Ah, this incredible building complex in Paris!

I think you could just about spend your whole life in the Palais-Royal, if you were very, very lucky! It has everything! Beautiful apartments, excellent restaurants, nice shops housed in lovely arcades and a drop-dead gorgeous garden with a pond and fountain. You’d be a princess or prince, to live such a life here!

I’m not a princess, but I’d like to live here anyway.

Above and below are shots of The Courtyard of Honor, with the spheres of the Palais Royal fountain visible. There are two fountains by sculptor Pol Bury, located within this roofless Gallery of Orleans, which separates the Courtyard from the gardens. It consists of two square basins each containing seventeen polished metal spheres of different sizes, with water flowing around them. The polished spheres reflect the architecture of the arcades around them.

The Palais-Royal is a former royal palace located in the 1st arrondissement. The screened entrance court faces the Place du Palais-Royal, opposite the Louvre. Originally called the Palais-Cardinal, it was built for Cardinal Richelieu from about 1633 to 1639 by the architect Jacques Lemercier. Richelieu bequeathed it to Louis XIII, and Louis XIV gave it to his younger brother, the Duke of Orléans. As the succeeding dukes of Orléans made such extensive alterations over the years, almost nothing remains of Lemercier’s original design.

The Palais-Royal now serves as the seat of the Ministry of Culture, the Conseil d’État and the Constitutional Council. The central Palais-Royal Garden (Jardin du Palais-Royal) serves as a public park, and the arcade houses shops. More on the garden in a later post.

Below is a map of the Palais today.

On the other side of the rows of columns is the courtyard. In 1985-86 the Ministry of Culture sponsored two sculptural works in the courtyard; the first, called “Photo-Souvenir – Les Deux Plateaux”, by Daniel Buren, which consists of short columns of various sizes arranged across the courtyard and shown below.

The idea is to create two virtual platforms, without floors; the columns vary in height because of differences in height of the illusionary platforms; some of the column rows are purely horizontal, aligned to the height of the column bases of the gallery of Orleans, while the smaller columns all rise to the elevation of a lower non-existent platform; their variation in height is caused by the difference of elevation in parts of the courtyard. Each column has vertical bands of black and white. This is a very popular place for photographs.