BlogParc Monceau, Paris.
It was many years ago when we understood one of the simplest, yet most important rules of traveling – Do Not Rush!
When we run the cycle of daily routines at home, whatever those are for each of us, we try to be as efficient as possible, because routines are, quite frankly, very routine – “unpleasant but necessary tasks”, as the dictionary defines it.
When we travel, we try to get away from our daily routines, we try to make our trip as pleasant as possible – as far away from chores as possible.
It’s not always easy, especially in large European cities, which we like to visit for their history, famous landmarks and life style that, sometimes, is different from our own daily life. An understandable desire to see everything, could easily convert a pleasant trip to “an unpleasant but necessary task”, similar to the chores we tried to escape.
One of the many tricks, which we use to avoid “traveling chores”, is to spend half a day in “weekend style”, such as going to a popular park, relaxing and watching nature and people. And if that park is a place that you liked to visit anyway, like Parc Monceau in Paris – that is a bonus.
Last time we were in Parc Monceau, it was a pleasant October day, in a middle of our intense 10 day long stay in Paris. With only a few occasional tourists, the park was occupied mainly by visitors from the neighborhood, usual for the working day – same as can be expected in any other big city – mothers or nannies with kids, elderly couples, some with grandchildren, small groups of office workers, slowly strolling through the park to or from their lunch breaks, and young couples, not exactly understanding where they are.
The crowd was certainly not the same as it was long ago, at the time when the park was rebuilt to its current state, in the mid-19th century. The ruins of the previous park, “la Folie de Chartres” – its pool and columns, the bridge, the pyramid and the obelisk were transformed into a really pleasant public park, as part of the grand transformation of Paris by Baron Haussmann.
It was when the high bourgeoisie society of the Second Empire built and occupied fine houses around Parc Monceau. Emile Zola’s “La Curée” told us a very colorful story of wealthy Nouveau Riche around the Park at that time.
Many of the grand houses around the park, in recent years, have been converted into luxury apartments as well as corporate headquarters and embassies – and the crowd is new too – but the landmarks of the park are still there – the old pool and the columns, the bridge, the pyramid and the obelisk, and, installed later, at the time of the Third Empire, numerous monuments of the composers, poets and artists with their muses.
We walked slowly through the winding passes of that natural park, who’s settings had not been overwhelmed by numerous follies, no matter how strange they looked together. Even more, those diverse structures, related to different eras and cultures, created an atmosphere of calm eternity and feeling of being here at a rare, quiet moment in history.
The park is not large, really, but its eclecticism and diversity made it engaging, inspiring – anything but boring.
The romantic landscape is eclectic as well. A collection of exotic trees and flowers all around the world were planted among the local vegetation in the end of 19th century, during the park’s restoration.
We were certainly not the first ones that got inspired, while relaxing in Parc Monceau – Claude Monet, for example, did a series of paintings of the park in the late 1870s. Those paintings are on display at The Met Fifth Avenue in New York, in Gallery 964.
A lot of composers, artists and poets were in love with this place. We would like to mention one of them – composer Louis-Hector Berlioz – who discovered the park not long after it was opened to the public. The park was a short walk away from his house in Paris at that time. In his letter to Pauline Viardot, a leading nineteenth-century French mezzo-soprano, he wrote:
… I often go for morning excursions; I own a beautiful garden that does not cost me a penny, even though two or three dozen gardeners are constantly busy looking after it, grooming it and varying its ornaments. The name of the garden is Parc Monceaux; in the morning at sunrise everything there is ravishingly fresh, quiet and colorful. I spend hours there thinking about nothing, sunk in the deepest stupor…
We too, like Berlioz, spent hours in the captivating atmosphere of Parc Monceau. But, unlike Berlioz on the morning of his letter, we were encouraged by the park to think and to talk about that island of history and nature, in the middle of Paris.
