on the park continued until 1878. According to a park legend, on the day of the park official opening someone made a mistake with the plumbing, and the water in the artificial lake drained away in a single day. According to the legend, the park engineer was so distraught that he committed suicide. It is recorded that the lake did in fact drain accidentally in one day in 1878, but there is no record of a suicide. During the 1871 Paris Commune, the park was the site of a military encampment, and witnessed fighting between the army and the Communards. In October 1897, the park was the setting of secret meetings between some of the figures involved in the Dreyfus Affair, including Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy and Max von Schwartzkoppen. During World War II, a French soldier, Pierre Durand, was killed by a bomb in the park. A small monument near the lake remembers this event. In 1942, during the German occupation, one of the main monuments of the park, an 1893 allegorical statue of the French Revolution by sculptor Auguste Paris, was taken away and melted down for its bronze. For many decades the most famous structure in the park was the Palais du Bardo, a reduced-size replica of the palace of the Bey of Tunis, made of wood and stucco, which was originally made for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. It was relocated to the park by park architect Gabriel Davioud, and placed at the highest point in the park (75 meters above sea level) which is also the highest point in the part of Paris on the left bank of the Seine. For many years it was the home of the meteorological station in the park, but the structure, designed to be temporary, began to crumble. The station moved to a new building, and the Palais suffered from decay and vandalism. In 1991 the ruins were destroyed by a fire. Meridian of Paris A stone monument in the park indicates the location of the Meridian of Paris, an imaginary line that passes from north to south through the center of Paris. This line, first defined by French astronomers in 1667, was used as the zero point for longitude on all French maps until 1884, when France agreed, reluctantly, to use longitudes measured from Greenwich Observatory near London instead of Paris. The stone was originally located in the