An artistic city on the Loire

An hour or so after arriving in Nantes, I was stalked by a giant mechanical elephant.
Strangely, that’s not an uncommon occurrence in this city on the Loire River, a two-hour train ride southwest of Paris. Nantes is home to Les Machines de l’Ile, an exhibition and testing grounds for the mechanical sculptures produced by the innovative company La Machine.
Think of an amusement park that native son Jules Verne might have built, full of fantastical man-made creatures but no cotton cand