Sunday Afternoon

SKY'S EYE

The boys and I went to the Jardin du Ranelagh, which was full of people because the weather has at last turned warm. True's friends Kayvon and Adam were there, playing soccer and already muddy to the knees. True can play soccer forever.

The park is lovely. Anna and I walked through it when she was pregnant with Sky years ago and we were on our final holiday as a childless couple. We had gone to see the Monet collection at the Marmottan Museum, which is on the edge of the park. I remember thinking then how wonderful it would be to live in Paris and bring children to play there.

The park once belonged to the gardens of the Château de la Muette, which sat on the site of a hunting lodge used by Charles IX when he hunted in the Bois de Boulogne. The château was built for Queen Margot, first wife of Henri IV, and it was where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette spent part of their honeymoon.

The château’s grounds were eventually sold off to real estate developers who built apartment buildings on the land (we live in one) for the city’s expanding middle class as Paris crept westward at the turn of the century.

What was left of the original château was torn down after World War I, but about the same time, Baron Henri de Rothschild built a duplicate a few blocks away, which now belongs to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. If anyone is interested, there is a nice history of the château and the neighborhood here.

The OECD is expanding its buildings on the property, so the Rothschild château is currently surrounded by cranes and scaffolding. We pass it whenever we go to the park.

The Jardin du Ranelagh was opened to the public in 1860, named for a nearby dance hall that had been built nearly a hundred years earlier and was, in turn, named after a dance hall in London that was named after its owner, Lord Ranelagh.

There are several beautiful statues in the park. Here is Sky standing in front of one depicting Cain, sculpted by a man named Joseph Michel Caille in 1876.

But my favorite statue is by a man named Leon Eugene Longpied and depicts a young fisherman pulling up the lyre and head of Orpheus on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos. Orpheus and his lyre helped Jason and the Argonauts steer clear of the Sirens by drowning out their seductive songs. But he was eventually torn to pieces because of his bad habits and his body parts washed into the Mediterranean Sea. His head was buried on Lesbos and his lyre was carried to heaven where it became the constellation, Lyra.

After playing, we walked home to dinner.

HOME?

Well, okay. Just one ride on the merry-go-round.