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Friday 17 June 2016

The Botanical Gardens, Paris, 1815

The next few posts will be celebrating the release of the fourth Brandon Scandal 'The Wandering Widow' with a few gratuitious pictures to illustrate the notes from the back of the book.
this is the pergola on a hill that Leo speculated might have been a mound of rubbish that couldn't be got rid of it, so they made a garden feature of it



The Botanical Gardens in the 5th Arrondissment were set up under the direction of Louis XIII for the study of medicinal plants by doctors.  The gardens are large and cover many types of plants.  The director of the gardens in 1815, Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck is the founder of the theory of inheritance of acquired traits on which Charles Darwin built his theory of evolution; indeed, Lamark can be said to be the father of the theory of evolution.  He survived the revolution by changing the name of the gardens from Jardin du Roi to Jardin Des Plantes.  A previous administrator and naturalist, George-Louis Declerc, Comte de Buffon, is commemorated by the pergola on the hill of the labyrinth which the characters visited.  

Plan of the gardens.  Our heroes were staying on the Rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire

A French fashion plate.  The pergola here isn't raised on an eminence, but I wonder if the artist was inspired by the Jardin Botanique? 
 
and here we find Leo and Letty in a Paris which still has narrow streets with medieval buildings, before the redesign of the city in 1848 after the year of revolutions

3 comments:

  1. Just finished reading it. Enjoyed it, but a lot of it was also in The Advertised Bride. Interesting seeing the same scenes from a different viewpoint.

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  2. Glad you enjoyed! Yes, the last two chapters came largely from the Advertised bride, and the excerpt about the visit to Darsham. 4000 odd words out of AB were used, but changed slightly to be the different viewpoint. I'm not sure that counts as a lot, being considerably under 10%...

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