the gravel lanes then drape themselves over the low-slung variety, usually in the vicinity of the orangerie , a heat sink dotted with orange trees and outsized potted palms. Chess players favor a combination of one upright, armless chair (for their boards) faced by armchairs. They set up in the grove of paulownia trees and in spring play under a rain of mauve blossoms. Amorous couples prefer secluded lanes, leaning two armless chairs side by side. The empty chairs, left as arranged by their last occupants, tell of trysts, duels, and roundtable talks.
    From my comfortable old armchair by the octagonal pool, I watched as children played with weathered wooden sailboats, prodding them with long wooden sticks. A sinister-looking man of middle age with a radio-controlled submarine chortled as his U-boat prowled just below the surface.
    The wizened woman who rents the sailboats displays dozens of the battered little craft on the cart she wheels out rain or shine. She is known to be fierce, defending her boats from the abuse of rambunctious children. Every once in a while, a submarine or powerboat rams a sailboat and she flies into a rage.
    Children often misuse the wooden sticks she supplies and take a poke at the pool’s enormous old carp. Witness the fish-hunting grandson I’d seen earlier at the Fontaine de Médicis: the boat woman has summoned a park guard and ordered him to subdue the child and confiscate his stick.
    As the grandmother and her chastened grandson slunk off, I remarked to a neighbor in an upright chair that the gardien was perhaps too strict.
    “Monsieur,” my neighbor remonstrated, “the rules must be enforced.” A chorus of Gallic voices agreed. “Rules, rules, rules,” echoed the stiff chairs.
    With that mild reproach coloring my cheek, I stole away to the park café, installed myself under the leafy horse-chestnut trees at a wobbly metal table, and soothed my pride with a sandwich and a beer. The beer was cool and refreshing, the sandwich tough as rubber and the prices extortionate. Still, a brass band was playing under the music stand’s canopy, the sun slanted through the budding grove, and I couldn’t help enjoying myself.
    I hadn’t been there five minutes when a battalion of gardiens appeared for their break. Paunchy and of indeterminate age, the men ordered rough red wine and soon it was flowing like the Médicis fountain. The gardiens wear dark blue uniforms with brass buttons and matching képis. In winter, they wrap themselves in dark blue overcoats or heavy black capes and look like avenging angels. They carry walkie-talkies and whistles and are not shy about using either. Peep-pee-EEP—get off the lawn! Peep-peep-pee-EEP—don’t pick the flowers! Put away that camera—no photos allowed with a tripod!
    Some afternoons, the birds can’t compete with the gardiens ’s shrilling. But now, as they ate and drank and smoked luxuriantly, they seemed entirely human. Every kingdom must have its rules and someone to enforce them.
    Later, as I wandered around the romantic English garden west of the main esplanade, I reflected upon this simple fact. Without the règlement , would the Luxembourg lose its magic? As it is, no one pilfers the pears grown by botanists on the pocket-size orchard’s espaliered trees. Or throws smoke bombs at the beehives kept by the Société Centrale d’Apiculture, whose courses on beekeeping, devised to bring Parisians into contact with nature, have been a fixture since the 1860s. Were they allowed on the lush yet delicate lawns, would the gleeful thousands of students from the Lycée Montaigne facing the park soon wear the grass thin? One nineteenth-century chronicler remarked that so many high school and college students have always come here that if the trees were full of parrots, the parrots would speak Latin—though the current language of choice seems to be Franglais, that admix of French and English, spiked nowadays with Arabic.
    Not far from a bronze