A Tour of the Academie des Sciences from a Member of the Academy

 

Christian Amatore in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the uniform of members of the Academie des sciences. He is an electrochemist of global reputation with more than 600 publications.

I had the opportunity to tour the French Academy of Sciences with Christian Amatore, who is himself a member of the Academy, and his wife Marie-France.

Le Grande Salle des Seances

Institut de Franc

Christian took me through several of its meeting rooms, the library, and most impressively the great meeting space beneath the oval interior dome.  Surroundings appropriate for an institution whose history reaches back to Louis XIV.

The oval dome appears round outside.

The Académie des sciences was founded in 1666 through the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful minister. Colbert gathered mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, anatomists, botanists, zoologists and chemists to promote scientific investigation and advise the government. The first meeting took place on December 22, 1666, in the king’s library. In 1699 Louis XIV formally reorganized it as the Académie royale des sciences and gave it quarters in the Louvre.

The Academy soon became one of Europe’s great centers of science. Its members investigated everything from astronomy and mathematics to chemistry and natural history. Its scientists participated in famous expeditions to measure the shape of the Earth, and in 1790 the National Assembly entrusted the Academy with helping establish a unified system of weights and measures—work that contributed to the metric system. 

The French Revolution interrupted this history. In 1793 the revolutionary Convention abolished all the academies. Two years later the Institut de France was created, and the scientific academy eventually emerged within the new institutional structure.

The magnificent building the Academy occupies today has a separate history. Cardinal Mazarin provided in his will for the creation of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, intended to educate young men from four territories recently incorporated into France. Construction began in the 1660s under Louis Le Vau, one of the great architects of seventeenth-century France, who also worked on the Louvre and Versailles. The college opened in 1688. 

Its most recognizable feature is the dome facing the Seine and the Louvre. What appears from outside to be a circular dome is oval inside—a remarkable architectural effect. The room beneath it was originally the college chapel and was intended to contain Mazarin’s tomb. After Napoleon moved the Institut de France into the former college in 1805, architect Antoine Vaudoyer transformed the chapel into the great assembly hall beneath the cupola.

Bibliothèque Mazarine

The library is another link to Mazarin. His great collection was transferred to the Collège des Quatre-Nations in the seventeenth century and survives as the Bibliothèque Mazarine, today containing some 600,000 documents, including thousands of manuscripts and incunabula.

Today the Palais de l’Institut houses France’s five academies. Beneath the dome, academicians continue a tradition extending across revolutions, empires, republics and more than three and a half centuries.

Marie-France and Christian in the meeting hall under the dome

Walking through those rooms with Christian Amatore made that history unusually tangible. The Academy is not simply a monument to France’s scientific past. Nearly 360 years after Colbert assembled that first group of scientists, it remains a place where scientists meet, argue, exchange ideas and try to understand the world.

The official histories are available from the Académie des sciences and the Institut de France's history of the Palais.

Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial

 

Perched on the slopes of Mont Valérien just west of Paris, the Suresnes American Cemetery is the only American military cemetery from the First World War located  near the French capital. It holds the graves of more than 1,500 American service members, the vast majority of whom died in World War I. A smaller number of burials from World War II are also present, as well as the names of missing service members inscribed on the memorial walls.

The cemetery was established in 1917, while the war was still underway. As American Expeditionary Forces under General John J. Pershing entered the conflict, Suresnes was chosen as a burial site for soldiers who died in hospitals in and around Paris. Unlike the vast battlefield cemeteries in northeastern France—such as Meuse-Argonne or Aisne-Marne—Suresnes primarily became a resting place for those who succumbed to wounds or illness in rear-area medical facilities rather than those killed outright in combat.

When walking the rows of white marble headstones, one notices something striking: many dates of death fall not only in 1918 but also in January and February 1919—after the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The war had officially ended, yet American soldiers were still dying.

The reasons were both medical and epidemiological.

First, many of those late deaths were the result of wounds sustained in the final offensives of 1918. The Meuse-Argonne campaign, which began in late September and continued until the Armistice, was the largest operation in American military history up to that point. It was also extraordinarily costly. Soldiers gravely wounded in October and early November often lingered in hospitals for weeks or months before succumbing to infections, organ failure, or complications that modern medicine might treat more effectively today. Antibiotics did not yet exist. Even survivable injuries by today’s standards could become fatal in 1918.

Two Jewish soldiers, both named Harry, died after the First World War ended.

Second—and equally significant—was the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, commonly known as the Spanish flu. The virus tore through military camps and transport ships with devastating speed. American forces in France were not spared. Crowded barracks, troop movements, and weakened immune systems made soldiers particularly vulnerable. Influenza frequently developed into pneumonia, which at the time had limited treatment options. Thousands of American troops died of influenza-related illness both during and after active combat operations.

In many cases, it is impossible to attribute late 1918 and early 1919 deaths exclusively to one cause. Some wounded soldiers, already weakened by injury, contracted influenza in hospitals. Others survived combat entirely but fell victim to disease before they could return home. The war may have ended, but the biological aftermath did not respect the Armistice.

After the war, families were given the option to repatriate remains to the United States or to leave their loved ones buried overseas. Those interred at Suresnes remain as part of the permanent American presence in France—a reminder that America’s entry into the Great War came late but at real cost.

The cemetery’s quiet hillside setting, overlooking Paris in the distance, contrasts sharply with the violence that brought these young men there. The rows are orderly, serene. Yet the dates on the stones tell a harsher truth: wars do not always end when the guns fall silent. For many buried at Suresnes, the fighting stopped in November 1918. The dying did not.

Musée Marmottan Monet: History, Collection, and Serene Beauty

 Tucked away in Paris's 16th arrondissement, the Musée Marmottan Monet is one of city's quietly beautiful museums. It lacks the crowds and theatricality of the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, but what it offers instead is intimacy—an experience that feels less like visiting a museum than like being welcomed into the private world of Impressionism.

The museum began not as a shrine to Monet, but as the private residence of Paul Marmottan, a late-19th-century historian and collector with a passion for the Napoleonic era. His home housed an exceptional collection of First Empire furniture, paintings, and decorative arts. When Marmottan died in 1932, he bequeathed the house and his collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, transforming it into a museum. Over time, however, its identity shifted dramatically—thanks to a series of transformative donations.

The most important of these came from Michel Monet, Claude Monet’s younger son. In 1966, he donated his father’s personal collection to the museum, instantly making the Marmottan the world’s leading repository of Monet’s work. This gift included paintings Monet had kept for himself—works never intended for sale or exhibition. Among them is Impression, soleil levant, the painting that gave Impressionism its name and that now anchors the museum’s identity.

Nowhere is Monet’s presence more deeply felt than on the lower floor, where the late Nymphéas—the water lilies—are displayed. These paintings are immersive rather than declarative. Hung low and spread across walls, they invite prolonged looking rather than quick recognition. Here, Monet’s obsession with light, reflection, and time unfolds in endless variation: lilies dissolving into color, water becoming sky, form hovering at the edge of abstraction. Sitting before them, I felt one senses not spectacle but persistence—the result of decades of seeing and re-seeing the same pond as vision itself aged and changed.

Upstairs, the museum opens into a different but equally compelling chapter of Impressionism through its exceptional holdings of Berthe Morisot. Thanks largely to donations from Morisot’s descendants, the Marmottan houses the most important collection of her work anywhere. These paintings—intimate, luminous, and psychologically acute—offer a corrective to the old narrative that cast Morisot as a “minor” Impressionist. Her portraits and domestic scenes reveal an artist of extraordinary subtlety, capturing the textures of women’s lives with brushwork that is as daring as Monet’s but more inward in tone.

What makes the Musée Marmottan Monet so affecting is precisely this balance. It is not a museum of manifestos or movements, but of sustained attention. Monet’s water lilies reward stillness. Morisot’s paintings reward empathy. 

The Napoleonic rooms remind visitors of the museum’s origins as a private home, grounding the experience in lived space rather than monumental display.

Leaving the Marmottan, I was not overwhelmed. I felt peaceful, immersed in the soft landscapes that Monet and Morisot gave me. It is a museum built for lingering. I sat for a long time amid the water lilies letting myself be transported to Givenchy. 

Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris

The Pierre and Marie Curie Museum—tucked quietly into the old Radium Institute on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris—is one of the most understated but important scientific museums in the city. It occupies the preserved laboratory spaces where Marie Curie, her daughter Irène, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot carried out groundbreaking research in radioactivity from the 1890s through the 1930s. The museum is small, reflective, and resolutely authentic: nothing is dramatized, nothing staged. You stand in rooms where the Nobel Prizes were earned.

At the heart of the museum is Marie Curie’s office and laboratory, preserved almost exactly as they were at the time of her death in 1934. Wooden benches, glassware, electrometers, notebooks, and early radiation-measurement devices remain in their original positions. Unlike her early work in the makeshift shed on the Rue Lhomond, the Radium Institute was built specifically for her—funded by French, international, and American donors—to allow research into the medical and scientific potential of radium. It became one of the great centers of early 20th-century physics and chemistry.

The museum emphasizes both the scientific history and the human story. Panels describe Pierre and Marie’s partnership, Pierre’s accidental death in 1906, and Marie’s tireless continuation of their shared research. Other exhibits trace the later achievements of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, whose discovery of artificial radioactivity earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize—reinforcing the sense that this building housed not just a laboratory but a dynasty of scientific innovation.

For a visitor returning multiple times, especially after reading Dava Sobel’s biography, the museum gains emotional weight. Sobel’s portrait of Marie Curie—the discipline, the grief, the stubborn moral clarity—comes alive in the physical space. The rooms feel modest for the scale of the discoveries made there, and the lingering sense of danger from early radiation work is unmistakable.

The museum is quiet, intimate, and deeply respectful—a rare place where the history of science still inhabits its original walls.

Paris Bike Co.--The Place to Rent a Bike in Paris

 

I found Paris Bike Co. in 2019 the way most good things are found abroad—an internet search that kept turning up the same message: “Highly recommended.” The reviews were unanimous about one point in particular: Sam Weaver doesn’t just hand you a rental bike. He fits you. Properly. 

Sam Weaver--Owner, Paris Bike Co.

When I showed up, he took the time to check measurements, fine-tune saddle height, and make sure the bike felt like something I’d been riding for years, not something borrowed for a week. 2019 was my first time renting from Paris Bike Co., and that experience set the pattern. Every time I’ve returned to Paris—March 2020, September 2023, November 2025—the process has been the same: Sam dialed in the fit, checked the position, and made sure the bike was set up exactly for what I wanted to do--ride the daily training ride around L'hippodrome Longchamps.  It’s a level of care that’s rare in any rental situation, let alone in a major city.

In 2020, I rented the bike on March 11 planning to keep it until March 16. My flight back to America was March 17. On March 13 (Friday the 13th) the American border closed and the world shut down for Covid.  Most Americans panicked and headed for the airport.  

Sam said he had to shut down the shop, but I could keep the bike till Monday.  It turns out bakeries are essential businesses and stayed open during Covid. So I rode through the empty streets of Paris and ate at bakeries until I left on Tuesday.  By the time I flew back the plane was almost empty. I had a row to myself. 

Sam's clientele includes many triathletes and para-olympic competitors.  I have been in the shop when Sam was working with a local customer on fitting the bike.  He is a Californian. His French is fluent, but it is definitely with a California accent.  It's fun to listen to. 

The shop is located in Malakoff 9km south of Paris.  I go there in the Metro.  You can check out the shop or reserve a bike on parisbikeco.com 

   

Anselm Kiefer in the Panthéon--The first major new art installation in the Pantheon in a century

 

I returned to the Panthéon after previous visits over the past decade, to see the first new art exhibit in crypt of the Republic in a century.  And the exhibit is by a German  artist!— Anselm Kiefer. Six vast glass vitrines catching the cold light from the dome, full of wreckage and silence.

I walk into the Panthéon patriotism, heroic scale; the new exhibit by Kiefer is frailty and fragility and pain enclosed in glass. Commissioned for the 2020 panthéonisation of Maurice Genevoix, author of Ceux de 14, the German artist installed six towering glass-and-steel vitrines—now permanent—plus two large canvases that were shown on loan. In the six enclosures are rusted barbed wire, scorched garments, lead books, concrete shards, and sprigs of wheat sit in suspended collision, as if a battlefield had been archived rather than cleaned up.

The materials aren’t metaphors; they’re blunt instruments sharply contrasting celebration of heroes. The Pantheon is France’s national crypt of heroes—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Curie—built to canonize clarity. Keifer's vitrines are enclosed chaos, monuments for a century that never stopped bleeding, a counter-monument to the patriotic and heroic. The work keys directly off Genevoix’s witness to the Great War; phrases from Ceux de 14 (so I have read about this book of World War I) run through the installations like exposed wiring. You don’t admire these pieces so much as absorb shock from them.

This is the first major new art commission in the Panthéon in nearly a century—the last comparable addition was Bouchard’s 1924 memorial. Kiefer isn’t just adding objects; he’s reopening the monument after a hundred years of stasis.

The clash between neoclassical order and Kiefer’s scorched-earth art is dramatic. The vitrines are not subtle. Kiefer puts the horror of war in the midst of patriotic celebration, a new dimension in this room that is the French nation’s memory chamber.

Standing in the great hall, I thought of how I was drawn to the patriotic and heroic sinceI was a child, but then saw the ruin and wreckage that is actual war. Kiefer puts the horror front and center in contrast to the beauty and majesty of the rest of the building and its art.