Museums - Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

The curiosity cabinet of the Sainte-Geneviève abbey was the idea of Father du Moulinet in the seventeenth century. By around 1660 this enlightened priest had assembled a collection of rare and unusual archaeological and natural history objects. In the eighteenth century, this collection was made accessible to an elite that could admire its ethnographic objects and natural history specimens. Unfortunately, unlike the library, the curiosity cabinet was seized in the Revolution and the collection was dispersed. The library does, however, retain some of the pieces from the collection, notably objects brought back from voyages of exploration, such as a Huron club and a seventeenth-century Arawak Indian ceremonial staff.