Patrick Comerford
On our last day in Paris, we returned to the Saint-Germain-des-Près district, having savoured the literary legacy of the area the previous evening, stopping in Les Deux Magots and raising our glasses to the previous clientele, including James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway.
We were back in the 6th arrondissement to stroll through the back streets with their art studios, to see the Luxembourg Garden, to taste authentic French crepes, and to visit the Church of Saint-Sulpice (Église Saint-Sulpice).
Saint-Sulpice is the third largest church in Paris – only slightly smaller than Notre-Dame and Saint-Eustache. The church is as impressive from the outside as it is inside, and its twin towers dominate the square in front of the church, the Place Saint-Sulpice.
Many people point out that Saint-Sulpice is similar in appearance to Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. Inside, the features include the nave, the Lady Chapel, a statue of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, the sacristy and its wood-panelling, murals by Eugène Delacroix and Cavaillé-Coll’s organ. The church also has an elaborate 18th century gnomon, once used to determine the equinoxes and the precise date of Easter.
Saint-Sulpice is also one of the locations where Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was filmed. The bizarre appearance of the Gnomon of Saint-Sulpice in the film has brought curious but seemingly unwelcome visitors in large numbers to the church.
The church is the second one on the site dedicated to Saint Sulpitius (or Sulpicius) the Pious, a seventh century Bishop of Bourges who died in 644. It was built over a 13th century Romanesque church, to which additions had been made over the centuries up to 1631.
The new church was the vision of Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657), the parish priest who founded both the Society of Saint-Sulpice, a clerical congregation, and a seminary linked to the church. Christophe Gamard drew up the designs in 1636, Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII, laid the first stone, and building work began in 1646.
The work was disrupted by a series of civil wars from 1648 to 1653 known as Fronde. Only the Lady Chapel had been built by 1660, when Daniel Gittard draw up a new design for most of the church. He completed the sanctuary, ambulatory, the chapels in the apse, the transept and the north portal (1670-1678), but building then stopped due to a lack of funds.
Gilles-Marie Oppenord and Giovanni Servandoni were then called in. They followed Gittard’s designs closely and supervised further construction, including the nave and side chapels (1719-1745). The decoration was carried out by the brothers Sébastien-Antoine Slodtz (1695-1742) and Paul-Ambroise Slodtz (1702-1758).
Oppenord created the north and south portals of the transept in 1723-1724, with an unusual interior design for the ends: concave walls with nearly engaged Corinthian columns instead of the pilasters found in other parts of the church. He also built a bell tower on top of the transept crossing. But when its weight threatened to collapse the building, it was removed.
After his potentially disastrous miscalculation, Oppenord was relieved of his duties as an architect and was restricted to designing decorations.
Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gergy, then priest of Saint-Sulpice, commissioned a gnomon in the church in 1727 to help him determine the time of the equinoxes and the date of Easter. A meridian line of brass was inlaid across the floor and ascending a white marble obelisk, almost 11 metres high, at the top of which is a sphere surmounted by a cross. The obelisk is dated 1743.
As we walked around the church, a funeral was about to begin. Rather than intrude on the grief of a family, we missed out on looking for the gnomon and the small opening with a lens in the a south transept window that shines a ray of sunlight onto the brass line. At noon on the winter solstice (21 December), the ray of light touches the brass line on the obelisk. At noon on the equinoxes (21 March and 21 September), the ray touches an oval plate of copper in the floor near the altar.
The gnomon was built by the English clock-maker and astronomer Henry Sully. It was also used for various scientific measurements. This rational use may have protected Saint-Sulpice from being destroyed during the French Revolution.
The Italian-born architect Giovanni Servandoni (1695-1766) won a competition to design the west façade in 1732. He had moved to Paris from London in 1724 and his new design was inspired by Sir Christopher Wren’s entrance elevation of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London.
His pedimented façades were mostly complete by 1739, but still without the two towers. But his pediment was criticised for being classically incorrect because its width was based on the entire front rather than the size of the order on which it rested. During this period, the Marquis de Sade was baptised in Saint-Sulpice in 1740.
Servandoni’s work had not been completed when he died in 1766. Oudot de Maclaurin later erected the twin towers to Servandoni’s design. Servandoni’s pupil Jean Chalgrin rebuilt the north tower (1777-1780), making it taller, and modified Servandoni’s baroque design to one that was more neoclassical. He also designed the decoration of the chapels under the towers.
The French Revolution intervened, and the south tower was never replaced. Pierre Victor, Baron de Besenval de Brunstatt, whose failures led to the storming of the Bastille in 1798, was buried in the church in 1791.
During the Revolution, Saint-Sulpice became a place for worship of the ‘Supreme Being’. A sign over the centre door of the main entrance declared: Le Peuple Français Reconnoit L’Etre Suprême Et L’Immortalité de L’Âme, ‘The French people recognise the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul’. During the Directory, Saint-Sulpice was used as a Temple of Victory.
Inside the church, at either side of the entrance, are two halves of an enormous shell (tridacna gigas). They were given to King Francis I by the Venetian Republic in the 16th century. They rest on rock-like bases sculpted in the 18th century by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and are used as holy water fonts.
The Lady Chapel, rebuilt by Servandoni in 1729, was badly damaged in 1762 in a fire that destroyed the nearby Foire Saint-Germain, and the chapel and its baroque interior were designed by Charles de Wailly in 1774.
Pigalle designed the large white marble statue of the Virgin Mary in the Lady Chapel. Pigalle’s work replaced a solid-silver statue by Edmé Bouchardon that disappeared during the Revolution. It is made of silverware donated by parishioners and is known as ‘Our Lady of the Old Tableware.’ The stucco decoration around the Lady Chapel is by Louis-Philippe Mouchy.
A fresco by François Lemoyne depicts the Assumption (1734) and has been restored several times since.
Charles de Wailly also designed the pulpit, completed in 1788. From this pulpit, the parish priest of Saint-Sulpice declared his refusal to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Later, it was also used by Revolutionary orators.
Redecorations to the interior, to repair extensive damage during the Revolution, began after the Concordat of 1801.
Charles Baudelaire was baptised in Saint-Sulpice in 1821, and Victor Hugo and Adèle Foucher were married in the church in 1822.
Eugène Delacroix added murals (1855-1861) that adorn the walls and ceiling of the Chapel of the Holy Angels, including ‘Jacob Wrestling with the Angel’, ‘Heliodorus Driven from the Temple’ and ‘Saint Michael Vanquishing the Demon.
During the Paris Commune (1871), the Club de la Victoire chose Saint-Sulpice as its headquarters and Louise Michel spoke from the pulpit.
An arson attack during an organ concert in 2019 caused a fire that damaged doors, a stained-glass window, a bas-relief and a staircase.
The funeral mass of Jacques Chirac, former President of France, took place in the church in 2019.
The church features in literature, operas, musical tradition, popular novels and in many films.
Massenet’s opera Manon has a scene set in Saint-Sulpice in which Lescaut Manon convinces Le Chevalier des Grieux to run away with her once more.
In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes , Honoré de Balzac has the Abbé Herrera celebrate Mass in the church, and the plot of Balzac’s short story La Messe de l’athée centres on Saint-Suplice.
The church has a long list of celebrated organists, from Nicolas Séjan in the 18th century, to Charles-Marie Widor (organist 1870-1933), Marcel Dupré (1934-1971) and Jean-Jacques Grunenwald (1973-1982). The current organists are Karol Mossakowski, Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin and Daniel Roth.
The organ was built by François-Henri Clicquot and rebuilt by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1862. It is regarded as Cavaillé-Coll’s magnum opus, and is one of the most impressive instruments of the romantic French symphonic-organ era. The church also has a two-manual-and-pedal choir organ by Cavaillé-Coll from 1858.
Sunday organ concerts take place regularly at 10 am (‘Auditions des Grandes Orgues à Saint Sulpice’, before the 11 am Mass). The Sunday Mass is preceded by a 15-minute Prelude of the Great Organ, starting at 10:45 am.
Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) has attracted visitors in large but often unwelcomes numbers to Saint-Sulpice.
But a notice in the church declares that despite ‘fanciful allegations’ in his novel, the line in the floor ‘is not a vestige of a pagan temple. No such temple ever existed in this place … It does not coincide with the meridian traced through the middle of the Paris Observatory.’
It points out too that the initials ‘P’ and ‘S’ in small transept windows refer to Saint Peter and Saint Sulpice, the patron saints of the church, and not to an imaginary Priory of Sion.
It is easy to understand why the Archdiocese of Paris decide to refuse Ron Howard permission to film inside Saint-Sulpice when he was making The Da Vinci Code in 2005.
The church faces onto Place Saint-Sulpice, which is a popular place for tourists. The chestnut trees in the square produce pink flowers in season, and the square includes the city hall of the 6th arrondissement and the Café de la Mairie, a rendezvous for writers and students.
The Fontaine Saint-Sulpice, or Fountain of the Four Bishops (Fontaine des Quatre Evêques), designed by the architect Joachim Visconti and erected in 1844-1848. The fountain has the statues of four bishops, one on each side: Bossuet (north) by Jean-Jacques Feuchère; Fénelon (east) by François Lanno; Fléchier (west) by Louis Desprez; and Massillon (south) by Jacques-Auguste Fauginet.
The fountain is also known as the fontaine des quatre points cardinaux (‘Fountain of the Four Cardinal Points’), although none of the four bishops ever became a cardinal.
That afternoon we also had a genuine taste of Paris at the Crêperie La Bolee at the top of Rue Servandoni, close to the Jardin du Luxembourg and with a reputation as ‘one of the best creperie in the Latin Quarter’. Of course, the street name recalls Giovanni Servandoni, the architect who truly shaped Saint Sulpice as we see it today.
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