La Ménagerie, le zoo du Jardin des Plantes

The iron fence bordering the Jardin des Plantes encloses one of the oldest zoos in the world. It began in seventeen ninety-four, when the revolutionary government moved the royal menageries from Versailles and the Tower of London to this public park. During the Siege of Paris in eighteen seventy, the starving city famously ate almost all the animals held here, including Castor and Pollux, the zoo's two elephants. Today, it remains a collection of nineteenth-century cages and small enclosures for endangered species.