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of the church. Although the possibility exists that the authors simply neglected to refer to such a
detail, the description of other family arms in the building negates this explanation. Indeed in
Piganiol de la Force’s account of the Récollets’s church, the guide specifically mentions the arms
of Françoise de Crequi, the wife of Maximilien de Béthune II, adorning the chapel of the Virgin
in which Françoise was buried. 42 The lack of royal images connecting the religious group to the
queen of France, a much more prestigious patron than Françoise de Crequi, indicates that the
symbols were intentionally excluded from the design.
Jacobins of the rue Saint-Honoré
In 1611 Maria de’ Medici authorized Sebastien Michaëlis, the prior of the Dominican
convent at Saint-Maximin, to establish a reformed community in Paris. Like the French capital’s
existing Dominican community, the members of the reformed group were referred to as the
Jacobins after the rue Saint-Jacques where the religious were first installed in the thirteenth
century. A year after the establishment of the reformed community Henri de Gondi, the bishop
of Paris, gave the religious fifty thousand livres, which along with donated land on the corner of
the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue de la Sourdière, allowed the Jacobins to begin construction of
their monastery.
Visible on Piganiol de la Force’s Plan et Description du Quartier du Palais Royal
between the parish church of Saint-Roch and the Place de Louis le Grand, the monastery had at
its center the community’s church, also begun in 1612 (fig. 68). Despite its prominent location
on the prestigious rue Saint-Honoré, the building received little interest from seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century authors of guidebooks. 43 In fact Luc-Vincent Thiéry wrote that “Neither the
church, nor the buildings of the monastery have anything remarkable,” while Germaine Brice
noted that little existed with which the curious could be satisfied. 44 Subsequent authors have
continued this trend, choosing to focus on the monastery’s role beginning in 1789 as the meeting
place of the radical Club des Jacobins rather than the seventeenth-century architecture. 45
Even with these drawbacks, a general idea of the building can be gathered from the
existing sources. Located in a large courtyard opening onto the rue Saint-Honoré, the church
was a simple rectangular structure. Its plan, depicted on Jaillot’s Plan du Quartier du Palais
Royal, consisted of a single nave of five bays flanked by side chapels and a rectangular chevet,
which abutted one of four buildings forming the monastery’s cloister (fig. 69). Little is known of
the nave’s elevation other than it had a cornice on which rested a barrel vault, covered in plaster
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