Place du Parlement

This guide to Place du Parlement in Bordeaux follows the sculptor Claude-Clair Francin, hired in seventeen fifty-nine to build the square's showpiece: a fountain finished entirely in marble, unlike anything else in Bordeaux. It traces what happened after he simply stopped work five years in, apparently unpaid, leaving the fountain half-built at the center of a market square for over a decade until poultry sellers moved their stalls in and officials tore the remains down. Its ornamental water jets were hauled off to a nearby street, where they reportedly just got in everyone's way.