Jardin du Luxembourg

The garden you're standing in doesn't belong to the city of Paris. It belongs to the French Senate, which meets in the palace right beside it. That means regular Paris police have no authority here. 

The story begins in 1612, when Marie de' Medici bought the grounds and shaped them into an Italian-inspired retreat. She commissioned the Luxembourg Palace between 1615 and 1631, and the baroque Médicis Fountain still carries her taste for drama and mythology. For centuries the garden couldn't expand southward because a community of Carthusian monks refused to leave, resisting the pleas of Marie and the threats of Louis XIII alike. It took the Revolution of 1793 to finally move them out.

Then came 1871. During the Paris Commune, government troops dug three mass graves here, burying an estimated third of the two thousand prisoners summarily executed across the city. The same lawns where children now sail model boats across the octagonal Grand Bassin once held those unmarked graves.

The iconic green chairs have been movable since the eighteenth century, inviting you to sit wherever you like. Given what the ground has witnessed, perhaps comfort was the least it could offer.