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Palais du Senat.

Text and images copyright (c) 1995 Carolyn Daily O'Connor - used with permission.

The 14th of August, 1904, this card identified as Paris - Palais du Senat was written in French advising the recipient that the family on holiday would arrive home on Tuesday at 11 a.m. (confirmer notre arrivee pour la Mardi matin, vers 11 heures.) The palace in the Luxembourg Gardens was begun in 1615 by Marie de Medici who was homesick for Florence. Her son, Louis XIII, banished her to Cologne in 1630 -- after she lost a campaign against Cardinal Richelieu.

Children still sail their boats in the basin in front of the palace. The gardens date back to 1257 when Carthusian monks had a tree nursery and vegetable garden that became known as the most beautiful in Paris. In the 1920s, Hemingway confessed in "Paris: A Moveable Feast" that he poached pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens -- enticing them to his young son's baby carriage with grains of corn, quickly executing that night's dinner before a gendarme could catch him in the act. The carriage hid the bird as it was transported home.

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Updated 05/95