![]() ![]() Towering above the Place Vendome is a bronze column with a statue of Napoleon dressed as Caesar perched on top. Not a single tree disrupts the harmony of this elegant, ho ney-colored testimony toearly city planning. All the buildings are identi cal, with street-level arcades topped by a rhythmic series of pilast ers that rise two stories to a steeply pitched roof with Mansar t windows. Now classified as a historical monument, Ma nsart's facade has remained intact. The lots behind this facade remained vacant, to be gradually sold off to individual builders in Paris's first real estate development. ![]() It was built as a beautiful facade, behind which academic and cultural institutions were to be housed. Originally conceived as an ornament for the Paris of Louis XIV, whose equestrian statue was to be its chief monument, the Place Vendome was designed in 1686 by Jules Hardouin Mansart. Its shop windows, filled with jewelry and luxury goods, reflect the opulence of France's costliest products. Roughly equidistant from the traffic-clogged Places de l'Opera, de la Madeleine and de la Concorde, the Place Vendome is a serene pocket of harmonious architecture and 17thcentury sumptuousness in the hectic heart of Paris. T he Place Vendome resembles an old-fashioned Cartier watch - a slightly enlongated square with beveled corners and an air of wellbred understatement. ![]() SUSAN HELLER ANDERSON is a reporter for the Style section of The Times. ![]()
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