Place du Tertre and Sacre-Coeur
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Place du Tertre and Sacre-Coeur
The core of old Montmartre, place du Tertre, would be incredibly pretty if it hadn’t so completely fallen victim to its own fame. Today, it’s jammed with tour groups, souvenir stalls and street artists knocking up lurid oils of Paris landmarks from memory. Even the famous trees- planted here in the seventeenth century – aren’t authentic; after surviving numerous attempts to remove them, no fewer than seventeen trees were cut down overnight in November 1991 – apparently on the grounds that they were discased. The new trees planted in their stead are flourishing, but it’ll take more than this to give the place its heart back.
If you want to seek sanctuary from the commercial hustle, head for the church of St-Pierre, between place du Tertre and the Sacré-Coeur, which rivals St-Germain-des-Prés for the title of oldest church in Paris. If one served the Benedictine convent which occupy the Butte Montmartre from the twentieth century onwards, and though much altered, with modern stained glass throughout, it still retains its Romanesque and early Gothic structures. More ancient still are four columns inside the church, two by the west door and two in the choir; they probably date from a Roman shrine that stood on the hill, though their capitals were carved in Merovingian times.
Crowning the Butte is the Sacré-Coeur (daily 6.45am – 10.30pm; free M° Abbesses/Anvers), a weird confection of French and Byzantine architecture whose simply tower and white ice-cream dome has somehow become an essential part of the Paris skyline – Parisian poet Jacques Roubaud has compared it to a big baby’s bottle for the angels to suck. Construction was started in the 1870s on the initiative of the Catholic Church to atone for the “crimes” of the Commune (see box below). The thwarted opposition, which, included Clemenceau, eventually got its revenge by naming the space of the foot of the monumental staircase square Willette, after the local artist who turned out on inauguration day to shout, “Long live the devil!” The interior is more neo – Byzantine nonsense, and apart from its carillon of bells – the largest bell in France, at 19 tones, swing here – the only exciting thing about the Sacré-Coeur is the view from the top (daily: April – Sept 9am – 7pm; Oct – March 9am – 6pm; €4.50). It’s almost as high as the Eifel Tower, and you can see the layout of the whole city – a wide, flat basin ringed by low hills, with stands of high-rise blocks in the southern corner, on the height of Belleville, and at La Défense in the west. The tall tower block in the middle of the city is the Tour Montparnasse and beyond, in the hazy distance, are the high, flat faces of the southern suburban cités.
