Parc Monceau
The
area of Paris North of the Champs-Élysées is seldom visited, because it’s
essentially a place where people live.
The western half of the area includes some of the
largest and most elegant private town houses in the world.
Parc Monceau, at the end of a
very smart avenue leading from the Arc de Triomphe, suits these surroundings.
The railings are
gilded, the gates look like those of a palace, the public loo is in an
18th-century rotunda.
There are lots of statues, a waterfall, the usual sandpit and slide with elegant
benches for nannies, and a Naumachia
– a pond surrounded by a colonnade, of a type on which
Ancient Romans used to fight mock battles with galleys.
This one, though, was built as
a ready-made ruin by Haussmann in 1860.
