Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Paris

Stand still for a moment at the foot of the steps. Traffic hums along the Rue de Châteaudun behind you, and buses sigh as they pull away from the kerb. In front of you, pale stone columns rise toward a triangular pediment. The church looks less like a Gothic cathedral and more like a temple from ancient Rome. Welcome to Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, one of the most surprising churches in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.

The name comes from far away. Loreto is a small town in central Italy, and it holds one of the most visited shrines in the Catholic world. According to a medieval legend, angels carried the house of the Virgin Mary from Nazareth to that Italian hillside. Pilgrims have travelled to Loreto for centuries. This Paris church borrows that name and that devotion, so the Virgin of Loreto watches over a corner of the city that sits far from Italy.

The building you see now dates from the early nineteenth century. Construction began in the 1820s and finished in the 1830s. The architect was Louis-Hippolyte Lebas, and he chose a deliberate style. He did not copy the pointed arches of medieval Paris. Instead, he looked back to the earliest Christian churches of Rome, the long halls called basilicas. A basilica, in simple terms, is a rectangular hall with columns down each side and a rounded end behind the altar.

Look up at the facade. Four Corinthian columns carry the pediment. Corinthian columns are the ones with leafy, carved tops, like bundles of acanthus leaves. Above the pediment stand three statues, and they represent Faith, Hope and Charity. These three virtues appear again and again in Christian art. Here they stand against the sky, often with pigeons resting on their shoulders. That small, everyday detail makes the grand front feel strangely human.

Now turn around and look back down the Rue Laffitte, the narrow street that runs straight toward the church. This is the first surprise most visitors miss. From further down that street, the view lines up perfectly. You see the facade of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in front, and above it, high on the hill of Montmartre, the white domes of Sacré-Cœur. Two churches from two different centuries stack on top of each other in one frame.

When this church went up, the neighbourhood around it was brand new. Paris was growing quickly, and developers were filling the slopes below Montmartre with fresh apartment buildings. The plaster was still drying in many of them. Landlords sometimes let rooms cheaply to young tenants, simply to have the new buildings occupied while the walls dried out. Many of those tenants were young women, working in shops, theatres and studios.

This is where the second surprise comes in. The word lorette entered French slang in the nineteenth century. It described the young women of this district, often kept by wealthy admirers, living somewhere between respectability and the demi-monde. The demi-monde was the half-hidden world of courtesans and fashionable pleasure. So a church named for the Virgin Mary gave its name to a kind of woman that polite society gossiped about. Writers and caricaturists of the time loved the irony.

The district also drew painters, writers and musicians. Just to the west lies the area once called the Nouvelle Athènes, or New Athens. Artists and composers of the Romantic era lived and worked in its streets. The painter Claude Monet was born on the Rue Laffitte, and he was baptised in this church in the early 1840s. It is worth remembering that as you stand here. The man who later painted water lilies and haystacks began his life just a few steps away.

If the doors are open, step inside. The contrast with the plain stone outside is striking. The interior is a long basilica hall lined with columns, and almost every surface carries paint and gilding. The coffered ceiling, divided into square panels, glows with gold. The walls of the side chapels hold large painted scenes. Painters of the 1830s and 1840s covered these surfaces, and the whole room was meant to feel warm, rich and complete.

Take your time with the chapels. Each one tells a different set of stories, from the life of the Virgin to scenes of saints and sacraments. The colours have faded and darkened over nearly two centuries. Candle smoke, damp and city air have all left their mark. In places you can see cracks and flaking paint. The church has needed serious restoration work, and the condition of the interior has become a cause for many Parisians who care about it.

Listen for a moment inside. The sound of the street drops away almost at once. Footsteps echo softly on the stone floor. Sometimes you will hear the organ, or a small group at prayer, or simply the quiet shuffle of a visitor. This is still a working parish church, not a museum. Please keep your voice low, and if a service is underway, stay at the back and let it continue undisturbed.

When you step outside again, notice how the church sits in the street plan. It closes the view at the end of the Rue Laffitte, like a full stop at the end of a sentence. Behind it, the Rue des Martyrs climbs uphill toward Montmartre. That street is lined with bakeries, cheese shops, cafés and greengrocers. It is one of the best places in this part of Paris to see daily neighbourhood life, so it makes a natural next stop.

Before you leave, look once more at the three stone virtues on the roofline. Faith, Hope and Charity have watched this crossroads for almost two hundred years. They have seen the lorettes and the painters, the carriages and now the buses. Let your eyes drift down to the worn steps, the people sitting on them, the light on the columns. Then walk on, and perhaps glance back from the Rue Laffitte, where the two churches line up one more time.