This is the Luxembourg Gardens, and the octagonal pond in front of the palace is the Grand Bassin. Gravel underfoot, green metal chairs everywhere, and — most days — a fleet of tiny sailboats working its way across the water. Those boats are the story. We'll get to them.
The garden exists because of homesickness. Marie de Medici — say it MED-ih-chee — was a Florentine banker's daughter who married the King of France. When he was assassinated, the widowed queen decided she was done with gloomy French palaces. So in sixteen twelve she started building herself a piece of Florence. She modeled the palace on the one she grew up in, and matched it with Italian gardens and fountains. She wanted to look out a window and see home. Her palace is now where the French Senate meets, which means the lushest garden in Paris is technically a government office's front yard.
Ernest Hemingway did some of his hungriest walking right here. In the early twenties he was broke — genuinely, skipping-meals br
oke. He figured out that the Luxembourg was the best route across town for a hungry man. From one end to the other, there was nothing to smell and nothing to see that could be eaten. A park as a survival strategy. Years later he went further. He swore he'd lure the garden's pigeons with corn, dispatch them, and sneak them home under the blanket of his son's stroller. Historians suspect the pigeons
