From the quai Saint-Bernard, it is about 500 metres to
the Grande Galerie.
A Park Full of Old Everything
Hunting Bear in the Jardin des Plantes
By Richard Erickson
Paris Kiosque - April 1998 - Volume 5, Number 4
Copyright (c) 1998 Richard Erickson - used with permission
[Editor's Note: Ric Erickson is hunting for a bear in this piece, but one
made of stone.]
I received an eMail
from reader Ron Roizen and that is why I am bear hunting
in the Jardin des Plantes. I figured it would be
easy; waltz in and shoot the bear, and continue my life
somewhere else.
With the weather oscillating between winter and spring,
doing a job like this requires 'good-enough' weather for
traipsing around in a park, and it isn't on hand every
day - so when opportunity strikes, one has to take it.
Today has 'find-the-bear' weather.
Paris' Botanical Garden, located at the east side of the
fifth arrondissement, is not my usual beat. I have
visited it on purpose once before, and walked through it
by accident one other time.
Known as the Jardin des Plantes, it is sandwiched between
the ugly university buildings of Jussieu and the Gare
d'Austerlitz.
The quai Saint-Bernard is on the northeast side of the
jardin and there is so much traffic that having one of
these dogs could be useful for getting across it to the
Seine. Along its banks, there is the Musée de Sculpture
en Plein Air - dubious air I would say - which is also
known as the square Tino Rossi.
If you are coming from the Gare de Lyon for some reason,
after crossing the pont d'Austerlitz, you can use the
jardin as a clean-air shortcut to the rest of the fifth
arrondissement.
Today though, I come out of the métro at Jussieu. After
checking out the students and the fountain, I head for
the jardin along the rue Jussieu, past the exceedingly
boring-looking faculty of Sciences building. I go into
the jardin by the entrance in the
rue Cuvier, against a stream of
students coming the other way.
The entrance to the gardens from the rue Cuvier looks
more antique than promising.
The first buildings look as if they are going to fall
down. In the children's play area, I look back and see
one of the faculty buildings has the name of Marie Curie
and it looks older than she was. The children have a
fairly-new spiky dinosaur to climb on and a lady is
telling one of them not to fall off it. The kid will be
falling off things in about two years, but is being
careful now.
I do not see the slab of a 2,000-year-old Sequoia from
California - does Ron know about this? - mentioned in my
old Michelin guide; and it may have been moved. However
after looking at a map, I see a bird-cage on a hill,
which is probably the 'butte Coupeau,' which was moved
here sometime after the other hill called Coupeau was
flattened in 1303. My antique Michelin guide says Buffon
did it in the 17th century, and it is the tip of an old
rubbish dump.
The 'bird-cage' is at the highest point in the centre of
a maze. On account of a very large cedar, planted in
1734, I see no bear. Legend has it this tree was brought
from Syria in a scientist's hat, but it is supposed to
have really come from Kew Gardens, just across the
channel. Everybody agrees about its age though.
Gardeners are hacking away at winter jungle as I go down
to the iron and glass houses that are full of tropical
plants. Across a very wide place, I see an open door and
I head for it. Inside, they do not know about my bear. It
is the Mineralogy Museum and taking photos in it is
forbidden.
The big, clean building to the left is the Zoological
Gallery - which was closed for renovations when my
Michelin guide was printed - and is now open, according
to a brochure in German, from 10:00 to 18:00, except on
Tuesdays. Apparently some bombs hitting it in WWII caused
it to be closed for a long time and Parisians were very
unhappy about it. It is now called the 'Grande Galerie de
l'Evolution' because it has a lot
of stuffed giraffes in it.
This is not the bear cage. It is the winter garden, where
you can be tropical in Paris.
The Botanical Gallery is further down to the right and
the Paleontology Gallery is beyond that. The brochure in
German says there are a thousand skeletons in it;
dinosaurs, the whole prehistoric works. The Bug Museum,
at 45. rue Buffon, is in an annex, outside the main
complex, across the street and I do not see it at all.
The zoo takes up the whole northwest corner of the
gardens; probably about a third of the total area - the
zoo is 5.5 hectares - and it is the oldest public zoo in
the world; founded in 1794.. Within this zoo there is a
'microzoo' where you can see, through microscopes, really
tiny bugs; that, as the brochure in German puts it, 'live
in our forests and our homes.'
The whole thing was started around 1635, as a garden for
royal drugs - medicinal, you understand - it was the
'Jardin du Roi.' Along the rue Cuvier there were
residences; that of Chomel, doctor to Louis XIV and
botanist, who wrote a history of plants.
In Louis XVI's time, Buffon asked for the house to be
added to the gardens. The street is named after Cuvier
who died in 1832 after doing remarkable studies of
anatomy and mineralogy, plus bones, and something about
studying the earth's revolutions in his spare time.
The names Lacépède, Daubenton and Fourcroy were
professors at the museum while André Thouin was chief
botanist of the garden. There was, is, the 'Maison de
Chevreul,' where famous scientists lived to be 88 like
Laurent de Jussieu or 103 like Chevreul, a chemist, who
died in 1889.
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, was a zoologist until he
died in 1844, and lent his name to the street that
borders the southwest side of the gardens. Most of the
others lent their names to Paris' streets too. My notes
say, 'Hôtel Debray, 1650 - built by Bullet - Chomel,
lived in 1701' - and so on.
Many of the exhibits date to a long time ago and so do
the buildings, and some of them are as antique as their
exhibits. There are a great many
'firsts' of this and that in this
garden and in its various museums.
The dinosaur is not an exhibit; it is for children to
climb on and in.
Some day the managers of all this are going to get some
money and fix the place up because it is truly unique. As
it is, it is like a museum of a museum and as such it is
a delight to see now - before it gets upgraded.
Even if you do not care for microscopic 'household' bugs
and things like the world's oldest stuffed rhinoceros,
halls full of very old bones, and piles of rock crystals,
there are still the winter garden, the summer garden and
the long allées, lined with trees, all of which have
illegible labels on them. But in summer, they do have
very real and really green, leaves.
Oh, I forgot. There are a lot of statues around, not just
of bears about to eat a careless Indian, but of other
people, like Buffon. There's a sundial, there's a...
there's so much stuff in Paris' Jardin des Plantes, it's
like a... zoo.
Richard Erickson, living in Paris for the last twenty years, has been
putting Paris online as long as anyone. More of his writings can be found in
Metropole Paris
where this article first appeared. He can be contacted via
erickso@world-net.sct.fr.
