Parks in Paris
2 parks to discover with Bad Historian in Paris.
Luxembourg Gardens — The Grand Bassin
This is the Luxembourg Gardens, and the octagonal pond in front of the palace is the Grand Bassin. Gravel underfoot, green metal chairs everywhere, and — most days — a fleet of tiny sailboats working its way across the water.
Rue de Rivoli / Tuileries Garden
You've reached the Rue de Rivoli — the long straight street with the endless stone arcades. Arch after arch after identical arch, running toward the Louvre one way and the Place de la Concorde the other.
Paris Audio Experiences
Visit these parks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Le Marais: Mansions, Masterpieces & the Best Falafel in Europe
A teenage forger who saved fourteen thousand lives because he knew how to remove an ink stain. A family who paid the biggest tax bill in art history in Picassos — France lets you do that — and the state hung the payment in a mansion Parisians nicknamed Salted after a skimmed salt tax. Marcel Proust's cork-lined bedroom, where he wrote a million words lying down. The prettiest neighborhood in Paris is named after a swamp, its poshest square has been wearing fake painted brick for four hundred years, and the loudest fight on its oldest street is over falafel. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you on this walk is true. Some of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
Montmartre: Geniuses, Gluttons & Goats
A four-foot-eight aristocrat who smuggled absinthe into the most famous nightclub in Europe inside his walking cane. A trapeze acrobat who taught herself to paint by watching Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec work, then became the first woman admitted to the French Salon — she kept a goat that ate her bad drawings. A donkey whose tail painted a masterpiece accepted into an official Paris art exhibition. Montmartre was its own tax-free town until eighteen sixty, and that's the real reason every broke genius in France ended up on this hill. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you on this walk is true. Some of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Grand Boulevards: The Man Who Demolished Paris
One man demolished nineteen thousand seven hundred and thirty buildings to rebuild Paris — including the house he was born in. An opera house with a real lake in the basement, where firefighters practice swimming in total darkness. A pilot who landed a biplane on the roof of a department store, collected twenty-five thousand francs from the store, and got fined sixteen francs by the police. A painter billed three hundred twenty-three thousand francs for a toppled monument — down to the last sixty-eight centimes — who escaped it by dying one day before the first payment was due. And a war hero who flew a plane straight through the Arc de Triomphe with about three meters to spare per wing. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you on this walk is true. Some of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Islands & the River
In nineteen eighty-four, sewer workers found a live crocodile under the oldest bridge in Paris — she got a name, an enclosure decorated to look like the sewers, and a death certificate. A queen waiting for the guillotine got an escape plan smuggled into her cell inside a flower, and answered it by pricking holes in paper with a pin. And an army of carpenters just rebuilt a cathedral roof with hand axes — on purpose, because that's how the first crew did it eight hundred years ago. Two islands, one river, one ice cream shop so confident it closes for the summer. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you on this walk is true. Some of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Left Bank: Thinkers, Drinkers & Dreamers
A secret society that let themselves into the Panthéon after hours, built a hidden workshop under the dome with armchairs and a mini-bar, and spent a year fixing a national clock the government had ignored for forty years — the government sued them, and lost. Ernest Hemingway, too broke for lunch, catching pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens and smuggling them home in his son's stroller. A bookshop owner with zero publishing experience who put out the most important novel of the twentieth century because every real publisher was afraid of it. And a bookstore where thirty thousand travelers have slept for free among the shelves — the rent is one page of your life story. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you on this walk is true. Some of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Postcard Tour
A con man sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal — twice. A handyman stole the Mona Lisa, took a bus home, and kept it under his bed for two years. France traded Egypt a three-thousand-three-hundred-year-old obelisk for a clock that arrived broken and has never been fixed. A hundred and eighty thousand bees survived the Notre-Dame fire by gorging on honey and hugging their queen. Eight of the most photographed places on Earth, and the stories the postcards leave out. Eighty percent of what the Bad Historian tells you is documented history. Twenty percent he invented — you find out which at the end.
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