As I have mentioned before, while I was in Paris I was reading Queen of Fashion, a biography of Marie Antoinette, and because of that I was driven to see some of the sites that featured prominently in her life. My favorite of these was the Palais Royal, a beautiful courtyard garden surrounded by an arcade that had housed the shop of Rose Bertin, MA's notorious dressmaker and personal stylist. MA would occasionally visit Bertin's shop to buy clothes, angering her royal relatives since the Palais Royal was also the stomping grounds of prostitutes and gamblers. Nowadays, the shops that ring the garden are pretty upscale clothing boutiques and antiques dealers, and there are no shady characters hanging about in the shadows. The gardens are a mix of wildflowers penned in by intensely manicured hedges. It's a nice quiet place to sit and read or stroll under trees that have been cut into box shapes (I was fascinated and perplexed by these trees, they look cool but square trees are just plain weird).
I visited Palais Royal by myself and I felt very relaxed and peaceful there. A couple of days later I dragged Tenzig and some friends there to see it but they didn't have the same intense reaction that I did, they we like "It's a garden." And I said "it's not just ANY garden," I tried to explain about Marie Antoinette and the calm feeling I got from the place but it seemed lost on them. We sat by the fountain for a while before we went to find some lunch, I was sad to leave it behind.
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