Val-de-Grace

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Val-de-Grace

West of rue Mouffetard, you quickly leave other tourist behind as you penetrate the academic heart of the Quartier Latin, lorded over by the Curie and oceanographic institutes and the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, on rue d’Ulm. Definitely more supérieure than normale, its students – dubbed normaliens – are France’s academic elite, bred for te top arts and humanities jobs in universities and lycées’.

It’s a closed world to outsiders, however, and there’s not much point in visiting this corner of the city unless it’s to see the magnificient Baroque church of Val-de-Grace, set just black from rue St-Jacques. Built by Anne of Austria as an act of pious gratitude following the birth of her first son ion 1683, it’s a suitably awesome monument to the young prince who went on to reign as Louis XIV, with its dome and double-pediment façade thrusting skywards.

You can only enter via the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées (Tues, Wed, Sat & Sun noon-6pm; €5 RER Luxembourg), which occupies the old Benedictine convent adjoining the church to the south. Part of a modern hospital complex, the museum is a wearyingly thorough history of military medicine, and its mock-ups of field hospitals and gory details of prosthetic limbs and reconstructive plastic surgery aren’t for the faint-hearted. The church, properly known as the Chapelle St-Louis, is reached via a curved iron grille behind which the Benedictine nuns once watched the Mass. It isn’t quite as large as you’d imagine after seeing the grandiose exterior, but still staggeringly impressive in the Roman Baroque manner. Inside the dome, Pierre Mignard’s wonderful trompe-l’oeil fresco of Paradise depicts Anne of Austria offering a model of the church up to the Virgin.

Around the corner from the hospital, the busy boulevard de Port-Royal forms the boundary with the 13e arrondissement; from her e it’s just a short step west to the bright lights and brasseries of Montparnasse.