Luxembourg Palace

Listen first. Gravel crunches under shoes on the long garden paths. Somewhere a child pushes a small wooden sailboat across the pond, and a metal chair scrapes as someone drags it into the sun. Above the trees rises a long façade of pale honey-coloured stone. Each block is cut with deep horizontal grooves, so the walls look ribbed and heavy. This is the Luxembourg Palace. It began as a widowed queen's homesick dream, and today it is the working home of the French Senate.

The queen was Marie de' Medici. She was born in Florence into the powerful Medici family and married King Henri IV of France. In 1610 Henri was assassinated in Paris, and Marie became regent for her young son, the future Louis XIII. She wanted a residence of her own, away from the Louvre and its politics. So in the early seventeenth century she bought land on what was then the southern edge of the city, near an older house owned by the Duke of Luxembourg. The name of that duke has stayed with the place ever since.

Marie gave her architect, Salomon de Brosse, a clear request. She wanted something that reminded her of the Pitti Palace in Florence, the great Medici residence where she had spent her youth. Look again at those grooved walls. This style is called rustication. Builders cut deep channels between the stones to make a wall look strong and rough, almost like a fortress. It is a strongly Florentine idea. But de Brosse did not simply copy Italy. He used a French plan, with wings around a courtyard and tall roofs, so the palace became a blend of two traditions.

Here is the first detail many visitors miss. The most famous artwork made for this palace is no longer here. Marie commissioned the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens to decorate a long gallery with a great cycle of paintings about her own life. They showed her birth, her marriage, and her regency, all dressed up with gods and allegories. Today those enormous canvases hang in the Louvre, across the river. So when you look at these windows, imagine a queen walking past a painted story of herself, larger than life, in bright colour.

Marie did not enjoy her palace for long. She clashed with her son's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. In 1630 came a famous episode known as the Day of the Dupes. For a few hours, Marie believed she had persuaded the king to dismiss Richelieu. Then the king supported the cardinal after all, and the people who had celebrated too early were the dupes, the fooled ones. Marie was eventually pushed into exile. She died abroad, far from both Florence and the palace she had built to remember it.

Over the next century and a half, the building passed through different royal hands. Then, in the eighteenth century, its rooms took on a new public role. Paintings from the royal collection were shown here to visitors, and historians often describe this gallery as one of the first public art museums in France. The idea that ordinary people could walk in and look at the king's pictures was quite new. Just to the west of the palace, the Musée du Luxembourg still continues that tradition with temporary exhibitions.

The Revolution changed everything. In the 1790s, during the Terror, the palace became a prison. Here is the second surprise. The painter Jacques-Louis David was held here for a time. From his window he made a view of the gardens, one of the very few landscapes he ever painted. A man who painted heroic scenes of Rome and revolution spent his captivity looking at trees and paths, very close to where you may be standing now.

After the prison years, the palace became a seat of government. The Directory, the five-man executive that ruled France after the Terror, met here. Then Napoleon Bonaparte came to power and gave the building to his Senate. Since then, through empires, monarchies and republics, it has housed an upper chamber of the French parliament in one form or another. In the nineteenth century the architect Alphonse de Gisors enlarged the palace on the garden side to make room for a larger debating hall. The extension follows the old style so closely that most people never notice it.

Inside, the decoration became grander still. The Senate library has a dome painted by Eugène Delacroix, one of the leading painters of French Romanticism, the movement that favoured strong emotion and rich colour. His scene shows poets and thinkers in the gentle afterlife described by Dante. The interiors are open only on guided visits, usually with a reservation, and sometimes during France's yearly heritage days, when many official buildings open their doors. If you cannot go inside, it is worth knowing that senators debate today under painted ceilings like these.

The palace has darker memories too. During the Second World War, German forces occupied Paris, and the German air force used the palace as a headquarters. In August 1944, during the liberation of the city, there was fighting in this area. Look closely at some stone surfaces in this part of Paris, and you may see small chips and scars. Not every mark is from the war, of course. But the building has carried soldiers, prisoners, queens and lawmakers, and the stone shows centuries of use and repair.

Now turn to the gardens, because for most Parisians, this is what the Luxembourg means. They were first laid out for Marie de' Medici and changed many times since. On the garden side, a wide terrace curves around a central pond. Along it stand white stone statues of queens and famous women of France, added in the nineteenth century. Find the Medici Fountain in the shade to the east of the palace. It is a long, dark pool beneath plane trees, with a carved grotto at the end. It is one of the quietest corners in the whole garden.

People use these gardens the way others use a living room. Students from the nearby Sorbonne read on the green metal chairs. Older men play chess or a French bowling game called pétanque. Children ride ponies or watch puppet shows. Joggers circle the outer paths in every season. Look for a small copy of the Statue of Liberty among the trees. It is a reminder that the original was a French gift to the United States. Few visitors expect to find her here.

Before you go, stand back from the central pond and look up at the palace once more. Notice the clock and the dome above the middle pavilion. Notice how the grooved stone catches the light, sharper in the morning and softer as the afternoon turns gold. A Florentine queen wanted a reminder of home. Instead she left Paris a parliament, a public garden and a place to sit in the sun. As you walk out, listen again for the gravel, the chairs and the children by the water.