"Place des Victoires" with Kristine

Kristine - Garden of the "Palais Royal"

10:05 AM - Kristine comes from New York. Very sports, she chose to take advantage of her stay in Paris to do a Running Tour and so combine sport and discovery of Paris.
We left Grand boulevards to join the Eiffel Tower.

At first, we ran in more intimate places as the garden of the Palais Royal (above) or the magnificent Parisian covered passages:

We often spoke about them in this blog but it is always a great pleasure to discover these passages again.

The second part of the route led us towards less "confidential" but great amazing places, as the banks of the Seine...

Kristine - Banks of the River Seine (right bank, at the level of the "Jardin des Tuileries")

... or of course, the Eiffel tower:

Kristine - Eiffel tower since the Avenue of the President Wilson

Along the way, we crossed the magnificent "Place des Victoires" with the Statue of king Louis XIV, the Sun King.

Kristine - Place des Victoires

This square, created in 1685, was named "Place des Victoires" in honor of the military victories of Louis XIV. Do you know that the place saw successively four different monuments:

• from 1686 till 1792, a standing statue of Louis XIV
• from 1792 till 1810, a wooden pyramid
• from 1810 till 1828, a statue of General Desaix
• and since 1828, the current statue, an equestrian statue of Louis XIV.

The first statue was melted in 1792 to make canons during the revolution. It represented King Louis XIV standing...

... on a base representing four overcome nations (Spain, the Empire, Brandenburg and Holland):

This base is visible in the Puget courtyard in the Louvre.
We can even see it without entering the Louvre since the passage which connects the street of Rivoli with the Louvre Pyramid (remember the photo 12 in this article: here).

Merci Kristine ! 

The route of the tour: