Sapere aude

Sometimes you just find yourself looking at this. Maybe not frequently. But if you do find yourself looking at this, you could stroll downstairs (a lot of stairs, as it turns out) and stand in a room with the bodies of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

View of the Eiffel Tower from the Panthéon of Paris

Then you could stroll along a corridor and find yourself in a room with the corpses of Pierre and Marie Curie. And another containing the bodies of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. And that's just the greatest hits.While there you can also see definitive proof of the earth's rotation.

I'm not saying you should do this or should want to do this, but if you do you should. It is a secular shrine to the Enlightenment, a classical temple of Reason, an inspirational monument to the ideals that led to the founding principles of the United States and the entire modern Western world. Plus, there's a pretty nice view of the Eiffel Tower, so long as you're not particularly afraid of heights. Favorite thing in Paris? It's up there. In more ways than one.