Institut de France
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Institut de France
From the Right Bank and the Louvre, the pedestrian Pont des Arts entices you across the river and into St-Germain. It’s the most charming of all the city’s bridges and a classic place to loiter, taking in the view upstream to the Ile de la Cité and, on fair days, basking in the heat that seems to soak into its wooden planking. The bridge owes its name not to the artists who have long sold their work here but to the institute that sits under the elegant dome on the St-Germain side. This is the Collège des Quatre-Nations, seat of the Institut de France. Of the Institut’s five acasemies of arts and sciences, the most famous is the Académie Française, an august body of writers and scholars whose mission is to award literary prizes and defend the integrity of the French language against Anglo-Saxon invasion. Recent creations include the excellent word courriel for “email”, but rearguard actions against English terms in science, management and webspeak have been hopelessly ineffective. Becoming an Académicien is the ultimate accolade, and the chosen few are known as Immortels – though ironically, by the time they have accumulated enough prestige to be elected, most are not long for this world. The list of Immortels is hardly avant garde: among the forty-strong group at the time of writing, one was a cardinal and just four were women.
You’d need an invitation to attend one of the Institut’s lectures, but if you ask politely at the gate and present ID and a couple of photos, you may be given a visitor’s pass for the exquisite Bibliothèque Mazarine (Mon-Fri 10am-6pm; free; M° Mabillon/Pont Neuf), where scholars of religious history sit in hushed contemplation of some of the 200,000 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes, surrounded by rocaille chandeliers, marble busts and Corinthian columns.
Next door to the Institut, at 11 quai de Conti is the Hôtel de Monnaies. In the late eighteenth century this was the Mint, but it’s now reduced to housing the Musée de la Monnaie (Tues-Fri 11am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun noon-5.30pm; €5). Its dry collection of coins and coin-making tools might, at a pinch, appeal to those deeply nostalgic for the franc, or Balzac-lovers curious to see the actual coins that slipped so easily through the fingers of young Rastignac, from the gold Louis to humble sou. To the west of the Institut lies the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the School of Fine Art, whose glory days gave its name to an entire epoch. It’s occasionally open for exhibitions of work by its students.
West again, at 5bis rue de Verneuil, is the house where iconoclastic pop legend Serge Gainsbourg lived until his death in 1991 – now owned by his film star daughter Charlotte. Over the years, the garden wall was steadily covered by layer upon layer of graffiti quoting famous lyrics like “God smokes Havanas” and aerosol-sprayed versions of Gainsbarre’s distinctive silhouette. Ever since a catastrophic day in April 2000, however, the Mur de Gainsbourg has received regular coats of whitewash. It hasn’t deterred the fans in the slightest, but to get the full effect you’ll have to hope you don’t visit just after the decorators – the official decorators, that is – have visited.
