Professed House of Paris

In the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Antoine, in the Marais, hangs a dark, troubled canvas by Eugène Delacroix, the Romantic painter. It shows Christ in agony on the Mount of Olives, and Delacroix painted it for this church. It was shown at the Salon of 1827. Nearby is a Virgin of Sorrows by Germain Pilon, the Renaissance sculptor.

The church was the chapel of a larger Jesuit house. In 1580 the Cardinal of Bourbon gave the Jesuits a mansion on this street, and it became their professed house, the home of fathers who had taken the order's final vows. King Louis XIII laid the first stone of the new church in 1627, and Cardinal Richelieu, his chief minister, said the first Mass there in 1641. The Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue gave his Lent and Advent sermons here for more than 20 years and is buried in the crypt.

France expelled the Jesuits in 1762 and the house emptied. Since 1804 its buildings beside the church have held the Lycée Charlemagne, a state secondary school. The church took its double name in 1803, and it still keeps two holy-water shells given by Victor Hugo, the novelist, when his daughter Léopoldine married in 1843.