The park being the one and only
Just days before this we had finally made phone contact with Claude. Claude is a very good friend of our very good friends from the Hudson Valley. They met and got to know him when they all lived in San Francisco, several lives ago!
Quoi dire? Claude is a true Parisian; born and bred. He lived in San Francisco where he was part owner and chef of a restaurant; when it closed he moved back to Paris.
Then, there is the restaurant “La Bagatelle”, and this is where we met Claude for Sunday lunch. The day was perfect: sun/clouds and just the right temperature for eating outside.
Here’s a short history:
Marie-Antoinette waged that the Count of Artois, who had bought this property in 1775, could not turn it into a park in 64 days.
Belanger designed it and Thomas Blaikie built it, to the day’s in-vogue anglo-chinois taste.
Bagatelle park and chateau only barely eluded obliteration during the Revolution, but a string of owners altered them considerably. The orangerie, gates and stables date back to 1835, and the guard’s lodgings were built in 1870, along with the Trianon and the two terraces.
The City of Paris bought this gem in 1905 and entrusted its head gardener, Jean-Claude-Nicolas Forestier, with the restoration work. He set out to turn these gardens into a botanical domain without upsetting the harmony that the existing layout had already established. He turned the subsistence crops into showcases for collections of roses, irises, perennials, clematises, peonies and other flowers.
The well-known Roseraie de Bagatelle (rose bed) which has hosted an international competition every year since 1907, is also the work of his hand.
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Guess which one is Claude and which is my husband:
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Un vrai “dejeuner”:
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Peacocks in the park:
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It was a delightful day. After lunch we drove around the parc, around the famous Longchamps racecourse, through the parc and back to our metro at Porte Maillot!
