The Biggest Slum in Paris

The Biggest Slum in Paris

Long before his death, Jean de Souvré commissioned an extravagant tomb for himself from the sculptor François Anguier in the church of Saint Jean de Latran in Paris. The church stood directly across from the Collège de France, inside a fortress that Jean de Souvré commanded and that was beyond royal jurisdiction (Sully, room 218). But he later become Grand Prior of the Order of Malte in France, and was buried in simpler style in the Église du Temple, the seat of the Order. I don’t know what touches me most about this elegant reclining figure with lowered eyes: the serenity of his attitude at death’s door; the gesture of the angel or guardian spirit who holds him in life with one hand and pushes him toward death with the other; or the fact that this luxurious tomb remained empty, abandoned amid ruined buildings that, after the Revolution, would become the biggest slum in Paris—like a treasure found in a rubbish heap on a street corner and preserved for posterity at Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments français. The icing on the cake: the Louvre has just acquired a magnificent terracotta preparatory model of this funerary statue.