Musée de Cluny: Roman Baths and the Lady and the Unicorn
Why is it significant?
Stop at the railings on the Boulevard Saint-Michel side and look down at the ruins sunk below street level: thick walls of brick and rough stone, arches, a few stubborn trees. These are the remains of the public baths of Lutetia, the Roman town that became Paris, built around the year 200.
Key Facts
| Place | Musée de Cluny: Roman Baths and the Lady and the Unicorn |
|---|---|
| Address | 28 Rue du Sommerard, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85060, 2.34360 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the railings on the Boulevard Saint-Michel side and look down at the ruins sunk below street level: thick walls of brick and rough stone, arches, a few stubborn trees. These are the remains of the public baths of Lutetia, the Roman town that became Paris, built around the year 200.
Inside the museum, one room survived almost whole: the frigidarium, the cold bath. Its vault still rises about fourteen metres above the floor, the way it did when Roman bathers splashed in the cold pool. In the same room stands the Pillar of the Boatmen, carved blocks dedicated to Jupiter by the guild of river boatmen under the emperor Tiberius. It was dug up in 1711 beneath the choir of Notre-Dame, and it is the oldest sculpted monument in Paris.
On top of the Roman walls, at the end of the fifteenth century, the abbots of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny built themselves a town house, with turrets, a chapel and a courtyard that is one of the finest late-medieval residences left in the city. In 1515 it lodged Mary Tudor, the young English widow of King Louis the Twelfth. Legend says she secretly married her true love, the Duke of Suffolk, inside these walls, and that the new king, Francis the First, preferred to let them go home rather than see her married to a foreign prince.
But the real treasure upstairs is a set of six tapestries woven around 1500, The Lady and the Unicorn. In five of them, a lady and a gentle unicorn illustrate the five senses. The sixth carries a mysterious phrase above a tent: to my only desire. Nobody knows what it means. In 1841 the writer Prosper Mérimée found them rotting in a castle in central France, George Sand wrote about them, and in 1882 the state bought them.
The museum, recently renovated, is officially the National Museum of the Middle Ages. From the courtyard, walk up Rue de la Sorbonne, the quiet street climbing the hill to your south, toward the most famous university in France.