The newly laid-out and furbished-up gardens make the Place du Carrousel even more attractive than it was when set about with flagged areas, gravelled walks and paved road ways, and, while the monumental and architectural accessories excel the horticultural embellishments in quantity, the general effect is incomparably finer at present than anything known before.
Plans for rebuilding the Place du Carrousel provide for a division into three distinct parts, three grand _pelouses_, _à boulingrins à la Français_, or lawns of a circumscribed area, according to the best traditions of Le Notre, a border of flowers and a few decoratively disposed clumps of flowering shrubs, the whole combined in such a way that the perspective and vista down the Champs Elysées will in no manner suffer. The architect-landscapist, M. Redon, who has been charged with the work, has drawn his inspiration from a series of unexecuted designs of Le Notre which have recently been brought to light from the innermost depths of the national archives. It was a safe way of avoiding an anachronism, and this time a government architect has chosen well his plan of execution.
In later years the question of the reëmbellishment of the Garden of the Tuileries has ever been before the public, but little has actually been changed save the remaking of certain garden plots, the planting of a few shrubs or the placing of a few statues.
The Garden of the Tuileries has a superficial area of 232,632 square metres. It is the most popular of all open spaces in the capital to the Parisian who would take his walks abroad not too far from the centre of things. The chief curiosity of the garden is the celebrated chestnut tree which burst into flower on the day of Napoleon's arrival from Elba--March 20. The precocious tree has ever been revered by the Bonapartists since, though the tree has never performed the trick the second time.
Statues innumerable are scattered here and there through the garden and give a certain sense of liveliness to the area. Some are by famous names, others by those less renowned, but as a whole they make little impression on one, chiefly, perhaps, because one does not come to the Garden of the Tuileries to see statues.