Former chapel of the abbey of Port Royal

The former chapel of Port-Royal de Paris features a distinct, austere stone facade topped by a triangular pediment, standing as the last major remnant of a convent that once challenged the religious authority of seventeenth-century France. Inside, the nuns practiced a rigorous form of Jansenism, placing individual conscience above royal and papal decrees. King Louis the Fourteenth eventually ordered the abbey demolished in seventeen ten, but he spared this chapel, leaving it to serve as a maternity hospital clinic for the centuries that followed.