Mazarine Library is organizing, from September 12 to December 12, 2014, an exhibition called The Tower of Nesle: Stone, Ink & fiction.

On the spot where it once stood, the Tour de Nesle multiplies in a variety of media, from medieval charter in stage costume through the illuminated manuscript, drawing, printmaking, advertising sticker, the displays the author's manuscript or popular edition. All documents are organized to provide a vision of the Tower of Nesle in three dimensions: historical, literary, and iconographic.

Vestige of the medieval fortifications of Paris, picturesque beachfront erect figure of the Seine, the Tour de Nesle was destroyed in 1663 by the architect Louis Le Vau, who built his location the Bibliothèque Mazarine.

Built in the thirteenth century with the construction of the wall of Philippe Auguste, the Tour de Nesle endured almost five centuries frequent changes, according to the needs of its users and depending on the evolution of defensive needs of the capital. Its position makes it an ideal subject of representation, which took over the illuminators, engravers and painters. But the quality of the works they left behind does not fully explain the reputation of this unique monument. The survival of the Tour de Nesle in Paris the imagination is indeed largely due to the legends that have linked to adulterous love daughters-King Philip the Fair.
Francois Villon, Brantôme, Alexandre Dumas, Aloysius Bertrand, or Abel Gance have contributed to transmit the memory of the Tour de Nesle, and feed the fantasies to which it is associated.
Convened by romantic literature and folk arts, theater and reconstructed by the serial novel, the diorama and film, she has become a monument of paper or cardboard, which replaced the original disappeared from the Parisian landscape for three and a half centuries.

(Visit; open Monday to Friday, 10h-18h; exceptional opening Sunday, September 21 for Heritage Days).

More info on the site of the Bibliothèque Mazarine here .