A Blackberry-enabled walk through the Tuilieries
Paris
Oct. 26, 2005
As the post-conference sessions wound down, I decided to wander out into the brilliant afternoon and make my way along the river down to check on Eddie and Pamela. From my hotel near the Opera, I walked to the Place de la Concorde and then on into the Tuileries Gardens where I stopped for a coffee in the sun.
On towards the Louvre, I did a bit of Blackberrying with folks in Chicago and California, who were just getting warmed up and eager to work. (I didn't think it necessary to tell them where I was working from this afternoon.)
In the big open space between the garden and the Louvre's courtyard with I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, the Tuileries Palace once stood. Henry II's widow, Catherine de Medici, had it built after Henry was killed jousting in the Place des Vosges. In the chaos after the Franco-Prussian war, members of the Paris Commune set it on fire. Rather than rebuild it, Paris decided to tear it down a few years later -- but there's a plot (no doubt hatched by closet royalists) to rebuild the thing and "restore the harmony" of the sight lines between the Louvre, the Champs-Elysees and the Place de la Concorde.
