Place des Abbesses: Guimard's Metro & the Wall of I Love Yous

Why is it significant?

Before you climb any higher, look at the metro entrance in the middle of the square. A fan of glass spreads over the stairs like the wing of a dragonfly, held up by green cast-iron stalks that curl like young plant shoots, and above it the word Métropolitain is written in letters that seem to be…

Key Facts

Open the walk

Before you climb any higher, look at the metro entrance in the middle of the square. A fan of glass spreads over the stairs like the wing of a dragonfly, held up by green cast-iron stalks that curl like young plant shoots, and above it the word Métropolitain is written in letters that seem to be melting in the sun.

This is the work of Hector Guimard, the architect who dressed the first Paris metro in Art Nouveau around 1900. Plenty of people at the time found his entrances bizarre and hard to read, and over the decades many of them were torn down. Only two of his original glass-roofed pavilions survive in Paris, and this is one of them. It was moved here from the Hôtel de Ville station in 1974.

Now step into the little garden on the side of the square, Square Jehan-Rictus. On its back wall, a dark blue surface of six hundred and twelve tiles of enamelled lava carries the words I love you, again and again, in some two hundred and fifty languages. The Wall of I Love Yous was created in 2000 by Frédéric Baron, who had spent years asking neighbours and strangers to write the phrase in their own tongue, and by the calligrapher Claire Kito. Look for the red flecks scattered across the blue: they stand for the pieces of a broken heart... which the wall, in its own way, puts back together.

The name of the square remembers women who ruled this hill for more than six centuries. In 1133 King Louis the Sixth and his queen, Adelaide, founded a royal abbey of Benedictine nuns on Montmartre, and its abbesses owned vines, mills and quarries all over the slope. The Revolution closed the abbey, and in 1794 the last abbess, Marie-Louise de Montmorency-Laval, old, deaf and nearly blind, was sent to the guillotine. Across the square, the brick church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre was a quiet revolution of its own: finished in 1904, it was one of the very first churches built in reinforced concrete, and work stopped for years while officials argued about whether it would stand.

Take rue Ravignan, the steep street climbing out of the top of the square, and stop at the little sloping plaza with a green drinking fountain. That is where modern art moved in.