Court of the Crimson King

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Recently, we celebrated All Saints' Day (fr. La Toussaint). In France, the celebrations aren’t so solemn as in our country. Still, All Saints’ Day is a good opportunity to become engrossed in meditation and think for a while about those who passed away.

            For this reason I would like to propose a trip to the one of the quietest places in Paris. Built on order of King Louis XV in the Latin Quarter at the end of XVIII century, the Panthéon became an eternal shelter for the greatest personalities of Republic since the French Revolution.

source: midnights-in-paris

            I can’t tell you how many times I went there. Every time I had to think, I choose chill and gloom of Panthéon. I simply love the way how the art of Greek architecture was applied to the French taste for monumentality. As the building had been a temple before the French Revolution (and then became a mausoleum and again a church, and… the French can’t decide what do they want!), you can find there large paintings covering all the walls and telling you the story of St Genevieve – the patron of Paris.

            Panthéon has been enrapturing me with its eclecticism. Just beside St Genevieve you can find the sculpture named Autel de la Convention nationale ¬¬prepared by François-Léon Sicard to commemorate The National Convention – first republic government of France. And next to politics and religion, there is the Foucault pendulum hanging from the roof and providing a tangible proof of the rotation of the Earth. This is how Panthéon works – it gives place for each domain of human being. And when you leave the ground floor and go down, you will find (almost) all those people who covered the France with glory.

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I can't stop thinking about the pattern for choosing those greatest of the greatest. Why, for example, I can meet in the Panthéon Hugo, Zola and Dumas but to meet Molier I need to go to Père Lachaise Cemetery? Why I can put the flowers on the grave of Maria Curie-Skłodowska here and to do the same thing for Frédéric Chopin I have to cover a pretty long distance to the cemetery? I do not deny the greatness of the people who are buried in the Panthéon (Voltaire, Rousseau…) but I simply like to puzzle over it, trying to find an explanation, it can be absorbing and helps me to memorize the biographies of French intellectuals, artists and politicians.

I strongly recommend you to visit the Panthéon when the opportunity will come. You will find there the calmness and silence. The mausoleum will give you also an idea how the French perceive the concept of nation and its leaders. What is more, standing so close to the personalities like Victor Hugo or Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives a shiver and assures you that they really existed.

 

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As an addition to this post, I suggest watching the ceremony of transfer of Dumas’ remains to the Panthéon. It was in 2002, the day of 200^th birthday of the writer. Jacques Chirac, who leaded the funeral service, said: "With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles—with you, we dream". Just look, who carried the Dumas’ coffin and how the procession looked like!