FROM THE LECOQ GARDEN TO THE VICTORY SQUARE

The garden is named in memory of the botanist Henri Lecoq, who lived in the nineteenth century and whose bust is still in the park. Henri Lecoq was director of the botanical garden, the natural history museum, dean of the Faculty of Sciences and vice-president of the Puy-de-Dôme Central Agricultural Corporation. Beyond this beautiful park, Lecoq also designates the Natural History Museum installed in its particular hotel, right next to it. It presents enriched collections throughout its course. One of his successes was the development of a sweet gland-based coffee, invented with his wife Jean-Baptiste Bargoin. He gave his name to the Archeological Museum and the Textile Arts, which was born with the money he inherited. The façade of his family home is still visible in Ballainvilliers street. By directing you to this street at the top of the garden, impossible to miss the obelisk, placed here in 1801 in honor of General Desaix, former of the Egyptian campaign of Bonaparte, fallen to the battle of Marengo. This street of xviiie style ends with the Halle to the Blés of yesteryear, where the School of Fine Arts had established its neighborhoods before moving from the side of Rabanesse. A passage through Maréchal Joffre and New Carmes streets leads straight to the court of the Blaise Pascal Center, a former school in which Bergson gave classes. For ten years, he has been home to the dance school and the conservatory of music. The road to the old Clermont borrows the rue Abbé Girard and Savaron. It is the corner of antique shops and architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the heart of Pascal Street. On this street, the hotel de Chazerat articulated around an astonishing oval courtyard (xviiie) houses DRAC. The city likes fountains. Among them, the place du Terrail, a copy of his true sister of Volvic, used to feed the beautiful hotels of Pascal Street. Then head to Victory Square at the foot of the monumental cathedral. This esplanade where the tourist house is found seduced in summer by its terraces around the statue of Pope Urban II on the fountain of the Crusades. And in winter, this is where the Christmas market takes its neighborhoods. A little lower, on Lemaigre Square, a ground inscription indicates the location of the old house of Blaise Pascal. In the surrounding area, street names tell you the history and past activities of the neighborhood: Rue des Chaussetiers, the Old Weight of City, Fat, Small Gras, Boucherie…