The Musée Marmottan Monet sits at the western edge of the Jardin du Ranelagh. On my way to the museum, I always stop for a quick moment by the statue of La Fontaine, one of the garden’s sculptures, to admire it again and marvel at how vividly it captures the fable of the crow and the fox. On the way back, when I’m not in a rush and my head is full of what I just saw, there’s more time to relax in the pleasant garden and take in all its statues.
The Jardin du Ranelagh originally belonged to the park of the Château de la Muette, where a hunting lodge once stood that was later expanded into the private mansion that became the Musée Marmottan Monet. The history of the château, the park, and the museum is told in detail in the article A visit to the Musée Marmottan Monet.
Jardin du Ranelagh, Le jardin du Ranelagh: a romantic Belle Époque atmosphere
Three avenues, named after three artists: Prud’hon, Raphaël, and Ingres, cross the wide, triangle-shaped Jardin du Ranelagh, which feels like it’s really made up of several gardens in one. Many embassies and international institutions sit in the neighborhood, some facing directly onto the garden, so plenty of diplomats pass through here.
Map of the Jardin du Ranelagh’s triangle. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.
Around the garden, streets and lanes let you admire bursts of architectural creativity, grand private mansions, and picturesque houses. On Avenue des Chalets, literally “avenue of the cottages,” a private street that can still be visited on a guided tour, you’ll see ten picturesque villas, two stories tall with pointed roofs. The villas were built for 19th and 20th century bourgeois families who wanted an original home.
The entrance to the avenue. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.
On Villa de Beauséjour, literally “lane of the pleasant stay,” also a private street, residents included the garden’s designer Adolphe Alphand and the singing duo Michel Berger and France Gall. But the real attraction is a set of Russian houses that came from the 1867 World’s Fair. The houses were sold and moved here, and the site is now a listed historic landmark.
One of the Russian houses. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.
The garden is planted with many trees, some common and some rare. The rare ones stand out for their great age, close to two hundred years old, and their impressive height, around thirty meters. In spring, the blossoms of the chestnut and Judas trees are spectacular.
You can sit on a bench or right on the lawns (most of them are allowed), let the museum visit sink in, daydream (which is usually what I do), get lost in a book, or scroll on your phone. There are also fitness equipment and table tennis for adults, bike paths, and playgrounds for kids in the three corners of the triangle. There’s even a pétanque court.
Starting in March, concerts of all kinds take place in the garden, under the dome of a blue kiosk. The big draw for kids is the famous puppet theater of the Jardin du Ranelagh, which opens at the start of spring.
Another unique attraction is a vintage wooden carousel, hand-cranked, that has been running for a hundred and fifty years (in a way, time really does stand still in the Jardin du Ranelagh). You can only find another one like it at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Each child gets a small wooden stick to try to catch rings as the carousel spins. When all the rings have been caught, the carousel stops and the round ends. The child who caught the most rings is crowned the winner.
The ring game on a carousel has its roots in ancient military tournaments of mounted, sword-wielding cavalry. Starting in the days of Louis XIV, the game became popular at the royal court, and Marie Antoinette had a colorful carousel in her English garden at the Petit Trianon in Versailles, where mythological creatures took the place of horses.
You can also take rides on a pony or a donkey, or, more comfortably, in a yellow carriage. The Jardin du Ranelagh is a little slice of paradise for children and adults alike.
Why Ranelagh: the original London model
The garden is named after Lord Ranelagh, who created the Ranelagh Gardens in the Chelsea district of London. Even after the gardens passed into other hands, they kept the name of their original owner. Lord Ranelagh remains famous because of his gardens. Richard Jones, known as Lord Ranelagh, was an Irish earl (1641-1712) who built a career in his country’s parliament and later in the English Parliament, from which he was expelled in 1703 after pocketing a considerable sum from the state treasury.
Lord Ranelagh was known for his wild lifestyle and his passion for both women and men. He also loved building structures and gardens, both for his own use and for the public. He took part in founding and running the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a home for British army veterans that still operates today: four hundred pensioners who still wear the red army uniform live there. Near the Royal Hospital, the Lord also built his own private home, Ranelagh House, and its grounds, the Ranelagh Gardens.
Lord Ranelagh’s house, torn down in 1805, no longer exists, but the gardens remain and today form part of the military retirement home’s grounds. At the end of May, these gardens become a sought-after destination when they host the Chelsea Flower Show. People come from all over the world for this celebration of sight, smell, and taste (there are even edible plants). For safety reasons, the number of visitors is limited to just one hundred fifty-seven thousand.
The lawns of the retirement home come alive in a rainbow of colors and shapes, and the wonderful gardens turn into a wonderland. The show features not only rare flower varieties but also garden designs drawn from different places around the world and different periods in history.
There’s even a Jewish thread in the story of how the Ranelagh gardens changed hands: one of their owners and designers after Lord Ranelagh was Solomon Rieti, a member of the Italian Jewish banking family Rieti, named after the city of Rieti in central Italy.
This distinguished family, whose lineage can be traced back to the 14th century, produced not only philanthropist bankers but also scholars, rabbis, artists, doctors, lawyers, and other public figures. The most famous among them is Benjamin Disraeli, who was the son of Maria, daughter of Rebecca Rieti (1742-1798), niece of Solomon Rieti.
In 1741 the Ranelagh Gardens were bought by a corporation that turned them into a public venue, hosting dance balls and masquerades for a paid admission ticket. At the center of the complex stood a round building with a Rococo-style dome, heated by a fireplace in winter and equipped with an organ, where high-quality concerts were held.
The famous Venetian landscape painter Canaletto, who spent about ten years in London starting in 1746, painted the gardens and the interior of the concert hall twice, in 1754.
Canaletto, the Rotunda of the Ranelagh Gardens. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.
The Ranelagh Gardens were further enriched with a Chinese pavilion over an ornamental canal and winding walking paths. All of London, nobles and commoners alike, flocked there to dance under the open sky, listen to concerts under the dome of the rotunda (in 1765, a nine-year-old Mozart performed there), have fun, and find partners.
The masquerade balls, until then the exclusive domain of aristocrats, opened up to other segments of the population as well. The Ranelagh Gardens, which took the name Ranelagh Pleasure Ground, became famous across the world. It’s worth noting here that the mastermind behind turning the private gardens into a paid public entertainment venue was not Lord Ranelagh himself, but the corporation that bought the place.
Credit goes instead to its members, among them the manager of London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the Irish statesman and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a statesman, architect, and extravagant, free-spending garden designer named Sir Thomas Robinson.
The latter, who was well connected in high society, was appointed head of entertainment. His social connections contributed a great deal to the venture’s success. He even bought himself a house near the gardens and used to invite hundreds of guests to breakfasts and lavish balls. Here is what the complex looked like in the 18th century, up close and from afar, based on engravings by Thomas Bowles:
Monsieur Morissan, the Frenchman who copied the English model on a smaller scale
The dazzling success of the London venue stirred the ambitions of Monsieur Morissan (Sieur Morissan), a painter, interior designer, and firework maker in the king’s service. After obtaining a license, he opened “Little Ranelagh” (Le petit Ranelagh) in 1774, a Parisian imitation of the great London original, designed by the entrepreneur himself: a fenced garden meant for dancing, on land that had belonged to the park of Château de la Muette, with a paid admission ticket, a café, and a restaurant.
The opening ball on July 25, 1774 ended with fireworks, as did every dance evening that followed. Chroniclers of Paris from that period briefly mention an unpleasant experience that soured Monsieur Morissan’s mood. The license he had received was arbitrarily revoked by an authority higher than the one that had granted it to him. They don’t go into how the problem was resolved. And this would not be the only obstacle in his path.
I can picture him, bent by the cruel and hidden hand of history, dismissed, submitting and then holding his head high in turns. Here he is, as the Revolution breaks out, forced to tear down his life’s work; here he is, rebuilding it as the Directory rises to power; here he is, pleading with a unit of Russian soldiers who raided his gardens when Paris surrendered, begging them not to cut down his trees to make firewood. He simply sent them off to the nearby Bois de Boulogne instead…
In 1783 the way the dance business was run changed. A corporation of a hundred people, called the “subscribers,” put up an annual sum to rent the venue, and each of them had the right to sell tickets to their acquaintances.
All the city’s nobles and fashionable women flocked to the garden. The pleasure-loving Count of Artois, Louis XVI’s younger brother, was a regular visitor. The young count, who would later become Charles X, used to bring along his sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette, on his many outings. On one occasion he even showed up at “Little Ranelagh” accompanied, no less, by the queen herself. Urban legend, or solid fact?
Either way, there’s no denying the place’s royal flavor. Guests entered the ballroom through an entrance decorated with Corinthian columns and topped with a dome, with a cloakroom on the left for leaving swords, canes, and hats, and on the right stood Madame Morissan in her well-stocked shop, selling soft drinks of every kind. The ballroom itself, supported by Ionic columns, was surrounded by a raised gallery lined with sofas and mirrors, which guaranteed a good view of the dancers. Daylight poured in generously through twenty-two windows set into the ceiling, and in the evening the hall was lit by lamps and chandeliers.
Several cafés served visitors to the garden. The most sought-after, the café right next to the ballroom, was run by the owner of the place, Monsieur Morissan. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, Monsieur Morissan and his partners went bankrupt, the popular dances weren’t bringing in enough money, but they reopened their business in style once the Directory took power, six years later.
When the European allies who had united against Napoleon and defeated him entered Paris, on March 30, 1814, Russian, Cossack, and Ukrainian soldiers took over the entertainers’ spot. The ballroom became a stable and later a hospital. On June 3 the allies left Paris. In 1818 a hurricane destroyed the buildings of the dance complex. After repairs, the garden reopened as a public dance club. Around 1830 the place enjoyed some success, though it had lost its former glamour.
In 1848 its role finally came to an end. Baron Haussmann’s historic, massive project to expand and renovate Paris drove the final nail into the coffin of “Little Ranelagh,” the life’s work of Monsieur Morissan, now forgotten in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The sound of violins and the rustle of skirts faded away, but a beautiful park designed by the engineer Adolphe Alphand, the garden specialist, commissioned by Baron Haussmann, was inaugurated on the site in 1860. And today, on nice days, the sound of music can be heard again during concerts held under the dome of the blue kiosk. Classical music or heavy rock, famous bands or unknown ones, there are no restrictions.
The statues in the Jardin du Ranelagh
The tribute to Jean de La Fontaine by Alphonse Dumilâtre
In 1889, a giant monument by Alphonse Dumilâtre was shown at the Universal Exposition, featuring not only the crow and the fox but also a lion, a snake, a cat, sheaves of wheat, two doves, and larks. Alongside all of these stood out two winged allegorical figures: Glory and Love. 3,610 kilograms of bronze!
The masterpiece, which rose to a height of seven meters, was moved to the Jardin du Ranelagh in 1891 but was sent to be melted down in 1942. That put an end to a work created thanks to the great efforts of the public committee for promoting La Fontaine’s work. The committee’s acting president was Sully Prudhomme, future winner of the Nobel Prize (1901), a poet who held seat number 24 at the Académie, just under two hundred years after his colleague La Fontaine.
The vice president was Dr. Henri Marmottan, then mayor of the 16th arrondissement, brother of Jules, the owner of the private mansion that today is the Musée Marmottan Monet. Among the supporters on the committee were Victor Hugo and the education minister of the time, Armand Fallières. It took seven years to raise the funds through public donations and by holding concerts and exhibitions.
The City of Paris covered the rest. Today the monument can only be seen in photographs, but on the original base, by Franz Jourdain (the architect who designed the La Samaritaine department store), which remains in the garden, you can still read, carved in stone: This monument, erected thanks to public donations with the support of the State and the City of Paris, was inaugurated on July 26, 1891.
It’s interesting to note that the successful chocolate maker of the time, Guérin-Boutron (1775-1942), which included picture series on the history and culture of France with its products, highly sought after by collectors and still sold today, included among them a picture of Dumilâtre’s statue:
Another bronze statue was sent to be melted down in 1942 and no longer exists. It was “Fleeting Love” (L’Amour fugitif) from 1877, by Ernest Damé:
The tribute to Jean de La Fontaine by Charles Correia
Charles Correia was born in 1930 in Portugal but came to France with his parents at the age of one and went on to become a very successful sculptor. He was one of the few French sculptors of his time who made a living from his art. In 1988, during a visit to his homeland, he was killed in an accident.
The place of the giant, figure-packed monument by the sculptor Jean Dumilâtre, which was sent to be melted down by the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation, is now taken by a simpler monument designed by Correia. This statue, also made of bronze like its predecessor, was placed in the Jardin du Ranelagh in 1984 and shows Jean de La Fontaine together with just the crow and the fox.
The crouching fox looks up hungrily at the round piece of cheese in the crow’s beak. The crow, bent down toward the fox below, listens with pleasure to the flattering words coming from its mouth. In another moment the vain crow will drop the cheese from its beak, falling victim to the fox’s cunning, who knows just which string to pluck to trap its prey.
The piece of cheese is like a kind of currency the crow is forced to pay the fox. And as if that weren’t enough, Jean de La Fontaine puts the moral of the fable right into the fox’s own mouth. The lesson is worth the price, the fox throws scornfully at the embarrassed crow, piling humiliation upon humiliation.
The statue is arranged in three tiers, which perfectly captures the power dynamics between the characters. The one presiding over it all, pulling the strings, is the fable’s own author, Jean de La Fontaine, a master of countless tricks. He’s the one who chose, from the material his predecessor Aesop provided, the fables he wanted to rework as he saw fit. He’s the one who maneuvered his characters and put words in their mouths. He’s the one who, through his choice of words and his crafting of literary devices and overall structure, worked many tricks on his readers, both obvious and hidden, guiding them toward understanding the fable while also, in the process, outwitting royal censorship. Below him stand the two opposing figures: the crow above, on the statue’s base (in the fable, as we know, it enjoys the advantage of height, perched on a tree), and the fox below.
The crow’s position of power, both in terms of space and ownership of the coveted object, flips completely, without the fox ever saying a single word. From ruler to ruled, without any physical violence, simply through the wit and persuasive power of its rival, who managed to turn disadvantage into advantage.
Other interesting statues
Another sensual statue, calmer this time, made of marble and far less unsettling than “Fleeting Love” that we saw earlier, is called “Méditation,” created in 1882 by the well-known sculptor Tony Noël:
The marble statue “Cain” (Caïn), 1871, by Michel-Joseph Caillé, brings back a sense of menace by showing Cain trying to hide, the way criminals do:
A marble relief by Georges Bareau, depicting the vision Victor Hugo had while writing his great collection of poems “La Légende des siècles” (“The Legend of the Ages”), continues to tell the story of humanity. The relief is called “La Vision du poète” (“The Poet’s Vision”). On the left, the poet, whose face resembles Hugo’s own; on the right, the wall he saw before him, a tangled, somber mosaic of all kinds of figures rising from the depths up to the sky.
Georges Bareau, The Poet’s Vision. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.
This marble relief, created by the sculptor Bareau in 1902, captures Hugo’s own words in the preface titled “La Vision d’où est sorti ce livre” (“The Vision from Which This Book Emerged”), 1877:
I had a dream: the wall of the centuries appeared before me.
(…)
A chaos of beings, rising from the abyss to the firmament!
J’eus un rêve: le mur des siècles m’apparut.
(…)
Chaos d’êtres, montant du gouffre au firmament !
The relief was created, as mentioned, by the sculptor Georges Bareau, commissioned by the City of Paris for the centennial celebrations of Hugo’s birth. The work, which sat for quite a while in the city’s storage, was only placed in the Jardin du Ranelagh in 1985.
And just as the poet draws images from his imagination out of humanity’s story, somewhere between myth and history, so too does the fisherman pull up, on his hook, the severed head of Orpheus, the musician and poet, greatest of all in the Greek mythological world. This scene is immortalized in the 1882 marble statue by Léon-Eugène Longepied, called “Pêcheur ramenant dans ses filets la tête d’Orphée” (“Fisherman Pulling Up the Head of Orpheus in His Nets”):
Just as Cain murdered his brother out of jealousy, the priestesses of Bacchus murdered Orpheus out of jealousy for his total devotion to Eurydice. In a frenzy of bloodlust, the drunken priestesses also killed their own husbands, and in their fury tore Orpheus’s body to pieces after he had rejected their advances, throwing his head into the Hebrus River (known today as the Evros).
The severed head, together with the singer’s magical lyre, a gift from the god Apollo, drifted on the river’s currents and reached the shore of the island of Lesbos. There’s some comfort in the rest of the legend, which tells how the song of a nightingale rises eternally from Orpheus’s tomb, built in a cave, and from the statues that depict him. The artist’s eternal soul goes on playing and singing even after his death, renewing nature and awakening love. Death has no power over the goodness of music.
Want to stay about a fifteen-minute walk from the Jardin du Ranelagh?
You can rent a spacious apartment on Avenue Paul Doumer, where Zvi Chazanov (the Francophile) stayed in April 2025. It’s a fully furnished, luxurious apartment from which you can head out and discover the charms of the 16th arrondissement. For more information, click this link.
Alternatively, you can rent another spacious apartment from the same owners, on Rue Nicolo, where this article’s author, Dr. Orna Liberman, stayed in April 2023. From the apartment, you’re just a few minutes’ walk from the Jardin du Ranelagh and the Musée Marmottan Monet. In this link, Orna shares her recommendations for the area.
Did you enjoy this article? Want to read more by Orna Liberman?
- Adolphe Alphand, the engineer who designed the Jardin du Ranelagh, also designed Square Montholon, whose eventful story you can read in the article Square Montholon: A Charming Parisian Corner with a Fascinating Story
- You’re welcome to read the second part of this article, which offers you a rare walk along a former railway line turned into a planted path, Paris: Green Walks in the 16th Arrondissement
- On the connection between France and England, you’re welcome to read the article The Affair of the Nesle Tower: Adultery at the Royal Court
The garden is also the starting point of the walking route through the Auteuil neighborhood, which leads from here down to the buildings of Hector Guimard and the old village feel of rue d’Auteuil.
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