5eme arrondissement.
Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie Reconnaissante
-
To Great Men To Whom The Country is Indebted
,
reads the front of this imposing Greco-Roman structure.
Built in 1755 (and finished in 1789) by the French
architect Soufflot, at the request of Louis XV, the
Panthéon is situated on La Montagne
Ste Geneviève in the Latin Quarter. It
houses a crypt where are to be found the tombs of some
of France's most illustrious literary figures , such as:
Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Malraux, or
Alexandre Dumas (the last one to have been transferred
there, in 2002) as well as political figures such as
Marat, Jean Moulin, Jean Jaurès or scientists
such as Pierre and Marie Curie (the latter being the
only woman buried at the Panthion). Nearby, one can
find the Institut du Monde Arabe, la Sorbonne, and
countless plazas and shops. The interior of the
Panthéon contains a Foucault pendulum, a device
named for the french physicist Jean Foucault who used
the pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.
Our initial visit to the Pantheon was a meeting with
students from a nearby university. We joined the
students for lunch, which included steak tartare, at a
cafe just a block or two away from the
Pantheon. Immediately after lunch we left the Latin
Quarter altogether and headed to Galeries Lafayette for
a somewhat unexpected shopping trip. Ironically, because
of this odd initiation to the area, it was not until
near the very end of the trip that I realized: (1) the
Panthéon was very close to our hotel and (2) the
area surrounding the Panthéon has infinitely more
to explore than what's visible at first glance. There's
always next time...
