Pantheon and St-Etienne-du-Mont
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Pantheon and St-Etienne-du-Mont
The most visible of the Left Bank’s many domes graces the hulk of the Panthéon (daily: April-Sept 9:30am-6:30pm; Oct-March 10am-6:15pm; €6.40; RER Luxembourg/M° Cardinal-Lemoine), the towering mausoleum which tops the Montagne Ste-Genevieve. It was originally built as a church by Louis XV, on the site of the ruined Ste-Genevieve abbey, to thank the saint for curing him of illness and to emphasize the unity of the church and state, troubled at the time by growing divisions between Jesuits and Jansenists – not only had the original abbey church entombed Geneviève, Paris patron saint, but it had been founded by Clovis, France’s first Christian king. The building was only completed in 1789, whereupon the Revolution promptly transformed it into a mausoleum, adding the words “Aux grands homnies la patrie reconnaisante” (“The nation honours its great men”) underneath the pediment of the giant portico. The remains of French heroes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo and Zola are now entombed in the vast, barrel-vaulted crypt below, along with more recent arrivals: Marie Curie (the only woman), with her husband Pierre (1995), writer and landmark culture minister Andrè Malraux (1996), and the novelist Alexandre Dumas (2002), the last to be panthéonizé here, with much-loved Petit Prince. He’d have a full-scale monument, but because his plan was lost at sea he fell foul of the rule that without a body part to inter you cannot be pantheonized.
The Panthéon’s interior is rather bleak, but worth a visit for its oddly secular frescoes and sculptures, and monumental design, originally conceived as a combination of the virtues of Classical Greek and Gothic construction. You can also see a working model of Foucault’s Pendulum swinging from the dome (the original is under glass at the Musée des Arts et Métiers – see p.120). The French physicist Léon Foucault devised the experiment, conducted at the Panthéon in 1851, to demonstrate vividly the rotation of the earth. While the pendulum appeared to rotate over a 24-hour period, it was in fact the earth beneath it turning. The demonstration wowed the scientific establishment and the public alike, with huge crowds turning up to watch the ground move beneath their feet. In summer (June-Sept 10am-5:30pm; free), you can join regular guided tours, which take small groups up into the vertiginous cupola and out onto the high balcony running round the outside of the dome; as you’d expect the views are spectacular.
Sloping downhill from the main portico of the Panthéon, broad rue Soufflot entries you west towards the Luxembourg gardens (see p.145). On the east side of the Panthéon, however, peeping over the walls of the Lycée Henri IV, look out for the lone Gothic tower which is all that remains of the earlier church of Ste-Genevieve. The saint’s remains, and those of two seventeenth-century literary greats who didn’t make the Panthéon, Pascal and Racine, lie close at hand in the church of St-Etienne-du-Mont (Mon noon-7:45pm, Tues-Fri 8:45an-noon & 2-7:30pm, Sat 8:45-noon & 2-7:45, Sun 8:45am-12:15pm & 2:30-7:45pm; RER Luxembourgh/M° Cardinal-Lenoine), on the corner of rue Clovis. The church’s façade is a bit of a hotchpotch, but it conceals a stunning and highly unexpected interior. The transition from Flamboyant Gothic choir to sixteenth-century nave would be startling if the eye wasn’t distracted by a strange high-level catwalk which springs from the pillar to pilla\r before transforming itself into a rood screen which arches across the width of the nave. This last feature is highly unsual in itself; most French rood screens were destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts, reformers or revolutionaries. Exceptionally tall windows flood the church with light, while the west end of the nave is filled by an elaborate carved organ loft.
Further down rue Clovis, a hug piece of Philippe-Auguste’s early thirteenth-century city wall emerges from among the houses.
