This weekend it was the Journées du Patrimoine, when a lot of public buildings open up to the public for the only time during the year. On Saturday I went to the Irish College on rue des Irlandais near the Pantheon and visited the library. The Irish College there is 400 years old, and it was the most important Irish school in Europe during the 1600s and 1700s, when young Irish men had to leave their own country if they were ambitious, and during the 1700s to get any education at all. I had been to the Irish College before, as most of it is open to the public. The old library, though, is hidden away on a top floor above the chapel, and no one, not even scholars, is allowed to use it at all at the moment. The Irish Cultural Center does not have the staff to supervise and they're afraid for the books. Eventually it will all be digitalized and put online for everyone, but meanwhile, how sad to have a library full of old books that no one can use! I was a bit disappointed to hear that the original library had been plundered in the Revolution. Most of the books there now were gifts from Napoleon, and they are mostly French, English and Latin, not Irish, although some date back to the 1500s. I saw a lot of intriguing-looking parchment books.
Not everyone queueing that day was waiting to see palaces and monuments. Outside the Gibert Jeune bookstore (right), on the quay near the Saint-Michel fountain, a long line of young people was waiting to get in. 
It is a good place to buy used schoolbooks. There were so many people that there were controllers at the door letting in only a few people at a time.
The next day we walked around the Latin Quarter after lunch, looking around at various places where high gates usually shut you out, like the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most exclusive schools in France-- it's a public high school you have to take a test to get into, and the inside of the school is beautiful, right behind the Pantheon, with courtyards and statues and high-ceilinged paneled rooms. Here's a photo of the line waiting to take a tour (left). 
I went a few years ago. The school has reputation as a brilliant but merciless place, though. Their pass rate of virtually 100% for the baccalaureat is due to the school's kicking anyone out who won't make the grade.
Another interesting nearby place in the French system is the legendary Polytechnique, 
or Eeks (X). When I first came to France, I thought that the Sorbonne was the top school in the country. But it's actually not especially sought-after these days by the French upper class. No, the top schools in France are almost all engineering schools! Mathematics is the Royal Road to success in France. Polytechnique is the Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cal Tech, Oxford and Cambridge of France all rolled into one very elite school. It takes only 400 French and 100 foreign students a year, and is technically a military school, whose students march first in the Bastille Day parade, wearing peculiar little Napoleonic-era hats. To get in is so hard that young people must not only study for years in a prépa, but also be in perfect health. Afterwards they are pretty much guaranteed a job for life.
We went to look at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève across the street from the Pantheon. It is a beautiful library and I was surprised to discover that it is open to the public upon application. Even a foreigner can spend a day there. The director's office downstairs, though, looked like something out of Harry Potter, except for the 20-year-old computers.
The Pantheon itself, built on the model of Agrippa's Pantheon in Rome, was to be a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris (along with Saint Denis), who was buried overlooking the old city of Paris in an earlier church. 
But the Revolution came along before the new church was dedicated, and the Pantheon has never served as a church. Instead it was dedicated to great men (literally: Marie Curie and another woman who died the same day as her famous scientist husband are the only two women buried there). Meanwhile, the Revolutionaries, who hated the Church, disinterred and scattered the revered bones of Saint Genevieve, and all that is left of her is a single knuckle preserved in a reliquary in the church next to the Pantheon, Saint Etienne du Mont. Here is her chapel in the church.
The revolutionaries did a lot of damage to churches all over Paris. They stabled horses inside Notre Dame, and dumped out the bodies of all the kings and queens buried at the cathedral of Saint Denis. The guide told us that Henri IV, the much-loved vert galant, was still so well-preserved that everyone came to look and cut off pieces of his beard and fingernails. One of the queens had been alive when buried and had tried to escape from her coffin-- her hands had been scrabbling at it till the nails wore down. Another queen had turned into a smelly black soup. All the remains were thrown into a common grave. Kinda makes you want to be cremated, doesn't it?
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