Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin

The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin wears a facade of heavy, rusticated stone, topped by a tall triangular pediment that commands the boulevard. Built in seventy-five days in seventeen eighty-one for the queen, Marie Antoinette, it was originally an opera house. The rush to finish it was so extreme that workers labored through the night by torchlight. After the opera moved, the building became a theater, where Victor Hugo’s plays premiered to riots and standing ovations that reshaped French drama forever.