Cluny and Panthéon

Today I visited the Latin Quarter again. First stop was the incredible Musée Cluny. The building that houses the museum, the Hôtel du Cluny, originally belonged to the abbots of Cluny; its long history of construction and renovation began in the 14th century. The museum also incorporates part of a ruined Roman bath complex from the 3rd century, the Thermes de Cluny. So the space itself is impressive, and the museum is full of medieval artifacts, the most famous of which is a series of six tapestries featuring a lady and a unicorn. These are stunning; I had no idea how rich and complex they would be to see in person. A large, high-ceilinged, and evidently very old room contains some of the heads from the statues of the kings of Judah on the facade of Notre Dame, which were knocked off during the Revolution. The statues on the facade currently have their heads, so I assume they were later replaced, but the original heads were kept here. In this room, full of fragmented stone bodies and often damaged stone heads, two or three singers were evidently preparing for a performance. I got to hear them practicing a couple of songs in that room; they were singing music that was made for those great resonant stone spaces, and it sounded fantastic.

Surfeited with medieval history, I ate lunch in the nearby Place de la Sorbonne and then visited the Panthéon, a huge domed building, originally a church, that now commemorates France's great men and women. It is an impressive place: massive pillars out front, a monumental interior full of memorials, paintings, and sculpture. This was the site of one of Foucault's demonstrations of the rotation of the earth using a pendulum, and the building contains a Foucault pendulum that uses an exact replica of Foucault's original weight. Of all the things in the Pantheon, though, I think the one that moved me the most was the tombs of the people buried in the crypt. I visited those of Marie and Pierre Curie, Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Louis Braille, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Burial there is a high honor for those who have contributed greatly to the country. I guess this is roughly equivalent to Westminster Abbey in England, but I realized that the U.S. doesn't really have such a place to honor its best and brightest in the arts and sciences, although for political and military leaders, there is Arlington Cemetery. Have we just not had time as a country to develop a customary place to honor artists and scientists?