Some Medici Beasts

 The other garden I frequent is the Jardin du Luxembourg, the beauty to Jardin des Plantes' beasts. Immaculate, silken lawns at all seasons, studded with faux Greek statues and the Queens of France in the anodyne style of the 19th c, pony rides, gardens planted every few months and unearthed to the waiting arms of the quartier's inhabitants, it is a highly ordered French garden. (Someone once said that France is a country of peasants who beat the land into submission.) The wonders of Jardin du Luxembourg are countless, including the Medici Fountain, a strange, dark corner, away from the otherwise relentless summer sun.

Built by Marie de Medicis, Henry IV's widow, it is of glowering darkened stone, though it was meant to invoke the sunny fountains of her ancestral Italy. The present fountain was largely rebuilt in the 19th c. Marie de Medicis herself was connected (distantly) with one of the beastliest of all episodes of Parisian history. I refer to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, said to have been ordered by her cousin Catherine. (For a fabulous rendering, see La Reine Margot after the Dumas novel, Isabel Adjani as Margot.)  As every French school child knows, that was when the persecuted Protestants of France had been invited to the wedding of the originally Protestant Henri IV as a gesture of brotherhood, only to be slaughtered in their sleep August 24, 1572. But that was not Marie's fault. Even her lack of intelligence may not have been her fault, but Henri IV, the most beloved of all French kings, lived in dread that he might be assassinated, for that would leave his cow-like wife (his words) on the throne. After he was assassinated, in fact, she did basically hand over the Treasury to her chambermaid and her notorious husband until Marie's son, Louis XIII, finally had them arrested.

Polyphemus

But enough about Marie. The fountain itself is alluring, especially to the ducks who have already begun to migrate back here. Unfortunately it tends to be littered with cellophane wrappers, though now there are beautiful gold fish coming out of hibernation just underneath them. The fountain depicts languid hunks of river gods, the dripping water looking ominous in the blackened stone, and an unfortunate husband of gigantic proportions coming upon his cheating wife, Galatea. If you look closely (and so much is shadow here, it is hard to see) at the cuckolded husband, you see that he has only one enormous eye in the center of his forehead--it is Polyphemus, the Cyclops. The tender erotic couple beneath its ominous gaze is of pure white, but everything else about the fountain is dark and supernatural.

A river god

The reverse side of the fountain (added later from another existing fountain) has another bestial scene, Leda and the swan, most erotically portrayed in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, but you won't see any of that here.

The ducks have begun to arrive--even in the stony shallow fountain at the Place de la Sorbonne. They sleep in the midst of tourists, their brown and brilliant green heads tucked in, devoted couples that will waddle side by side at least until the arrival of the brood. Then, as with some humans, the emerald green heads of the males will turn elsewhere.

Last summer we watched a poor brown mommy duck have a slow nervous breakdown in the Fontaine de Medicis. Many little ducklings--were they all hers?-- flapped around in chaos, endeavoring to swim back and forth across the basin of the fountain, squealing and circling frantically. The mommy was being driven to distraction. She would try to lead them, then despairing she would bounce out of the water, shake herself off and complain, duckwise. Every few minutes she would take off into the sky, leaving them to their own devices. She may have gone off to gossip with friends at the basin in front of the Palais du Luxembourg, built by Marie, whose greatness was only a question of marriage.