At the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais, with its palm and banana trees
and mosaic floors, marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting
to watch the museum's stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow
as the sun moves.
Photo:
Ed Alcock
for The New York Times
Even hospitals.
I doubt that most visitors to Notre-Dame Cathedral know that inside the nearby Hôtel-Dieu complex, which is still a working hospital, is a formal garden-courtyard with sculptured 30-year-old boxwoods. The hospital’s gardener replants much of the space every May — with fuchsias, sage, impatiens and Indian roses.
From the top of the flight of steps that cuts across the garden, you can find yourself all alone, looking out through the hospital’s windows to the tourist hordes outside. Every few months, the hospital’s interns choose a different costume for the male statue at the back — at the moment, he is Snow White.
(It was Mr. Bureau who told me that some of the most peaceful gardens belong to hospitals. Gardens help cure patients more quickly, he said).
The Square René Viviani on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame is another spot that is easy to miss. But this tranquil square features what is said to be the oldest tree in Paris — a false acacia brought to France from Virginia in 1601, and now shored up with concrete posts. Sitting on a park bench in one corner yields one of the best views in Paris — Notre-Dame on the right and St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, a tiny church built in the same era on the left.
And then there are the gardens that are the back or front yards of museums. For instance, at the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais— with its palm and banana trees and sculptures and mosaic floors lit from below — a half dozen marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting to watch the museum’s stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow as the sun moves.
Inside the museum is a portrait of Alphand (whose park designs include the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc Monceau and the Parc Montsouris, as well as the Vallée Suisse) in a top hat, his pince-nez hanging from his black overcoat.
And then there are country settings like the garden of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, once the home of the 19th-century artist Ary Sheffer, at the end of a narrow path at 16, rue Chaptal in the Ninth Arrondissement. There, you can sit among the poppies, foxglove and roses and sip tea (a cafe opens in the summer) and pretend to be George Sand, who lived nearby, and whose personal effects have been assembled in a reconstructed drawing room inside (even a lock of her hair).
