Fifty kilometres west of Cluny, across countryside that becomes ever gentler and flatter as you approach the broad valley of the Loire, is PARAY-LE-MONIAL, whose major attraction is its Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. Not only is it a superb building in its own right, with a marvellously satisfying arrangement of apses and chapels stacking up in sturdy symmetry to its fine octagonal belfry, it's the best place to get an idea of what the abbey of Cluny looked like, as it was built shortly afterwards in devoted imitation of the mother church.the town itself is the archetypal country town, quiet and unpretentious, straddling the slow waters of the River Bourbince and the Canal du Centre. The only thing that disturbs its calm is the arrival of pilgrims of the Sacré-Coeur, or "Sacred Heart", a cult which originated here with Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, a local nun who received revelations advocating the worship of the sacred heart. The cult was later adopted by the entire Roman Catholic Church. The first pilgrimage took place in 1873, encouraged as a means of combating the socialist ideas espoused by the Paris Commune, and it raised the money to construct the church of the Sacré-Coeur on the hill of Montmartre in Paris. Paray is now second only to Lourdes as a pilgrim centre. The one secular building definitely worth a look, aside from just browsing down the main street – rue de la République/rue des Deux-Ponts/rue Victor-Hugo – is the highly ornamented Maison Jayet, now the Hôtel de Ville on place Guignaud, built in the 1520s.
Pages in section ‘Paray-le-Monial’: Practicalities.
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