St-Étienne-du-Mont

St-Étienne-du-Mont Review

This jewel box of a church has been visited by several popes, owing to the fact that Ste-Geneviève (the patron saint of Paris) was buried here before Revolutionaries burned her remains. Built on the ruins of a first-century abbey founded by Clovis, the first King of the Franks, it has a unique combination of Gothic, Renaissance, and early Baroque elements, which adds a certain warmth that is lacking in other Parisian churches of pure Gothic style. Here you'll find the only rood screen left in the city—an ornate 16th-century masterwork of carved wood spanning the nave like a bridge, with a spiral staircase on either side. Observe the organ (dating from 1631, it is the city's oldest) and the marker in the floor near the entrance that commemorates an archbishop of Paris who was stabbed to death here by a defrocked priest in 1857.