Paris Diaries: Thrones, royal and otherwise

Getting lost in the Bois de Boulogne

When you arrive at the Bois de Boulogne it doesn’t take long to realise that you haven’t, actually, really arrived. Like other massive parks it may technically start at its edge but really, the discerning tourist doesn’t want to be on its periphery. They want to be at the nice bits, the lakes, the gardens, the main sights.

If you arrive like we did by getting the Metro all the way out to Porte Dauphine, a journey so long you feel you must have left Paris and even France behind, a journey that must surely have actually taken you so far you’ve gone right out of the western end of France, into the Atlantic, and have actually found yourself somewhere back to the east, Germany perhaps, then this is a bit of a kick in the teeth.

We want to see the lake. When you don’t know what you want to see in an enormous park the lake, or one of the lakes, anyway, seems like a good place to start. But first we walk through what feels like miles of scrubby forest that looks a perfect place to dump a body. It’s nice in a peaceful, sun-dappled kind of way but I can’t really stop thinking about what a crime hotspot this must be. Imagine being here at night, I think.

At night it is indeed a bit of a crime hotspot. There have been bodies found, as I feared, and sex work is rife. But it isn’t the middle of the night, it isn’t even lunchtime, so it still seems like a good idea to shoot for the lake.

We find the lake, or a lake, at any rate, an achievement not to be sniffed at when you consider the sheer scale of the Bois. It’s two and a half times the size of Central Park in New York, a statistic that is utterly meaningless if, like me, you haven’t been to Central Park, but L assures me this is somewhat significant. It is still only the second biggest park in Paris, the Bois de Vincennes pips it, from which we can draw the conclusion that the French like parks, or that New Yorkers don’t, or perhaps both things are true. Perhaps neither are, I suppose.

It’s slightly smaller than Richmond Park in London, too, another meaningless comparison if you haven’t visited, but it’s what Wikipedia has offered up for me and so what I am giving to you. The point I’m trying to get across here is that it’s huge, that when you arrive at its edge you are still miles away from where you’d like to be and, good news, you’re in a park now so you’ve got no choice but to walk it.

Or run it, as apparently everybody else in the park is doing when we visit. I’ve seen less runners at actual, organised races than I have on this Saturday in the Bois. It takes a second or two to realise there hasn’t been some natural disaster or mass shooting and people aren’t just running away. All around us are svelte, tanned Parisians pounding the pavement and making us feel bad about the amount of pastry we have in our bags.

The lake is very pretty and it’s even prettier because having found it, we can stop walking and have lunch. While eating we look at the map and list of attractions of the Bois de Boulogne and decide that perhaps the lake is enough. This may sound like we have a lack of ambition but really, when a place has a gardens, a chateau, a zoo, an amusement park, two horse racing tracks (why stop at one?), Roland Garros (of French Open fame), the Louis Vuitton foundation and more, where do you start?

Just to make our heads spin with little titbits even more, we also find out it was laid out and created at the behest of Napoleon III (not the all-conquering, short-arse, one of the other Napoleons), just after he’d staged his coup. There’s something quite nice, I think, about staging a coup and then following it up with designing your own big park.

We’ll have a wander around, we decide, once we’ve eaten our lunch, and we do, eventually, get up and walk, though this is mainly because we need the toilet. This is okay, since there are some in the Jardin Shakespeare. This jardin, or garden (see, I can parlez français) is meant to be very beautiful, and it is, we note, as we stride towards the toilets.

We look at the jardin in the manner of people who will see it again soon, when we haven’t got lunch to deposit off into the toilet. It’s nice, sure, but we have some small issues to resolve. These small issues become much larger, more pressing issues when the toilets turn out to be closed.

If there is a feeling in life that is both as simultaneously dispiriting and alarming than arriving at a public toilet and finding it locked or closed, I am yet to feel it.

It’s okay, we tell ourselves, there are more toilets just a short eighteen minute walk away. Eighteen minutes isn’t a long time, of course, but when there’s something you could really do with doing in, say, eighteen seconds, eighteen minutes feel like eighteen years. When that walk becomes a few minutes longer because a gate, one solitary gate that is the one gate that we need to walk through is locked, the alarm bells are less ringing and more shrieking.

Still, it’s a good way to see the Bois de Boulogne, in much the same way that we saw the Jardin Shakespeare, appreciative but distracted. By the time we’ve schlepped halfway across town to where these mythical toilets are I’m on the verge of a medical incident the likes of which the Bois has never seen. Should the toilets be locked the door will be being blown off its hinges, one way or another.

They are not locked, but they are, like most things these days, behind a paywall. They are in the Parc de Bagatelle, a park that costs money to enter. Normally I would have strong opinions on this as a concept but not today, today I pay the entry fee and finally, relief.

I’m glad we can enjoy the Parc de Bagatelle, as it’s lovely. It’s got a chateau! Not many parks have a chateau. Not many parks are also, technically, in other parks either, so there’s that. The chateau is also lovely, as is the rose garden, though like most rose gardens there aren’t as many roses as you’d think there would be.

The chateau, incidentally, was built by Louis VXI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, in less than three months, after his sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette bet him that he couldn’t get it built that quickly. Well, at least such frivolous behaviour such as betting on the construction of a chateau didn’t end poorly for any of them.

Eventually, it’s time to leave the Bois. We have to get back to the rest of Paris, and that’s miles away. In the taxi on the way back to Porte Dauphine we pass Villa Windsor, the home of Edward VIII, latterly the Duke of Windsor, after his abdication. There are remnants of royalty everywhere in the Bois, it seems, just no toilets.

There’s a metaphor in that, somewhere.

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