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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Long before Disneyland opened on its outskirts, the French capital gave children their own moveable feast.
Aug 31, 1999 | It's called the City of Light, but as my husband, young daughter and I discovered when we moved here three years ago, Paris is also a city of carousels. One of our favorites spins in a corner of the Champ de Mars, the old military parade ground, between a playground and a small refreshment stand. On Wednesday afternoons and weekends, two dozen hand-painted wooden horses bearing names like "Baba" and "Bijou" emerge from their "stable" (actually a locked green shed) to be suspended from hooks off a circular wooden frame. Built in 1913, this antique carousel remains powered by a simple hand crank. Pint-sized riders can request a wooden stick or "baguette" to joust with the ring man, who stands on a platform loading dozens of tin circles into a medieval-looking feeder.
Visit the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or all those Impressionist masterpieces in the Musie d'Orsay? Our 6-year-old daughter, Sophie, still prefers the ring game. Fortunately, almost every park and public square in the French capital features a "manhge," or merry-go-round, including at least a dozen survivors from the Belle Epoque. We've evolved a family quid pro quo: An afternoon of museum time or other culturally enlightening indoor fare, or simply a long, lingering Paris walk, earns a side trip to a carousel.
We like the manhge in Luxembourg Garden, whose turn-of-the-century, weathered wooden menagerie includes a camel, an antlered reindeer and a solemn gray elephant, none much larger than a golden retriever. While my husband and I munch sugar crepes and keep lookout for French movie stars and their offspring, Sophie buckles a leather safety strap around her waist and concentrates on spearing rings at high speed (an electric motor has replaced the carousel's original hand crank). In the leafy Jardin des Plantes, we'll follow a tour of the the newly renovated Natural History Museum, the Mineral Museum or the dinosaur-filled Hall of Paleontology with a turn on a contemporary merry-go-round of extinct and endangered creatures featuring a wistful Dodo, a bright green Tyrannosaurus Rex and a leaping phalanx of proto-giraffes. At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, flower-draped donkeys cavort with palanquin-bearing lions under a midnight-blue canopy painted with golden stars. Just across the Iena bridge, not far from the Trocadero and the Museum of Mankind, we sometimes find newlyweds posing on a double-decker carousel of prancing horses, wooden swings and rocking sea-scallop carriages.
At eight to 10 francs (about $1.30-$1.60) per ride, an afternoon of Paris carousel-hopping isn't cheap, especially when all three of us want multiple spins. But just as on the Metro, you can usually buy a packet of tickets at a discount. On our outings my backpack is a jumble of plastic tokens. Just as spearing rings has gotten easier with practice for Sophie (current record: 17), I've developed a system of color-coded envelopes that help me keep track of which ticket goes with which merry-go-round in which arrondissement.
Our carousel expeditions brighten the long, gray winters, and Christmas brings a special treat: The Mairie of Paris, which allocates citywide merry-go-round concessions to private owners, offers a week of unlimited free rides between Christmas and New Year's as a holiday gift to "les citoyens." Foregoing museums altogether, we head for the Place Willette, at the foot of the Sacre Coeur steps, to line up for free turns on an Italian-built carousel, whose painted ceiling features Venetian canals, but whose stampeding horses (made of plastic) boast pink and blue eagle feathers and an American Wild West theme. In the Place Saint-Sulpice, Philippe Campion, head of an amusement park dynasty, sets up a merry-go-round built in England in 1871, at the beginning of the steam era, a precursor of the giant "salon" carousels popular at the end of the 19th century. The elaborately decorated wooden chargers have wild, flaring eyes and double-seated saddles, and they rotate clockwise, contrary to their continental counterparts. This summer, as always, this migrating merry-go-round has reappeared in the Tuileries Garden, site of an annual July-August carnival called the Foire du Trone.
American cities have one or two merry-go-rounds, if any. In Paris, carousels are so much a part of the landscape that you find them not just in parks and squares but inside supermarkets and fast-food restaurants like McDonald's. When our list of outdoor favorites reached 25, I began to wonder, why such a cornucopia? The answer, it turns out, has to do with a constellation of factors, including France's reverence for tradition, a clement Parisian climate, a habit of indulging small children and, of course, history.
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