In 1744 a sick Louis XV swore he would build a new church here if he recovered; he survived but left the church building to his unlucky son, who commissioned Germain Soufflot to undertake a mighty domed design. Begun in 1764, the building was almost complete when the French Revolution erupted; meanwhile, Soufflot, the architect, had died, supposedly from worrying that the dome would collapse. Revolutionaries blocked in the stained-glass windows and turned the church into a shrine to heroes of the French nation. After a brief return to Christendom, the Panthéon has come down to us as a monument to France's most glorious historical and cultural figures. The crypt holds the remains of Voltaire, Zola, Dumas, Henri Rousseau, and dozens of other luminaries. In 1995 Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie became the first woman to join their ranks. Soufflot needn't have worried so much about the building's structural stability -- the dome is so perfect that Foucault used this space to test his famous pendulum. COST: EUR7. Métro: Cardinal Lemoine; RER: Luxembourg.