Eglise St-Roch

Begun in the 1650s in what was then the heart of Paris, this long church was designed chiefly by Jacques Lemercier; work took so long, the church was consecrated only in 1740. Famed parishioners and patrons are remembered in funerary monuments: Le Nôtre, Mignard, Corneille and Diderot are all here, as are busts by Coysevox and Coustou, Falconet's statue Christ on the Mount of Olives and Anguier's superb Nativity. Bullet marks from a 1795 shoot-out between royalists and conventionists still pit the façade.