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Snake fountain in Paris

 


Opposite the entrance gate of the Paris Garden of Plants (Jardin des Plantes) is the snake fountain. Actually, it is called the Cuvier Fountain in memory of Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist.  

 

On the corner of Rue Cuvier in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the site was formally the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Victor which had a fountain called the Alexander Fountain or the Brush Fountain. The prison, including the fountain, was demolished in 1840.

 

French architect Alphonse Vigoureux (1802-1853) was the water inspector for the city of Paris. He created the snake fountain from 1840-1846 to pay respect to Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) to replace the Alexander Fountain. Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic – Baron Cuvier – is best known as the “father of paleontology” and establishing that species extinction was a fact in his work Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813). The French government listed it as a historical monument in 1984.

 

On top of snake fountain is a young woman, sculpted by Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1852), carrying tablets inscribed with Cuvier’s motto, which comes from a Virgil verse: “To know the cause of things.” Next to the woman is a lion, crocodile, and amphibious marine animals.


Underneath the woman is an ornamental fountain created by French sculptor Pierre-Jules Pomateau. It has a horizontal band – a frieze with the heads of animals and one human; a semi-circular wall; and three columns. Between each column is a snake fountain – three snake heads with a waterspout in each mouth. 

 

Whenever I pass it, I think of it as the Snake Fountain. 





 









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MARTINA NICOLLS


MARTINA NICOLLS is an Australian author and international human rights-based consultant in foreign aid evaluations and audits, education, psychosocial support, resilience, peace and stabilization, and communication, including script writing and voice work. She lives in Paris. Her latest books are: If Paris Were My Lover (2025), Tranquility Mapping (2025), Moon, Mood, and Mind Mapping Tracker (2025), and Innovations within Constraints Handbook (2025). She is the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). 


 























 

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