Pentemont Abbey

The high stone walls of Pentemont Abbey are pierced by a seventeenth-century portal crowned with an arched pediment. Originally a Cistercian convent, the site became a fashionable refuge for noblewomen seeking a quiet life in the heart of Paris during the seventeen hundreds. In seventeen eighty-seven, the sisters were forced to move, and the revolutionary government later seized the property. Today, the complex houses the French Ministry of Veterans Affairs, hidden behind those same walls that once enclosed cloistered nuns.