The Courtyard of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France -- the equivalent of the US Library of Congress

The original Bibliotheque Nationale de France

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France stands about 200 meters from our house and up until recent times housed first the kings' library and (by law) from 1537 onward a copy of every book published in France (eventually accumulating 12 million books include 2 Gutenberg bibles). After moving from palace to palace, the library finally settled down in our neighborhood in 1570 (we came much later). With the explosion of publishing (Hey, we even have books on surfactants, of all things, but hopefully not in French!) even this city-block-sized building got too small and the collection has moved to a modern set of four buildings that we will see on the next web page.

One enters the old Bibliotheque on Rue de Richelieu just across from the tiny Square Louvois. Here's a view from the entrance of the Bibliotheque looking backward across this lovely square with its lavish fountain representing the four rivers of France. If you had xray vision you could look inside your monitor right now. If I had an xray camera, you could look directly through these buildings and into our apartment nearby:

Obviously Dick has his batteries charged for the following day's Paris Marathon and so he is nearly glowing in the dark.

Here's a better view without the old boy on the side:

Turning around you'd see the courtyard view at the top of the page (although Pietrina is usually not there). The library grew over the years, starting out as a Cardinal Mazarin's mansion around 1643. Mazarin was an Italian who virtually ran France while Louis XIV (less than 5 years old when he became king) was growing up. Mazarin had his own collection of books. Later, the Francois Mansart took a crack at adding onto the mansion (as they did many buildings in our neighborhood). The wing at the top of this page was built around 1731.

The great staircase

When you walk into this place you are either a researcher (and proceed to one of the rooms seen below) or a visitor to one of the many exhibitions held in the Gallery Mazarin Gallery like the Magnum photography show which we saw or to the Medals and Antiques Museum. To get to either, you take the grand staircase probably built by Francois Mansart around 1645 for the cardinal. The Gallery Mazarin is typically covered with paintings or photographs but one has only to look up at the ceiling to the art work by the Italian Romanelli brought in by Mazarin.

Printed Papers Lecture Room

The most beautiful research room built in 1859-1867 by the architect Labrouste was locked and empty when we went by. It's called the Salle de lecture des imprimes: Here's a view of the left side:

Note in the wider view below the steel girders and the skylights illuminating the room and avoiding the need for gas lanterns which were thought be too risky for the book collection:

The Periodical Room

We found another reading room with many researchers on this Saturday in the oval shaped Salle des lecture des periodiques built in 1906.

Jardin and Nothingness

The west side of the building houses a garden:

Dick's favorite statue in all of Paris (city of thousand of outside statues) is this bronze of Jean-Paul Sartre in the garden:

Here's a close-up. While the glasses have been broken, someone atoned for this by putting a cigarette in JP's mouth.

Dick enjoyed this statue much more than he did reading Sartre when he did a semester of independent study in philosophy during his undergraduate years in another French town called Detroit.

The Old Bibliotheque contains many other objects such as a plaster bust of Voltaire with the philosopher's heart in its base. (Often famous men in France had their hearts placed in different places than the rest of their body. Often kings who often behaved heartlessly in life).

This is a delightful building 400 years in the making. For the past 25 years or so, it has been too small (holding spots for only 700 researchers) and too solid to adapt to some of the modern technology. So it has been "enhanced" by a much larger complex of new buildings at the end of the subway line.

The old bibliotheque will house a number of special collections including the world's first map collection and the largest set of engravings in the world (another 12 million). We took that subway to get to the new Bibliotheque Nationale; please join us by clicking here.

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If you can't figure out your way out of this mess, search for something else on the Schmitt pages