My Paris Notebook

“The most beautiful church in Paris, after Notre Dame” was started in 1532 and consecrated, with a piece or two still missing, more than a century later.  During those hundred years, taste had changed even more radically than in our own century.  

The original plans for Église de Saint-Eustache were like a final look at the religious architecture of the Middle Ages.  By the time the building was ready to be decorated, the taste of a new age prevailed.  The result was a patchwork that a still later age would find lamentable.  The 1828 edition of a guide to Paris (Le Veritable Conducteur Parisien) deplored “the poor taste of the architect” and “the confused mixture of Latin and Greek.”

Viollet-le-Duc hated the Renaissance, which explains his loathing of the interior of Saint-Eustache; however, he was not the only person to see it as “badly conceived, badly built, a confused mass of debris borrowed from all sides…a kind of Gothic skeleton covered in Ramon rags stitched together like a harlequin suit.”

By the time Saint-Eustache was completed, in 1642, there was absolutely no one living who could describe what had been there before.  

In fact a chapel, dedicated to Sainte-Agnès, a Roman martyr, had stood there for 300 years before it was demolished to make way for a more modern, more imposing church. Conceivably, people in the neighborhood were disturbed to watch it being torn down.  They had been christened and married there; their parents had been taken from the chapel to their burial ground.  Alas, the wiping out of a 300-year-old chapel almost 500 years ago does not arouse our nostalgia.  

It does not enter our minds to say that if it still existed Paris would be more attractive or easier to live in.  Three hundred years today, seem dwindled, short.  The loss of a building 150 years old, closer in time, is the work of vandals.  

Saint-Eustache now looks not like an architectural patchwork but like a harmonious and splendid reproach to anything built within yards of it.  

  

(The late André Marchal playing the glorious church organ.)

As for the chapel, we can try to imagine what it must have looked like, and we can be sure that it was there, for three shrunken centuries.  The danger is when a whole generation of Parisians, for want of knowing, will answer “What was there before?” with “Nothing.”