I checked the weather forecast this morning and saw that today might well be the last day of sunshine I have on this trip. It therefore seemed a good idea to go and see the Jardin Luxembourg - the garden of the Luxembourg Palace, originally built for Marie de Medicis, mother of Louis XIII. The French Senate sits there today. I went via the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical Gardens), where I found…well, if you ever played D&D, you probably remember gold dragons, silver dragons, copper dragons etc. Meet the amiable recycled aluminium (and other material) dragon:

I walked west, wondering if the sun would come out. It did, soon before I reached the Luxembourg Palace. The autumn foliage in the gardens was really lovely, and urns full of flowers added further colour. Some general pictures:

The figure seen from behind the view above is the ‘Marchand de Masques’, the ‘Merchant of Masks’. The masks belong to French writers, composers and artists, including Hugo, Corot, Berlioz, Dumas, Delacroix and Barbey D’Aurevilley:

The garden is known for its statuary and sculpture. Marble statues of French queens are spaced around the terrace above the formal lawn, there’s a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty, and there are numerous monuments, most of them to artists, writers and musicians rather than the usual round of generals and legislators. They’re all men, as far as I could see, with attendant muses and nymphettes. Here’s Charles Leconte de Lisle with a companion from Mt Parnassus:

And here, Antoine Watteau:

I’m partial to Watteau’s paintings, and somehow I guessed this might be him before I deciphered the weather-worn name. The lady is very much a Watteau woman, perhaps a visitor to Cythera - who has lived on, as art does, and has now come to visit a memorial to the long-dead artist who created her. She lays a flower under his image, the statue of a statue, and looks at him with gentle inquiry and a subtle expectancy, as if she were thinking that he might not be past coming back to life. The sculptor, Henri Gauquie, has given her a natural, mobile presence, so that she really looks as if she has just come walking through the garden and perched herself beside the memorial bust. It looks, of course, like a scene from one of Watteau’s many paintings where silken figures loll and play around ancient statuary. Concerning this momument, sculptor and critic Lorado Taft wrote: “Gauquie, in his memorial to Watteau, has a better excuse for his playful treatment of the theme. The master of beribboned sheep and charmingly impossible shepherdesses could not be more fitly honored than by a monument of Sevres or Dresden ware. One would imagine this little lady right off from a mantelpiece.” It’s a playful treatment, to be sure, but the witty allusion has rather a dark heart. That there is only a bust, without a body, reminds us that the dead fade in memory. The dark stone for the dead man is only appropriate; he has gone out of sight, forever separated from his white marble admirer. His clothes are in a state of casual disarray, his expression intently fixed on something, somewhere - as if he’d been out walking on a windy day, his powers of thought concentrated, when death stopped mind and body in their tracks. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Watteau’s later work often smiles rather sadly (see Les Deux Cousines on this page). Chronically ill (he succumbed to tuberculosis in his late thirties), he was certainly no stranger to the presence of death hovering over life. I’m not sure I agree that his mature paintings convey a sense of life’s ultimate futility, as the Wikipedia article suggests; I do think some of them convey the sense of life’s bittersweetness and an interior, modern sort of conflict - a heroic conflict, even, if heroes can wear silk slippers - between the soul of pleasure and the reality of finite time, loss and death, when afternoon shadows lengthen across the playground: a pastel Gotterdammerung where one by one the gods die lazing, chatting, and looking for love. Reading up on Watteau later, I learned that he worked in the studio of Claude Audran, then keeper of the collections in the Luxembourg Palace, and found inspiration in these gardens and their statuary for his own paintings.
As you can probably tell, I rather fell in love with this sculpture - not least, I must confess, because of Watteau’s portait’s handsome looks. Here are two larger pictures:

And here is the famous Medicis Fountain:

As I was taking pictures I saw a very blond figure sitting beside the fountain feeding birds. It looked very much like Héléne, who was at Scylla and the dinner afterwards, and indeed it was. She told me the fountain was one of her favourite places in Paris; I could certainly see why. The sky had clouded over again and it was getting very cold. I had planned to walk through the Latin Quarter, but decided to call it a day and head back home. On the way I stopped in at Berkeley Books, an American secondhand bookshop, looking for new reading material. I picked up Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Deep Song, containing his essay on duende, which has been on my shopping list for a while. It’s going to rain tomorrow, so I might go to the Louvre - I’ll see if I’m in the mood for a major expedition.