Comédie-Française and the Kiosk of the Night Owls
Why is it significant?
In front of you, on the little square, a metro entrance has been turned into a fairy tale: two small domes made of fat, coloured glass beads, like a necklace dropped from the sky. Behind them, the columns and arched windows of one of the most famous theatres in the world. The beads first.
Key Facts
| Place | Comédie-Française and the Kiosk of the Night Owls |
|---|---|
| Address | 1 Place Colette, 75001 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86320, 2.33610 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Roofs and Royal Secrets: From the Louvre to the Covered Passages of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you, on the little square, a metro entrance has been turned into a fairy tale: two small domes made of fat, coloured glass beads, like a necklace dropped from the sky. Behind them, the columns and arched windows of one of the most famous theatres in the world.
The beads first. This is the Kiosque des Noctambules, the Kiosk of the Night Owls, made by the artist Jean-Michel Othoniel in 2000 to celebrate a hundred years of the Paris metro. One cupola is meant for the day, the other for the night. The square itself is named after Colette, the writer, who spent her last years in an apartment overlooking the Palais-Royal gardens just behind.
The theatre is the Comédie-Française, founded in 1680 by order of Louis the Fourteenth, when he merged two rival companies into one. It is the oldest active national theatre company in the world, and it still works as a troupe: its senior actors are called sociétaires, and they share in the running of the house. Parisians call it simply the House of Molière. On almost any night of the season the repertoire turns: Molière, Racine and Corneille one evening, a modern play the next, with the same actors switching centuries.
Molière himself never set foot in this building, which the company has occupied since 1799. But it keeps his chair. On the seventeenth of February 1673, playing the hypochondriac in his own comedy The Imaginary Invalid, he was seized by a coughing fit on stage, finished the performance, and died at home a few hours later. The wooden armchair he sat in that night is preserved in the theatre.
French actors have a superstition that grew from that night: never wear green on stage. The legend says Molière was dressed in green when he collapsed. Historians shrug, but many theatre people still avoid the colour... and some will not even say the word rope in a theatre, for older sailors' reasons. Now step through the arcade behind the theatre, into the courtyard of the Palais-Royal.