After we visited Sainte-Chapelle, we went next door and walked through the Conciergerie. This is the prison where, like many others over the years, Marie-Antoinette, the Queen of France, was beheaded in 1793. We took a walking tour of the area and saw the cell where Marie-Antoinette was kept before her beheading which has now been turned into a tiny memorial chapel.
I suspect this huge painting captures the event very well.
Here’e a little more information about the event.
In another area of the Concergerie, a huge cave-like place, we ran across an art installation. We had seen part of it from outside the building when walking by a couple of days ago and wondered what the story was. Now we got to see it from the inside too. It’s very strange but very interesting. It’s called “Detournement,” or Detour. As the Paris Convention & Visitors Bureau explained it:
“Sculptor Stéphane Thidet is continuing his exploration of nature with an impressive, bespoke installation at the Conciergerie de Paris. By diverting part of the Seine, taken from the Pont au Change, Thidet echoes the 1910 flood that left watermarks on the monument’s columns. Like a rollercoaster, the bare wood installation transports water through the building, passing through the Soldiers’ Hall and the historic kitchens, to pour out through the basement windows into the moat of the conciergerie.” Okay . . .
The wood is a striking natural color in this stunningly low-lit area. The water rolls, sometimes smoothly, sometimes roughly, down trails of troughs and occasionally forcefully falls from a waterfall into a tub and into a trough again and continues along. Eventually it comes out of the building through a tall basement window making a striking waterfall. Here . . . see for yourself.
I Love Paris in the Springtime 