Night-Scented

Marie de Medicis had acquired a plot of land belonging to the duke of Luxembourg to the south of the Latin Quarter and called into being a stately palace and extensive gardens for herself and her son, Louis XIII. Now home to the Senate, the upper house of the French parliament, and the capital’s most prized public park, it bore the name of its original owner – the Jardin du Luxembourg – rather than that of the queen who had given it its definitive form.