Fountain of the Innocents

Look around: a lively square, café terraces, people sitting on the steps. For some six hundred years, this was the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, the largest in Paris. Parishioners from many churches were buried here, along with those who died at the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital on the Île de la Cité.

1Bones on display

The cemetery was enclosed by covered galleries, the charnel houses, whose lofts were piled with bones dug up to make room for new graves. In 1424 a famous Dance of Death was painted in one of them, showing Death leading popes, kings and peasants by the hand. Parisians strolled, traded and met friends among those skulls.

2The day the wall gave way

Over the centuries, the cemetery's ground rose above the level of the surrounding streets. In 1780 a wall collapsed and remains burst into the cellar of a house on Rue de la Lingerie. The cemetery was closed and, from 1786, its bones were carted away at night to disused underground quarries: the origin of the Paris Catacombs.

The fountain, by Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon, was built in 1549 at one corner of the cemetery for the ceremonial entry of King Henri II.

When the cemetery was cleared, it was moved to the centre of the new square and given a fourth side, carved by Augustin Pajou.

3What to look out for

• Jean Goujon's nymphs, in wonderfully fine drapery, on the vertical reliefs.
• The fourth side, from the eighteenth century: can you tell the difference?
• The paving of the square, laid over the old burial ground.