Parc saint james

The park you are entering, the Parc de la Folie Saint-James, carries a name that reflects the competitive extravagance of the eighteenth-century French elite. Claude Baudard de Saint James, a wealthy treasurer for the French Navy, commissioned this estate in 1777 specifically to outdo a rival who lived nearby. His instruction to the architect, François-Joseph Bélanger, was famously blunt: do whatever you like, as long as it is expensive. The resulting project became a spectacle of excess, featuring artificial streams, sprawling grottoes, and dozens of ornamental structures that served no purpose other than to signal his immense, and ultimately ill-fated, fortune.