Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon

This guide to the Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon centers on François Rabelais, who worked here as a physician in 1532 while secretly writing a scandalous, hilarious tale of a giant named Pantagruel under a scrambled pseudonym. It follows the book's unlikely success, a second story about Pantagruel's father, and the risk a doctor ran by mocking theologians in print. The dome and courtyards you see today came two centuries later, designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, the architect of the Paris Panthéon.