A European Reverie: Acte 2: Gaîté Parisienne

Aaaah Paris! Full of gloire, histoire, and …. people. Too many of them, in fact.

Alighting the train from Düsseldorf at the Gare du Nord, one’s senses are immediately assaulted by the eau de fag and the shouting and jostling of the milling crowds. Outside the cacophony of car horns adds to the general mêlée as our taxi drivers cheerfully launch themselves (and us) with gusto into the swirling maelstrom better known as Friday afternoon peak hour, where every driver behaves as a charioteer at the Circus Maximus (and I thought the Roman drivers were bad …), determined to fight for every inch of ground, even if it means blocking up every intersection. Driving in Paris is inadvisable at the best of times, with drivers practising the Giant Slalom down narrow streets full of parked cars and driving just millimetres away from the car in front, but peak hour on a Friday afternoon is clearly the ultimate challenge, with the entanglements at the intersections skilfully avoided by racing down narrow backstreets at breakneck speed and careening wildly around corners to catch the lights, with our piles of luggage shifting alarmingly around us. Somewhat white-knuckled, but thankful to be in one piece, we arrived at our lodgings – someone’s apartment – in the leafy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

At this point I can hear those of you who are particularly on the ball wondering why these missives are entitled “A Garden Reverie”, and not “The Famous Five go Forth” or some such title (With apologies to Enid Blyton). Well, the point of going to Paris for two of us, apart from spending time with the children, was to “discover” the hidden gardens of Paris (which you might suggest is a bit of a waste of time, as some other clever person has already done it) – although as we discovered, some are so well-hidden that they are almost impossible to find, while others, when standing and looking at them, might not be immediately obviously a garden at all. But there are some gems to be found, even though they necessitated a map, a compass and a packed lunch, and we’ve added a few of our own to the list.

The first was the Parc du Bagatelle, cunningly hidden in the middle of the vast Bois du Boulogne (and by vast, I do mean vast, with big trees and deep shadows of the Red Riding Hood variety), far from any Metro station (of course – Madame is supposed to be conveyed there in her carriage …), necessitating a long march just to find the entrance. It was, however, worth the effort. As its name suggests, the park is a mere “trifle”, built at vast expense as the result of a bet between Marie Antoinette and her brother-in-law, and completed, together with the chateau, in less than 70 days. It now has a huge collection of roses, overseen by a pretty little pagoda-like belvedere and a charming, wedge-shaped potager. The gorgeous views were complemented by the soft sounds of a piano concert in the Orangerie nearby.

The second park is the Park du Bercy, near the Gare de Lyon, built on the site of an old wine entrepôt. It has to be said that the French, with their sense of style, do new urban parks and gardens extremely well, with a certain unity of theme and design and attention to detail that designers in Australia can only dream about. Despite only being about 20 years old, it has a lot of remarkably tall trees. The designers left the rail tracks that ran through the site, along with the cobbled streets, and then carried the idea of the rails through the different parts of the park, which helps to pull it together, because it is sliced in half by a major road.

Where the buildings stood, different rooms have been created, which offer diverse spaces for a range of uses. At one end of the park, the cave-like storage areas have been retained and turned into a shopping and café precinct, while at the other are playing fields.

Le Backyard

The owners of our apartment were also clearly into gardens, and we much enjoyed eating our eye-wateringly expensive “yellow” chicken from the local butchers in the private minimalist garden, decorated with festoons of washing, and overlooked by at least a dozen apartments.

La Tomate

While yellow chickens are exceedingly delicious, no trip to Paris for us would be complete without one night out – at Atelier Joël Robuchon, where four hungry souls braved the eleven-course menu …. and then moaned all the way home …. I offer the following dishes as ideas that can be whipped up in a jiffy for your next dinner party. As every good hostess knows, the perfect meal should start with a soup. Why not try “La Tomate”, in the form of a gazpacho, with “gilded” croutons under a mustard sorbet à l’ancienne . Then there should be a fish dish. How about “La Langoustine”, grilled on a bed of celeraic puree with just a hint of Thai flavours and floating in a foamy Coral Sea. Or perhaps “Le Caviar” would be better, with a hot-cold egg cooked in maple syrup hiding under a vegetable wafer topped with caviar together with Gravelax salmon with citrus and vodka. No French meal is complete without “Le Foie Gras" – in this case hot from the duck, with fresh cherries and almonds in a jus with a hint of hibiscus. Then to finish the meal, how about “Le Parfum des Iles” – a crème of fruits – passionfruit a granita of rum and a cloud of whipped coconut.