Along Boulevard Saint Michel we passed the chapel of the Sorbonne University, built by Cardinal Richelieu, who was chancellor of the university and who is buried in the chapel. The chapel is only used for official ceremonies and exhibitions. The Sorbonne, officially "Paris-Sorbonne University," is the main inheritor of the old Sorbonne, which dates back to the 13th century and was one of the first universities in the world. This is the heart of the Latin Quarter. The area is home to a number of universities besides the Sorbonne and gets its name from the Latin language, which was the language of learning back in the day.
Two blocks farther up, looking east from the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and Rue Soufflot, one can see the Pantheon, the beautiful Neoclassical building where many illustrious Frenchmen are buried. On the opposite side of Boulevard Saint Michel is the east entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens and Palace. Once inside the park you get a nice view of the Pantheon's dome.
In the early 1600s the Luxembourg Palace, which nowadays houses the French Senate, was built as a royal residence for Marie de Medicis, the widow of Henry IV and the regent for King Louis XIII. She requested that the palace be modeled after the Pitti Palace and the Boboli gardens behind it in her native Florence and called it the Palais des Medicis. In 1630 she bought additional land and enlarged the gardens.
She also commissioned Rubens to paint a series of paintings for the Palace. The "Marie de Medici Cycle" consists of 24 paintings, of which 21 depict Marie's own struggles and triumphs in life and the other three are portraits of herself and her parents. The paintings were installed in the Rubens Gallery on the main floor of the western wing, but they now live in the Louvre.
On one side of the Palace, and easy to miss, is the Médicis fountain, which was built in the form of a grotto.
The main part of the gardens is a green parterre of gravel and lawn with a large octagonal basin in the middle, where in the summer you can rent old toy sailboats and float them in the basin. Surrounding the central green space are 20 statues of French queens and female saints, standing on pedestals, which I had never noticed before. They were commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1848 and include of course Marie de Médicis, and Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, but also Jeanne III of Navarre, Blanche of Castille, Anne of Austria, and Mary Stuart, shown lower, popularly known as Mary, Queen of Scots, who was the queen consort of France from 1559 to 1560 through her brief marriage to François II.
It was another gorgeous day, and half the city of Paris was there. Most people just relax, reading or catching some sun in one of the park chairs, but some like to stroll around the park. Even the Gendarmes seemed to be taking it easy.
As in most parks in Paris, there's a vintage carousel, and this one is possibly the oldest one around judging by its simplicity and by the way the engine creaks. This carousel doesn't have music, but it has something the others don't: the children sitting on the outer end, usually the older kids, get a small wooden stick that they use to catch brass rings as they go around. The kids don't get to keep them; once all the rings have been caught, they're collected by the operator before the merry-go-round has stopped. "No reward for getting them except the satisfaction of having done it," as Adam Gopnik describes in Paris to the Moon, a collection of essays on his five years in Paris.
