Latin Quarter and Montparnasse: The Midieval Museum and Paying Respects to France's Famous Departed

Today I went to the Right Bank of Paris, to the Latin Quarter and to Montparnasse.  I started a the Musée National du  Moyen Age/Thermes de Cluny, the National Museum of the Middle Ages.  It began life as the bathhouse of the ancient Roman settlement, but then a rich 15^th-century abbot built his mansion on top of them.  It was a residence for other famous Middle Ages celebrities until it was seized by the state during the Revolution.  In 1833, it was rented to Alexandre du Sommerard, who adorned it with medieval artwork.  After his death, the government bought the building and the collection.  It is filled with thousands of artifacts from the period.  There are arms and armour, hunting equipment, manuals on war dating back to the period, many household items such as cooking ware and innately carved furniture, tapestries, and thousands of religious artifacts from the Middle Ages.  It really showed how much religion and warfare were entwined into the everyday fabric of medieval society.

My second stop was the Pantheon.  Originally a church dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, St. Genviève, it was constructed as a thanksgiving after King Louis XV recovered from a mysterious illness.  It was designed by the architect Soufflot in the form of a Greek cross with a dome.  When Soufflot died, his pupil Rondelet completed the work.  After the revolution, the church was converted to become a pantheon, or final resting place, for the Great Men of France.  The main level is very imposing, with high-vaulted ceilings depicting religious iconography.  Likewise the walls have immense murals depicting the lives of St. Genviève, St. Jeanne d’Arc, Clovis and Charlemagne.  There are immense sculptures as well, depicting themes from the French Revolution, including a giant piece where the alter once stood of twenty or more armed individuals and bearing the inscription: Vivre libre ou mourt! (Live free or die!).  The crypt was moving.  Inside are the final resting places of very famous French persons.  There is Léon Gambetta, who was the leader of the Republican legislative opposition during the time of the Second Empire, who declared the Third Republic, and who was instrumental in its founding and early days.   Opposite the antechamber from each other are the two great writers of the Enlightment: Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who between them shaped a great part of the literature on modern republican and democratic government respectively.  Here as well are scientist-couple Pierre and Marie Currie.  There is a section devoted to persons of the First Empire, generals and statesmen.  In a long tunnel that dissects two branches, there is a list of the names of every person who died in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the first of which overthrew the Bourbon Restoration in favor of a constitutional monarchy after the loss of several constitutional freedoms and the second overthrew that constitutional monarchy and replaced it with the Second Republic.  There are inscriptions of the names of all of the writers who died serving in both World Wars.  Also present are Louis Braille, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas.  Louis Braille, of course, invented the Braille alphabet which permits the blind to read.  Emile Zola was one of the first to come to the defense of Dreyfus when he was unjustly accused of treason due to being Jewish.  Victor Hugo is the national poet of France and is famous for his politics and his writing.  Alexandre Dumas is likewise famous for his writing (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask, to name a few).  He also had a very active life campaigning for liberty and human rights.  He died at the age of 68 during the Franco-Prussian war, fighting to stop the German advance on Paris.  The experience of the Pantheon is very hard to describe, but it is very emotional and you leave feeling very overwhelmed.

Leaving the Latin Quarter, I traversed the Luxembourg Gardens on my way to Montparnasse.  My goal was to get a panoramic view of Paris from the top of the tower there, but the viewing conditions weren’t the best (foggy and snowy) so I decided to give it a skip and come back on a clearer day.  I then wandered around until I found the Montparnasse Cemetery, final resting place for a number of very famous people, including Simone de Beauvoir and his lover Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, Dreyfus, Alphonse Crémieux, and Man Ray. 

I also searched for the catecombs which lie beneath Paris and of which there are tours, but I gave up and instead went to look for the Eugène Delacroix Museum.  I spent two hours looking for the Eugène Delacroix Museum.  I found the Seine, my first indication that I had gone too far, and I wandered around the 6^th Arrondissement for a while, looking for a place that was open and had a cheap cup of coffee, because it was snowing pretty heavily and I was pretty frozen.  The problem with France, however, especially in the more non-commercial places, is that nothing is open on Sunday.  There were numerous boutiques that I had wanted to browse inside of, offering antiques or old books, but sadly they were closed.  Many of the cafés that would have been less expensive were closed as well, leaving only chic, expensive restaurants.  So I found my way back to my hostel, wrote this update, and am now going to go look for dinner.