Children in Paris
They play on carousels, at puppet theaters, around royal basins with rebellious toy boats
This city is made for children. Its grandeur lends itself to playfulness, as if to compensate for all its stone monuments and for the sheer weight of the city's history.
Consider the Luxembourg Garden with its stately palace, now the French Senate but once the home of Marie de Médici, widow of Henri IV. In 1615, the queen began the construction of the palace and garden to remind her of her native Florence. Four years after its completion in 1627, she was exiled by her son Louis XIII. Now the basin in front of the palace is given over to the famous toy boats for children.
They launch the boats with sticks and watch them sail, waiting for them to come back to another part of the basin's edge, so they can push them onward again. When it's calm, the game is dreamy and placid.
"But the wind picked up the last time we were here," a neighborhood mother tells me. "The children were running fast to catch up to their boats."
The French dote on their offspring, and there's no shortage of traditional entertainments. Despite the erosions of modern life, traditions linger. For any visitor to Paris, with or without kids in tow, the popular attractions and pastimes for children offer a window on the culture.
Family life in Paris revolves around its neighborhoods, and the parks in many arrondissements feature three diversions in close proximity: a playground with swings and climbing lad ders, a puppet theater, and a carousel.
Besides all these, Luxembourg Garden has its antique sailboats, which date back nearly a century. "They need constant repairing," says Claire Credeville, a young woman who runs the boat rental concession from a pushcart. She points to a metal bowsprit bent from bumping the bank of the basin.
The sailboats sometimes get stuck against the side of the fountain in the middle of the basin. Usually a breeze will dislodge them. "But once in a while I have to wade out there," says Credeville. "The water is thigh high."
The oldest attraction in Luxembourg Garden is the vintage carousel with its ring game. The children ride wooden animals: weather-beaten horses, a reindeer, a giraffe, an elephant. As the carousel whirls, children seated on the outer row of animals use sticks to spear metal rings that an attendant dispenses from a rack.
I tell a parent how amazed I am that this carousel has been in operation since 1900. A grandmother from the neighborhood says the ride is at least a decade older than that.
"My grandmother was born in 1883, and she rode on this carousel as a child," says Françoise Bon. "My mother did, too, and so did I, and my children after me. And now my grandchildren. I was never any good at the rings, but my grandchildren are."
Carousels have their roots in the Renaissance, when knights on horseback began spearing rings as a nonlethal form of jousting. It was Louis XIV (1638-1715) who invented the merry-go-round as a ride, and indeed Versailles, where he moved his court in 1682, was the site of an amusement park where his guests could also ride the first roller coaster. After the French Revolution of 1789, the carousel with its ring game migrated to Paris, where it became a fixture for children.
Only a few carousels still feature rings, and the old carousels are vanishing from their neighborhoods, snapped up by museums and collectors. Merry-go-rounds with plastic motorcycles, flashing lights, and other modern touches are replacing the antique rides one by one.
From Luxembourg Garden, I take the metro to see a 1913 carousel at the Champ de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower, where children ride wooden horses with names like Loulou and Baba. Most carousels now run by electric motor, but this one still requires a manual crank. Once the children are strapped to their horses with safety belts, the attendant pushes the carousel to get it going before smoothly maintaining the momentum with the crank.
Many neighborhood children are well practiced at jousting, expertly spearing the rings on every pass. Another grandmother tells me that she remembers as a child stuffed prizes for skillful jousters.
Now the ring game is for bragging rights only, but that seems sufficient. As the carousel slows, a 9-year-old girl shouts, "I got 10," and in triumph she holds aloft her bâton with its booty of rings like doughnuts on a stick.
When it comes to attractions beloved by French children and tourists alike, a visit to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral holds historical and literary pride of place. Victor Hugo immortalized the big tower bell rung by a hunchback enamored of a gypsy girl.
As I make my way up the time-worn stone steps, I wonder how I would avoid the lovesick Quasimodo if he were to suddenly appear scampering toward me from above. There's passage space for only one person at a time on this tight, spiral staircase. Turning back is not an option, because a throng of tourists is plodding up the stairs behind me.
It's 387 steps to the top, the equivalent of a 20-story building. The reward for reaching the viewing rampart is a close view of the gargoyles that watch over Paris, grotesques created in the 19th century by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, when he restored the cathedral. When the tower bell strikes the hour, I feel the vibration down to my toes.
For older children, the catacombs of Paris offer a comparable sense of accomplishment - only instead of an ascent, the visit entails a dark descent to the "kingdom of the dead" opened in the late 18th century to hold the bones from cemeteries that were bursting at the seams.
The French attitude toward death tends to be more philosophical than ours, and school groups routinely tour the catacombs. Think of this underworld as a PG-rated attraction, not for the squeamish, although most adolescents would have trouble resisting the implied dare of the inscription over the portal: "Stop! Here is the Empire of Death."
I find myself becoming inured to the bones stacked like cord wood along one corridor after another. Even so, this is a creepy, clammy place. I'm startled when I come across the figures of two catacombs guards half-hidden in the shadows; the presence of these silent, living sentinels is more unnerving than the dead.
Paris is filled with odd museums off the beaten track. The tiny Museum of Magic on a side street in the Marais district is one that only the most jaded child would scorn. The historical curiosities are modest but fun: magic lanterns, optical illusions, and a magical box used by Houdini to tell the future.
The main attraction is a half-hour show built into the admission price. During my visit, a magician named Daniel, dressed in black, rolls up his sleeves and asks the audience to imagine an era before PlayStation and video games. He then calls up several young volunteers from the audience, who are suitably impressed by his charming sleight-of-hand repertoire of card games and disappearing handkerchiefs.
"Always remember," Daniel solemnly intones as he gazes at the audience, "it is necessary to dream."
For anyone who has dreamed of running away to join the circus, or who simply wants to watch one, Paris has a splendid historical pedigree. The Cirque d'Hiver, in the center of Paris, began in 1852. Jules Léotard invented the flying trapeze here in 1859, and the 1955 film "Trapeze" starring Burt Lancaster is set in this coliseum. Since the 1930s, seven generations of the Bouglione family have reigned at the circus.
"It's a job, a way of life, and a passion," says Francesco Bouglione, director of the Cirque d'Hiver.
The Cirque Diana Moreno Bormann is a mom-and-pop circus located on the city's periphery. On performance days, members of the five-generation circus family greet ticket-holders at the tent's entrance. Richard Bormann, 8, cavorts with the clowns during the show.
Richard attends school on weekdays, and admits that his classmates are "jealous" of his status as apprentice in the family business. His dream is to be an acrobat in the circus.
What do French children eat as treats on a day's outing? At the circus, the cotton candy is called "barbe à papa," or papa's beard.
No matter your age, there's no shortage of treats to choose from around Paris. The ubiquitous pâtisseries are temples of self-indulgence. One of my favorite pastries is the Jésuite, an almond and chocolate confection shaped like a clergyman's hat.
You may want to stroll down Île Saint-Louis licking an ice cream, which is what I did after my visit to Notre Dame. I had a tangy "cassis," or blackcurrant cone from one of the island's many ice cream parlors (Berthillon is a favorite).
Indulgence is not a bad idea now and again. When in Paris, do as the French children do.
Robert Garrett can be reached at robgarrett@comcast.net. 