West of Paris is the small village Giverny. Here you'll find the famous gardens and house where the painter Claude Monet lived. Most of his paintings were painted in his beautiful gardens with flowers, the painting with the Japanes Bridge is world famous. Like Marcel Proust said in Le Figaro [June 15, 1907]: "If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink."