Paris Icons: Wallace Fountains

If you’ve ever had the great fortune to flâner* the picturesque public parks and seductive streets of Paris, France, then surely you will have come across at least one of these curious green works of public art: Paris’ famous Wallace Fountains.  They first made the scene in the early 1870s, named for the English philanthropist who introduced them: Sir Richard Wallace.

Sir Wallace loved Paris, so much so that he stayed put throughout the 1870-71 Siege of Paris of the Franco-Prussian War.  Indeed, he first distinguished himself during the siege when he organized, at his own expense, several ambulance operations to tend to the wounded and needy.  As a result, he was much beloved by French citizens far and wide who heard of his great acts of selfless charity despite the siege’s blockade on information.

After the siege, Paris faced other problems.  Fresh drinking water became scarce, for example, and its price climbed so high that it was more economical for the poor to purchase wine.  Alcoholism soared, which didn’t help the post-war clean-up effort one bit!  With his fountains, Wallace brought free, potable drinking water to the masses both to mitigate the rise in alcohol consumption while also to help beautify his war-ravaged adoptive home. 

Each Wallace Fountain is a cast-iron sculpture designed by Charles-Auguste Lebourg, following Wallace’s guidelines that they be

• visible from afar but harmonize with the surrounding landscape;
• affordable to make as well as to install;
• pleasing to the eye;
• simple to maintain; and
• able to withstand the elements.

That these goals were achieved is evidenced by the 77 Wallace Fountains that continue to provide Paris with both beauty and clean, potable water today.

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 *Flâner = To stroll

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August in Paris: Parc de St. Cloud

Our final August in Paris, 2009, adventure took us to the 460-hectare (1136.68 acre) park of St. Cloud [san cloo], situated 10 kms (6 miles) southwest of Paris. The park, once punctuated by a glorious royal château, is perched atop a steep escarpment overlooking the River Seine. It offers magnificent views of the French capitol - a fitting location, indeed, for a place that loomed large over the political landscape of France for centuries.

The Château de Saint-Cloud dates back to 1572. Until the 18^th century, it was largely the country palace of the cadet branch of the royal family (i.e. the descendents of the younger brothers to the king). Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe duc d’Orléans, made perhaps the biggest mark on the estate when he acquired it 1658: He hired the same landscape-designer to renovate the gardens – André Le Notre – who would undertake his brother’s Versailles masterpiece just three years later.

In 1785, four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the property became royal once again when King Louis XVI bought it from his cousin Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans. It was an extravagant expenditure at a time when French peasants were starving and the royal coffers were running dry. But the future King of France, young Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François, had been a sickly child and Queen Marie Antoinette was convinced that the air in St. Cloud would be healthier for him than that of Versailles. She, too, set about to upgrade the grounds, renovating the chateau and gardens with the help of Richard Mique who was just then adding the finishing touches to her Hameau (hamlet) at Versailles.

Alas, she and the children would never spend much time in St. Cloud. The future monarch died on 4 June 1789 and the Revolution broke out only weeks later. By October, the royal family was living under house arrest at the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

Following the Revolution, French governance fell for a short time to a corrupt arm called The Directory. In 1799, a coup d’état, aided by General Napoleon Bonaparte, overthrew the Directory. Guess where? That’s right, at the Château de St. Cloud!

Napoleon I climbed quickly from member of the tripartite Consul to Consul for Life to Emperor of France. The Château de St. Cloud became a favored home. Just as it would be preferred by Napoleon III, France’s second Emperor and Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew.

Napoleon III declared war on Prussia from the Château de St. Cloud on 28 July 1870. Ironically, it was the same spot from which the Prussians laid siege to Paris in the torturous months that followed.

As Parisians struggled to stay alive - feasting off cats and dogs and zoo animals once the meat of sheep, pigs, and cows ran out - the Prussians shelled them relentlessly from the elevated St. Cloud park grounds. On 13 October counter-fire from within the city hit the chateau. It caught fire and burned to the ground.

Today, the domaine de St. Cloud is owned and maintained by the French state. Among the daily joggers, dog-walkers, sunbathers, and picknickers, one can still detect many remnants of its illustrious past. That is, if you know what to look for:

• Outbuildings and a small museum near the chateau ruins provide clues to the estate’s 16^th century beginnings;
• Le Nôtre’s high-baroque cascade is one of ten fountains dating to his 17^th century renovations;
• Marie Antoinette's 18^th century flower garden today cultivates roses for exclusive use by the state;
• La Lanterne, so named because a lantern was lit there whenever Napoléon I was in residence, remains a favorite viewpoint of Paris among visitors;
• An English garden, the Jardin de Trocadero, has been blooming at St. Cloud since its planting in the 1820s, during France’s short-lived attempt to restore the Bourbon Monarchy.

*****

And now the lazy days of August are over. The sand of Paris Plage has been swept away and the Seine expressway hums with vehicles carrying passengers back to work. The leaves are turning brown and beginning to blanket the Allée of the Ile des Cygnes. Yesterday, sun-kissed vacationers faced hours of stressful traffic delays along the nation's auto-routes as they fought their way home for La Rentrée (The Return). Time to join the queues to buy books and pens and paper again. Starting today for the next 11 months we'll have to share Paris, and all her sleepy corners, once again!

Images:

Chateau and fountain at St. Cloud, around 1845. Engraving by Chamouin after a daguerrotype, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Napoleon Bonaparte in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire in Saint-Cloud, by François Bouchot (1800-1842), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Adolphe Braun (1811-1877), "Ruines du chateau de St. Cloud", Paris, 1871, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Saint-Cloud Chateau c1845.jpg

Paris Monuments - Hôtel de Ville

You won’t believe what happened last week. I got an unexpected private tour of the Paris Hôtel de Ville (city hall). It happened like this:

Mother-of-the-Uber-Mensch (MUM) and her darling little sis (DLS) were in Paris. They’d flown in to see the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) in the school play. Loo was in rehearsal. The Uber-Mensch (U-M) was working. So I headed out with MUM and DLS to see the exhibit commemorating the 120th Anniversary of the Eiffel Tower: Gustav Eiffel, le magicien du fer (the Magician of Iron) on display now through 29 August 2009.

We approached the only gate that appeared open in the imposing city hall complex. “Excuse me,” I said to a security guard. “Where can we find the exposition Gustav Eiffel?”

“Je suis desolé (I’m sorry),” he responded. “Mais aujourd’hui c’est fermée (But it’s closed today).”

“Closed? But my belle-mère came all the way from New York to see it!” I said (which really wasn’t true, of course. She was here to see Loo.)

“Oo-la-la!” he exclaimed, leaving me momentarily flummoxed and slightly ill-at-ease. “Mais, j’adore New York!” And he went on to tell us, with much enthusiasm, that he’d been there for the running of the Marathon last November; that he’d found the New York spectators très sympa (exceptionally nice); that no matter where he went in the city, there was always a friendly stranger to help him; that he’d never enjoyed himself more than during the Greenwich Village Halloween Day Parade; and that he’d been in Times Square on the night of November 4th, when President Obama won the election, and he was so proud to have shared such joy with so many happy and peaceful people.

“Attendez deux secondes (wait two seconds)”, he said. He peeled away to chat à voix basse (in whispered tones) with another gentlemen, who responded with a simple nod. The two then looked in my direction and waved us through the gate.

I thought he’d gotten permission to open the exhibit for us. But no! As it happened, he was waiting for his colleague to relieve him for his 45-minute break just when we arrived. Rather than put up his feet, he decided to take us on a private tour of Mayor Delanoë's office building as a thank you for all the hospitality he’d received while in New York.

Ever since 1357, when then mayor (actually, provost) Etienne Marcel bought the parcel on which the Hôtel de Ville sits, the administration of the city of Paris has been located on this spot. Once a gentle slope leading to the river Seine, the site had been a port for unloading cargo of wood and grain in medieval times. It then became the infamous Place de Grève where Parisians gathered for public executions (the very place where Quadimodo was beaten and Esmeralda hanged in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame).

In 1533, Francois I, the Renaissance King, decided to bestow upon Paris a city hall building worthy of the French capital. It would be the largest in all of Europe and Christendom, filled with space and height and light. Construction was completed nearly 100 years later, in 1628, under the reign of Louis XIII. In 1835 two wings were added, in keeping with the original Renaissance style, to accommodate the needs of an enlarged city government. Otherwise, the building remained unchanged until 1870-71, during the Franco-Prussian War.

In September 1870, Napleon III surrendered to Prussia. Embittered Parisians declared the end of the Empire. A republican government moved into the Hôtel de Ville and assumed the Prussians would go away. But they did not. A bitter four-month siege of the city ensued. After a harsh winter living off cats and dogs and rats when all other meat became scarce, the republicans, too, capitulated to Bismarck, giving up Alsace and Lorraine and agreeing to heavy war reparations.

Angry revolutionaries in Paris broke into the Hôtel de Ville, setting up a rival communard government, called the Paris Commune. The republicans moved out to Versailles, taking their army with them. In May 1871, as anti-communard troops advanced on Paris, extremists set the city ablaze. At the Hôtel de Ville, a fire intended to eradicate all existing revolutionary records did much more than that. It gutted the entire building, leaving it a scorched stone shell.

Reconstruction took place from 1873-1892. While the new Hôtel de Ville edifice retains the exact look of its 16th century predecessor, the restored interior reflects a more lavish 18th century design. Our guide confided to us that he finds the Hôtel de Ville to be even lovelier than the Elysée Palace, home of the French President.

The central corridor of the Hôtel de Ville boasts ceiling-height stained glass windows, bearing family crests of the pre-revolutionary Noblesse de Robe (aristocracy). Murals painted by some of the leading artists of the day, including Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Gervex, adorn the walls of the extravagant banquet halls, salles des fêtes. And sculpture abounds, with such figures as Auguste Rodin having joined 229 other sculptors to provide likenesses of 338 famous Parisians as well as lions and other features.

So you see: what goes around does come around. Thanks to the kindness of New York strangers, the MUM being one, we were given a special bird's-eye view of a special Paris icon.

And that night Loo gave us a show-stopping performance as well!

Images:
Photo of Hotel de Ville de Paris by Tristan Nitot, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of the New York Marathon from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge by Martineric from Lille, France, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of sculpture of Etienne Marcel by by Thierry, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Image of the Hotel de Ville de Paris at the time of the Paris Commune (1871), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of Hotel de Ville courtyard by TwoWings, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Human Flight in Paris, Past and Present

When I look out the windows of my Paris apartment, I see a jumble of rooftops, our neighborhood church and park, the spire of the Eiffel Tower, and an antique clock atop the Hopital Saint Perrine. Also in my direct line of sight is a 6,000 cubic meter (211,860 ft3) balloon. White by day, fluorescent-green by night, the 32-meter-tall (105 ft) balloon floats up and down all day long, tethered by a cable that lets it out, like a kite, to a height of 150 meters (482 ft). Amid the classic beauty of my corner of Paris, it’s a kitschy reminder that hot-air balloons figure prominently in French history and culture:

From the height of a hot-air balloon, the earliest French photographers gave us aerial documentation of the 1889 and 1900 World’s Fairs. A few decades earlier, from July 1870 to May 1871, Parisians used hot-air balloons to break the siege of their city during the Franco-Prussian War. And almost a century before that, in 1783, the first recorded episode of human flight took place in Paris, in a hot-air balloon developed by the French Montgolfier brothers.

It all started one cold evening in 1782. Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, the impractical dreamer of a family of 16 children, sat mesmerized by a fire burning in a fireplace. He wondered what “force” could be causing sparks and smoke to rise up from the flames. With the help of his brother, Jacques-Etienne, he fashioned a small, oval bag out of silk, turned it upside down, and lit a fire under the opening. The bag rose into the air, hitting the ceiling above the two brothers. They hypothesized that fire created gas, which they dubbed “Montgolfier gas”.

What actually happened was that the heated air inside the small “balloon” became lighter than the surrounding air, causing it to become buoyant and rise upward.

The brothers set to work, building bigger and bigger balloons and experimenting with different materials until on June 4, 1783, they held their first public demonstration of un-manned flight. Near their home in Annonay, in the Rhône-Alpes region of southern France, they sent a balloon of 790 cubic meters (27,894 ft3) to an estimated altitude of 1,600-2,000 meters (5,200-6,600 ft). The balloon weighed 225 kilograms (500 lbs) and was constructed of four large pieces of cloth held together by 1,800 buttons and reinforced by interior netting. The voyage lasted 10 minutes and covered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles).

Their next launch was to take place on August 27 in Paris over the Champs de Mars. This time the balloon, made of sky-blue taffeta decorated with gold suns and zodiac signs, was half again as big. Unfortunately a downpour stopped the show. But a subsequent test, on September 11, compelled King Louis XVI to suggest that the brothers select two criminals to test the effects of atmospheric travel on living creatures.

Joseph and Etienne thought it best to send animals aloft first! On September 19, they sent a duck, a rooster, and a sheep called Montauciel (Climb-to-the-sky) into the skies of Versailles before a huge crowd, including the King and Queen Marie-Antoinette. The flight lasted roughly eight minutes and covered 3.3 kilometers (2 miles), obtaining an altitude of 462 meters (1500 ft). The animals survived the trip unharmed; indeed, Montauciel was found nibbling unperturbed on the straw used to fuel the fire that lifted the balloon.

The next step was to release humans into the clouds. For this, Joseph and Etienne doubled the size of the balloon again. It was 23 meters tall (75 ft) and able to hold 1,698 cubic meters (60,000 ft3) of air. On November 21, 1783, a physician, Pilâtre de Rozier, and an army officer, the Marquis d’Arlandes, set off from the Bois de Boulogne. They stayed aloft for 25 minutes at a height of 100 meters (328 ft), traveling 9 kms (5.59 mls) over the rooftops of Paris until they touched down amongst the windmills of the Butte-au-Cailles (now in the 13th arrondissement).

The balloon we see from our apartment windows is a feature of the Parc André Citroën, a 14 hectare (35 acre) public space located on the banks of the river Seine in the southern 15th arrondissement. The park occupies the site of the former Citroën car factory, which operated from 1915 until the 1970s. A 1980s urban renewal project leveled the former factory to create housing as well as a public recreation area now famed for its modern landscape design.

The balloon ride over the Parc André Citroën offers views of the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, Sacré Cœur Basilica, and Cathedral of Notre Dame. For years now the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) has been begging me for a ride. But after our hair-raising voyage up La Tour Eiffel, I’ve resisted. Though Loo, being lucky, is the one-and-only person I would ever consider taking a balloon trip with, for the moment - pour l’instant - I prefer to watch it rise and fall from my apartment windows.

Sources:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/hot-air-balloon.htm
http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/montgolfier_brother.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon

 

 

Images:

Self-portrait of Félix Nadar, French Photographer, 1820-1910, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photographic reproductions of engravings of Montgolfier balloons, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.