BNF Library | The National Library of France

There is an air of the mythic to The National Library of France. Once a dark, byzantine series of old underlit reading rooms, after a twelve-year, $256 million renovation, this cave of wonders has opened, revealing treasures once reserved for the eyes of latex-gloved historians and academics.

The renovation had a clear goal: bridge the gap between the Library’s old regulars and the modern public at large.

The Salle Ovale, an architectural wonder and reading room featuring a glorious vaulted skylight with buttresses of some 20,000 books, was once reserved for scholars and students, but is now free to access to anyone that would like to take in its light. 9,000 comic books are a clear signal that this is a place for everyone, not just thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau who strolled these halls in their heyday.

The Salle Ovale is celebrated for a reason, but it’s the Library’s new museum that has France’s literati gawking and gasping.

The history of the National Library began in 1368, when Charles V imported his own collection of manuscripts to the Louvre from his palace. Over centuries, this collection grew, moving from location to location before finding its home on the rue de Richelieu in 1721.

It’s no surprise that this library, whose stewards can claim Napoleon himself as alumni, has its share of glittering plunder and homegrown treasure. Of course, many of these artifacts have a literary bent, like an original manuscript of Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But there are other treasures to behold: the earliest known globe to include America on its surface, Charlemagne’s Ivory Chess Set, the bronze thrown of King Dagobert, still shining more than a millennium after it was forged. The characters of Ovid’s Metamorphoses look down on all the museum-goers, pictured in the gallery’s original painted 17th-century ceiling.

The most humble and most significant piece though is the statue of Voltaire which sits unassumingly at the entrance of the Salon d’honneaur. Voltaire’s body may be in the catacombs of the Pantheon nearby, but his heart lives here, in the National Library. Maybe it’s not a symbol of the living past, but rather, of its vitality, and the library a place where one can see great minds at work as if they were reading right beside them.