destinations
“
love this garden. When you come here you go back in time. Every time I visit it’s special—this
place is a little oasis in the life we live. Paris is full of secret parks very much like this. And I love the
name of the museum as well,” Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the artistic director of Hermès and great-great-
great grandson of the founder of the storied leather goods firm, confides, sitting under a bramble
of roses in the jardin of the Musée de la Vie Romantique.
Dumas, a consummate Parisian, has agreed to share his passion for this hidden treasure—the
garden, where the aromas of flowers and trees remind him of his earliest days in the city of light
interiors
(“You can smell the Seine and the earth,” he sighs) and the museum itself, formerly the 1830s
residence of painter Ary Scheffer, who palled around with Eugène Delacroix, Frédéric Chopin and
George Sand.
