The Left Bank: Saints, Scholars, and the Lost Generation

Shakespeare and Company

The legendary English-language bookshop where Joyce, Hemingway, and three generations of Tumbleweeds found a home among the shelves.

The green storefront in front of you, with its yellow sign and wooden benches, has been a home for English-language books and the people who read them since 1951. George Whitman founded this shop and called it Le Mistral at first. In 1964, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, he renamed it after Sylvia Beach's legendary bookstore, the one on rue de l'Odéon that published Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 when nobody else would. Whitman let young writers sleep among the shelves in exchange for a few hours of work and a promise to read a book a day.

More than 30,000 of them, nicknamed Tumbleweeds, have done exactly that. Look above the doorway to the reading library and you will see Whitman's motto: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' Step inside when you are ready. The shop still runs on that principle.

Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre

One of the oldest churches in Paris, begun in the 12th century and never finished, now home to Melkite Greek Catholic worship.

This is the oldest church in Paris still standing, begun around 1165 on the foundations of a sixth-century chapel. It was built under Louis VII, the same king who launched Notre-Dame, and the two churches rose at roughly the same time. But this one never got finished. You can see it in the proportions: the choir was meant to be three stories high, and the nave was supposed to have stone vaults that were never built.

What stands here instead is a quieter, smaller thing, and better for it. Since 1889 the church has belonged to the Melkite Greek Catholic community. The iconostasis inside, the screen of icons separating the nave from the sanctuary, follows the Byzantine rite. In the little park next door, Square René Viviani, you can find the oldest tree in Paris: a false acacia planted in 1601.

Panthéon

France's secular mausoleum on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, built as a church and claimed by the Revolution for its great minds.

You are standing in front of the Panthéon, the building that dominates the Left Bank skyline. Louis XV commissioned it in 1755 as a church to honor Saint Geneviève, after he recovered from a serious illness and credited her intercession. The architect Soufflot designed a neoclassical temple with a dome inspired by St. Paul's in London and a portico borrowed from the Roman Pantheon.

But the Revolution got here first. In 1791, before the church was even finished, the National Assembly turned it into a mausoleum for the great men of the new republic. The inscription above the columns reads 'Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante': to great men, a grateful nation. Inside are the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marie Curie, and Louis Braille.

The dome you see is actually three domes nested inside one another. Soufflot cut through the inner two with an oculus so that, standing under the center, you can look straight up and see the paintings on the outermost shell.