Saint-Eustache

Saint-Eustache was built from 1532, completed in 1634 and consecrated on 26 April 1637. After Notre-Dame it is one of the largest churches in Paris, and it follows Notre-Dame’s plan, but it dresses a Gothic structure in carved ornament of the Renaissance. The west front came later. Two chapels added in 1655 weakened the old front, and from 1754 it was rebuilt to a design by Jean Mansart de Jouy, finished by Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux; the south tower was never completed.

Richelieu and Molière were baptized here, and Louis XIV made his first communion here in 1649. The church keeps Colbert’s tomb, by Coysevox and Tuby after drawings by Le Brun, Pigalle’s Virgin and Child, and Keith Haring’s bronze triptych The Life of Christ of 1990. The great organ, rebuilt after a fire in 1844 and again in 1989, has nearly 8,000 pipes.

Seven visits are recorded, from October 2018 to June 2025. Five of the seven recorded visits are illustrated below, in chronological order.