Metro
: Cluny La Sorbonne.
The grim-looking buildings to the
south of rue des Ecoles are the
Sorbonne, the Collège de France - where Michel Foucault taught -
and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, wich numbers
Molière,
Robespierre, Pompidou and Victor Hugo among its graduates, and Sartre
among its teachers. All these institutions are major constituents of
the brilliant and mandarin world of french intellectual activity.
You can have a look around the Sorbonne courtyard without anyone
objecting. The Richelieu chapel, dominating the uphill end and
containing the tomb of the great cardinal, was the first
Roman-influenced buliding in seventeeth-century and set the trend for
subsequent developments.
The Pantheon
Daily : April-Sept 9h30
-18h30. Oct-March 10h00-18h15. RER :
Luxembourg. Metro : Cardinal-Lemoine.
The broad of rue Soufflot provides
a grand perspective on the domed and
porticoes panthéon, Louis XV' thank-you to
Sainte-Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, for curing him of
illness. It was transformed during the revolution into a mausoleum for
the great, and the ashes of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo and Zola, among
others, were transferred here and laid to rest in the vast
barrel-vaulted crypt below. If you have ever read Umberto Ecco, you
might be interested to see a working model of Foucault's pendulum
swinging at the site of the french physicist's 1851 experiment. A video
with headphones in english tells the whole story.
