Le passé simple

I'll bet some of you out there will recognize where this was taken. It's the lobby and main staircase of the Alliance Française, the language school in Paris that our study abroad group attended in 1981-82.

The calm before the storm; classes started again the week after I took this photo.

The buildings have had some face-lifting done in the past thirty years, and one of the old buildings (where Ken's office was) was demolished and replaced back in the early nineties. I think there are apartments in the new building.

I walked through from the rue de Fleurus to the main courtyard and out through the entrance on the boulevard Raspail. Oh, the memories.

La dernière du Luxembourg

This is the last photo from inside the Luxembourg garden. Right next to the gate on the rue Guynemer, on the left side, is one of the sections of the garden that's made in the English style. The first glade is built around a statue of Edouard Branly, a doctor and physicist, who was one of the pioneers of radio and wireless radio telegraphy. You can look that up.

The typical Parisian park chair in the Luxembourg garden.

Monsieur Branly is credited with pioneering what we know as the wireless remote control. He might also be blamed for why we all have fifteen remotes wandering around our homes. Seriously. I have at least four on the coffee table in the living room. And four more in the family room. Thank you very much, M. Branly!

Of course, I'd rather get up and look for the remote than get up and change the channel manually, n'est-ce pas?

A hedge trimming update

I've actually finished with the hedge trimming. There's still the cleanup to do, but the long hedge is finally trimmed. I also have to trim the tall bay leaf tree. That's a whole 'nother can of worms. But the big job is done.

This more or less before. I had trimmed the inside of the hedge, but not the top or the outside.

These are photos of the longest stretch of hedge along the road. It goes from the house to the end of the property and around to the back gate.

Now I've done the top on the inside. The hedge is too wide for me to reach across from one side.

I took pictures, as I always try to do, of the before, during, and after trimming. I hope you appreciate how much fun I have doing this. I've decided that the only way to make it tolerable is to divide it into sections and celebrate as each section gets done.

And now this section is completely done. Except for the cleanup, of course.

And that is precisely what I do. I calculated (thanks to my spreadsheet) that I worked on the hedge for a total of eight days. Over those eight days, I worked ten and three-quarter hours. If you've done the math, you can see that it works out to an average of one and one-third hours per day. But hey, I'm retired. I can take my time, right?

That is a six-foot ladder... six inches taller than me. So you can see how tall that darned hedge is.

I was very lucky this year that the weather has been spectacular during the hedge trimming season. No cold, no rain, no wind. Just nice sunny days and me working in a t-shirt. Very pleasant. Thanks for sticking with me! Remember, I have to do this again next year.

Le dôme vue du jardin

Just as I was about to exit the Luxembourg garden on the west side (rue Guynemer), I turned and saw the dome of the Panthéon through the trees. From where I was standing, the dome is about 700 meters (just over a third of a mile) away.

Looking east across the Luxembourg garden toward the Panthéon.

The picture is taken into the morning sun which accounts for the misty quality, but I like it. The zoom lens makes the dome loom large in the photo.

The Panthéon was built as a church in the eighteenth century atop the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, a high spot on the left bank named for the city's patron saint. The church was intended to receive the relics of Sainte-Geneviève, but before the building was consecrated as a church, the French government decided it would be used as the final resting place of great men of the Republic (post revolution).

Court numéro trois

As it was a beautiful summer morning when I took this walk, I was not at all surprised to see people already on the tennis courts in the Luxembourg garden. That unmistakable "pop" of a tennis ball hitting a racket was echoing through the geometric forest. I stopped to watched a couple of volleys, then I was on my way.

Court number three in the Luxembourg garden. Click to serve and volley.

I became a tennis fan back in my high school days, in the mid seventies. Those were the days of Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, John McEnroe, Björn Borg, Ilie Năstase, and Martina Navrátilová, to name a few. I liked to play, but never played in any organized fashion, except for high school gym class. That was no fun because the jocks saw tennis as an opportunity to hit the ball as hard as they could at the heads of those of us who were less athletically inclined. And it was always doubles play (if you could call it play) and I spent most of the time ducking rocket-fast balls flying at me.

I had more fun just playing pick-up games with friends after school and on weekends. When no one was around I'd bang the ball up against a wall somewhere. I was never really good at it and after a while I dropped tennis for a long time. I started watching tennis on tv again in the mid eighties. Those were the days of Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Steffi Graf, Stefan Edberg, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Ivan Lendl, and still Martina Navrátilová, to name a few more.

I picked up a racket again in the nineties and took tennis classes at our local community college. I even played outside of class when I could find a partner. I still wasn't very good, but I enjoyed the game.

I went to my first Grand Slam tournament in 1997. You guessed it: the French Open in Paris. What a thrill that was. Ken and I had tickets for the women's final and the men's final that year. We watched Iva Majoli beat Martina Hingis in an real upset, then watched Gustavo Kuerten win his first of three French Opens, beating Sergi Bruguera.

I've been back to the French a few times since then, enjoying earlier rounds and more matches. The only other pro tournament I've been to is the Bank of the West Classic at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, a few times when we lived in San Francisco.

For the past fifteen years or so I've followed a lot of tennis on television, but I haven't played since 2002. There are so many sports channels available on tv these days and there is a tournament being televised from somewhere in the world almost every week during tennis season. And just in case you're wondering, the professional tennis season begins in January and concludes at the end of November.

La forêt géométrique

The Luxembourg garden is composed of three primary gardens. The first is the very formal French garden directly in line with the north-south axis of the palace. This is where the bassin and fountain are located. Along the western edge of the park are the English style gardens with their curves and more natural looking plantings. Between the two is the geometric forest, with trees planted in what's called a quinconce (quincunx) pattern, an alignment of groups of five laid out like the five side on a standard six-sided die.

A diagonal path through the geometric forest. Click to quincunxinate.

The result is a stunning array of trees that line up in every direction you look. Paths through the forest follow the alignments north and south, east and west, and diagonally. Not being a landscape architect, I didn't know this layout had a name nor that it is one of the standard patterns for orchards. I'm learning this as I go along. Ah, the wonders of the internet!

Le Palais du Luxembourg

This is one corner of the Luxembourg palace, once the residence of Marie de Médicis, wife of King Henri IV and regent for her son, King Louis XIII. It was built in the first half of the seventeenth century. The park I've been showing you pictures of was the palace garden, a very private place in its time. The gardens are a public park now, and the French Senate meets inside the palace.

The southwest wing of the Palais du Luxembourg seen from the across the bassin.

The two round towers you see in the background are the bell towers of the church of Saint-Sulpice. When I first lived in Paris in 1981, the place I lived was just a couple of blocks from this church and the beautiful square and fountain in front of it. For some reason I didn't wander up there on this walk, so no photos. But it's well worth a visit if you're in town.