Saint-Étienne-du-Mont: Pascal, Racine and the Midnight Steps
Why is it significant?
Look at this church's facade and try to decide what century it belongs to. A Gothic rose window, Renaissance columns, a triangular pediment stacked on top, and a slim bell tower squeezed in on the side.
Key Facts
| Place | Saint-Étienne-du-Mont: Pascal, Racine and the Midnight Steps |
|---|---|
| Address | Place Sainte-Geneviève, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84660, 2.34800 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at this church's facade and try to decide what century it belongs to. A Gothic rose window, Renaissance columns, a triangular pediment stacked on top, and a slim bell tower squeezed in on the side. It took more than a hundred and thirty years to build, from 1494 to the 1620s, and you can see every change of fashion along the way.
Inside is something no other church in Paris still has: a rood screen, a jubé. It is a stone bridge across the nave, carved like lace, with two spiral staircases curling up either side. Rood screens once separated clergy from congregation in every great church, and nearly all of them were torn down. This one, from the sixteenth century, survived.
Here too lies what remains of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint who, the story goes, kept Attila the Hun away from Paris with her prayers in 451. Revolutionaries burned her relics in 1793; only fragments survived, and they are venerated in a shrine here. Two giants of French thought are buried in this church as well: the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, and the playwright Jean Racine. And in January 1857, the Archbishop of Paris was stabbed to death inside, during a service, by a priest who had been suspended from his duties.
Now walk around to the side of the church, on Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, and find a few worn steps by a side door. In Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris, from 2011, the hero sits right here as the bells strike twelve, and an old car pulls up full of revellers who carry him off to the Paris of the 1920s, to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Picasso. People come every night to sit on the same steps and wait.
No car, no Hemingway? Then go and find him yourself. Walk down Rue Descartes, southward, a few minutes, to a little square with a fountain where the real young Hemingway lived, poor and happy.