Road Test

Crossing Paris on Rues St-Martin and St-Jacques

One afternoon on the rooftop terrace of the Centre Pompidou I gazed beyond the Plexiglas tubes and primary-colored pipes at the people beetling along Rue Saint-Martin, the straightaway edging the center’s plaza. How many of them, I wondered, realized they were walking on part of Paris’ oldest street, the north-south axis the Romans called cardo—as in cardinal points? This cardo is older even than Rome, archaeologists claim. It lies atop the Bronze Age trade route that linked northern Europe via Lutèce—the Celtic settlement of the Parisii tribe—to the Mediterranean.

I admit up front that I’m a road warrior, a Roman and pilgrimage route aficionado. In 2006 my wife Alison and I walked 1,100 kilometers across France. Not that I want to boast, but I happen to know that while all roads lead to Rome, some, like Rue Saint-Martin, are definitely more direct than others.

Entering Paris from the north and what’s now Saint-Denis, this buried ancestor of roadways runs underneath Rue Philippe de Girard, changes names half a dozen times and leaves town heading south past the Cité Universitaire. Well, until Pompidou built the Boulevard Péripherique it did. Now the road deadends into the beltway—and metaphorically goes underground.

Ever practical, the Romans straightened and paved the long-beaten Bronze Age path. In the Middle Ages pilgrims adopted it, renaming the Left Bank portion in honor of Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur—Saint James the Greater. Starting in the 9^th century, his sanctuary in Compostela, near Spain’s Atlantic coast, became Christiandom’s third-most popular pilgrimage destination after Rome and Jerusalem. Thousands of questers for over 1,000 years caressed The Way of Saint James with their clogs. It’s hard to imagine how many blisters this road has engendered.

For a lark, before we set out across France, Alison and I test-drove our boots on Paris’ cardo. It turned out to be a day-long, 10-km saunter down the city’s long memory lane. Ours started as all good hikes start with coffee and croissants—at Gare de l’Est. Why there? Simple: the train station sits astride the ancient highway, its rails teasing out the lay-lines. North of it there’s nothing much to see. But from here south things get interesting. If we’d been sipping coffee on the spot in, say, 52 BC, we might’ve seen Julius Caesar pursuing a Parisii. Okay, Caesar didn’t usually do the skewering himself (he delegated), and coffee and croissants weren’t around yet. Life wasn’t worth living.

We made our first stop across from the station at 148 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. In the early 1600s Marie de Médicis waved her wand and created the Récollets convent here. It was ransaked by Revolutionaries, and went from barracks to weaving-works, hospice to military hospital then squatter’s paradise. Some of the cloister disappeared in 1926 with the new Avenue de Verdun. Other chunks were swallowed by the expanding Gare de l’Est. Long a moody place, nowadays it’s home to the Maison de l’architecture, with working spaces and apartments for visiting architects. Beyond the freshly restored colonnaded front, in a quiet courtyard we discovered Café de la Maison. Had we known it was here, we might’ve skipped the station’s paper cups.

Just yesterday in historical terms—meaning 1844 and 1852—when the Grand Boulevards and train stations were being built, workers unearthed the northern roadbed of the cardo, from Pont Notre-Dame to Boulevard de Magenta and the Square Saint-Laurent. Like its layer-cake roads, Paris’ churches also sometimes sit atop ancient sites—temples to Earth goddesses, Celtic dieties and of course Roman gods. About fourteen hundred years ago Grégoire de Tours mentioned a Saint-Laurent chapel on the Roman road right here. With this in mind we strolled into the Renaissance nave of Saint-Laurent, a hodgepodge whose homely façade and neo-Gothic belltower date to 1862. Candles flickered, a symbolic link, perhaps, to the Merovingian monks buried beneath circa 550 AD. Their tombs were discovered in 1680. But lower strata are older—much older.

In his Conquest of Gaul, Caesar mentions the Gauls’ fine roads—news to most contemporary readers. Rome demanded standardized straightaways 9-meters wide, allowing chariots to pass unimpeded—forebears of our “dual carriageways” and Interstates. So Roman engineers improved as they conquered. No surprise then if Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin runs straight and true from Saint-Laurent through the three-arched, 1674 Porte Saint-Martin, a Roman-style triumphal gateway celebrating French victories in Besançon and Limburg. It’s said Louis XIV fancied himself the divine-right heir of the Emperors, and here, sculpted on the north entableture, he appears in Roman garb. We walked through and stared up: on the south side the Sun King is Hercules, wearing little other than a big wig.

Rue Saint-Martin runs south from the arch, the concentration of historic sites on it increasing as it nears the Seine. The Arts et Métiers conservatory and museum, housed in the former Saint-Martin-des-Champs abbey, was tempting—Martin reportedly worked miracles here in 385 AD. The astonishing library is in a reconverted 13^th-century refectory designed by the same architect who created the Sainte-Chapelle. We wandered through it and atmospheric courts, but knew we’d need several hours to wrap our heads around the 1,600 years of history and the museum displays, from steam engines and scientific instruments to Foucault’s pendulum. So we ambled on to Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, just beyond Rue de Turbigo. This unsung church surprised us with a spacious deambulatory for pilgrims.

It’s challenging to keep on the cardo’s straight and narrow. Nearby streets beckon. For instance, three blocks further south at #51 Rue de Montmorency stands Paris’ oldest house, from 1407. It’s raked backwards from sculpted stone foundations, and has been remodeled too many times to count. Here lived Nicolas and Pernelle Flamel, the rich booksellers it’s said were alchemists. They underwrote the construction of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie’s northern portal.

François Mitterrand obsessed about the east-west “Power Axis” from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre. Georges Pompidou, a classical scholar before entering politics, preferred the Celtic-Roman-Pilgrim’s axis. Buildings on Rue Saint-Martin fronting the Pompidou are a mere 400 years old. Two blocks south, though, Saint-Merri plunges its foundations into late Antiquity, when the church of Rome upheld the Empire by converting “Barbarians” into Catholics. Saint-Merri subsumed an older chapel, the resting place of Carolingian miracle-worker Médéric, later shortened to Merri. Rebuilt three times in its first 1,000 years, the current church is late-flamboyant Gothic, from 1520-60. Gargoyle spouts stared down at us. We listened to an organist practicing then hit the road again.

The vestigial Tour Saint-Jacques is still under restoration, wrapped in tattered tarps and scaffolding. Another flamboyant Gothic wonder, this time from 1509-1523, it towers over Rue Saint-Martin and Rue de Rivoli. The church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie that used to be attached to it was quarried during the Revolution. It was from this compound that pilgrims set forth, crossing Pont Notre-Dame en route to Chartres, Orléans and Spain on the ancient road. Those Celtic merchants of old—dealers primarily in tin—weren’t so lucky. Around 1000 BC they started crossing the Seine in dugouts, or waded across natural fords on the north and south sides of Ile-de-la-Cité. The Celts tossed up rickety footbridges in Lutèce’s latter days. Rome transformed them into Paris’ first permanent spans. Rebuilt a dozen times, the Petit Pont has bridged the same spot from island to Left Bank, with variations on the name “little bridge,” for over 2,000 years.

We’d only walked a hundred yards up Rue Saint-Jacques when we reached the churches of Saint-Séverin and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Both have 6^th-century pedigrees as sanctuaries. Each is worth a patient visit. Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre seemed a must: not only are there three holy water fonts shaped like pilgrim’s shells. Better still, the small church’s foundations and forecourt wellhead sit on Roman paving stones, lifted from the crossroads of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue Galande—Paris’ other major Roman road that branched east to Lyon.

Just as exciting was what we discovered at #21 Rue Saint-Jacques: a sculpted 1500s doorway, pocketsized courtyards, an 18^th-century house, and spiraling stairwells guarded by plump cats. In the courtyard of nearby #67 we found another sculpted door and balcony.

Rue Saint-Jacques climbs past the Sorbonne and ungainly Lycée Louis-le-Grand. At the top of the rise we stopped for the view back, trying to imagine the ancient city. A few paces away, a plaque at #14 Rue Soufflot marks where the 13^th-century Jacobins convent once stood. Ironically it lent its name to a university department where, 500 years later, revolutionaries met.

For a millennium—from the Merovingians to the Revolution—this area was studded with churches, monuments and private mansions and ringed by walls. The carriage door at 151 bis Rue Saint-Jacques, a Louis XV townhouse restored in 2006, stood open. We helped ourselves. In the courtyard looms an impressive house with a horseshoe-shaped staircase, curving balconies and sculpted grotesque faces.

The Roman aqueduct from Arcueil to the baths at Cluny flanked the cardo for much of its length. Sections were revealed here in the 1890s and again by excavations in 2006. The road narrows briefly to pre-modern dimensions. At #172 another plaque recalls the Saint-Jacques gate in the Philippe Auguste walls, demolished in 1684. Curving Rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques marks the path of the moat.

We tracked back and forth across the street, admiring the gilded grillwork at Au Port Salut, a 1700s travelers and pilgrims’ inn, still here and in business. Still carved on the heavy door of #169 are scallop shells, usually an indication that the property’s owner had walked to Compostela and back. Another kind of throwback in this high-rent district is #179: a mechanic’s garage fills the cavernous courtyard.

The narrowest point in the cardo lies between #187 and #216—where writer Blaise Cendrars lived. I measured out six paces, making it even narrower than the Roman road. That’s because from the 1200s on, convents and abbeys colonized off-street lots. Private buildings shouldered in front along the roadside. We glanced up at the pitched roof of #208. The plaque once on #218 disappeared with the latest replastering, I guessed. In a long-gone, 1200s townhouse that once stood here, Jean de Meung penned the bulk of the medieval bestseller Roman de la Rose.

One of Paris’ stranger piles is the pseudo-Romanesque, rusticated Institut Océanique at #193, abutting Rue Gay-Lussac. When the road went through in the mid-1800s a Roman villa with thermal baths surfaced, reaching as far as #240. Ever curious, we explored courtyards not yet locked by Digi-codes. Instead of finding ancient mosaics we enjoyed unadulterated Parisian atmosphere—until ferocious concierges chased us out.

The trouble with walking the cardo is, there’s far too much to see in a day. Determined to make it across town nonetheless, we marched on, into the barn-like baroque Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, at #252. Though only from 1630-1685 this church evokes the Order of Alto Passo—Christian knights who in the 1100s protected pilgrimage routes linking France to Rome. Off the echoing nave we spotted a statue of Saint James. His wall-eyes followed us out.

The Paris headquarters of Alto Passo were a few yards south at #254. Above the carriage entrance is the insignia of the Commanderie du Haut-Pas. Many landmarks like it have disappeared, some as recently as the 1990s. The Ferme Saint-Jacques at #262, for instance, was replaced by an egregious eyesore; gutted, #289 became subsized housing; and #328 might just be the most egregious postmodern steel-and-granite bunker in town.

Happily others have survived. Courtyards, doorways and dormers—like those at #283 and #284—hint at days of yore. We were glad to see the former Benedictine Couvent des Anglais at #269-269 bis. “Schola Cantorum” is carved over the entrance. Dance, music and drama students came and went, seemingly oblivious to the corinthian columns, sweeping staircase and garden court.

Repaved and equipped with benches, the halfmoon plaza facing Val-de-Grace convent seemed a good perch. From it our eyes inspected the convent’s ironwork, forecourt flanked by square pavilions and immense baroque façade. We lucked out, wandering into a wedding ceremony. “A.L.” appears everywhere at Val-de-Grace, the initials of founder Anne of Austria and her husband Louis XIII. Saint Peter’s and the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome inspired the triple-aisle nave, soaring dome and Bernini-style Baldaquin. Dazed by an overdose of chapels, courtyards and architectural details we fled outside.

Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques starts at busy Boulevard de Port Royal. Behind a smog-blackened old building and the Stalinesque Cochin medical school hides an arcaded cloister from 1625, these days part of the Baudeloque maternity ward. We sat amid clipped yew trees and heard the future of France wail.

The cardo’s last kilometers pack less charm per step, but we were pleased to remark l’Observatoire on our right and, kitty corner, the centuries-old Faculté de Théologie—a grimy, soulful address that seemed appropriate given the road’s pilgrim past.

“Saint-Jacques” is also a leafy boulevard and an early 1900s métro station sitting where the Faubourg becomes Rue de la Tombe-Issoire. As we walked toward Parc Montsouris, a lovely landscaped enclave, I remembered the origins of the street and park’s unusual names: beyond the city limits, tombs once lined the Roman road, and one of them supposedly contained the remains of a giant, Ysorre. The name morphed to Souris and Issoire, and who knows what happened to the tombs and skeletons.

Beyond the Vanne reservoir and university greenbelt, the cardo-cum-Way-of-Saint-James becomes a potholed offramp from the Boulevard Péripherique. On it cars roared three-abreast in both directions. Saint James might not have approved, but I couldn’t help thinking Julius Caesar would’ve loved it.

 

Paris and the Tour Saint-Jacques

Environmental artist Christo worked wonders when he swaddled the Pont Neuf back in 1985, the year I moved to Paris. Nowadays I raise my eyes to the Tour Saint-Jacques on the Rue de Rivoli wondering if the master-wrapper has met his match.

Tour St-Jacques under wraps, copyright Alison HarrisSince 2001 scaffolding has shrouded the former churchtower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie from its octagonal foot to its 54-meter-high head. The tower’s flamboyant Gothic silhouette, one of Paris’ tallest, is a Right Bank landmark between Châtelet and Hôtel de Ville. Somehow sinister, the shroud will hide the crumbling tower until at least November 2009 (click on the image to enlarge it).

For the last few years I’ve been reading everything I can get may hands on about the medieval pilgrimage the tower was associated with, part of the research I’m doing for A Skeptical Pilgrimage. The book traces the pilgrimage route from Paris south to the Pyrénées (and from there to Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle in Spain). In searching for traces of the alchemists, murderers and fanatics the tower’s site has known, my wanderings have led me many times into the square at its base.

In March 2006 city officials closed the Square Saint Jacques. Until at least 2009 it will be filled with limestone blocks and construction equipment. “Phase one is over,” a foreman told me over traffic noise, “five years of analyzing every centimeter.”

The square reopened in April. From a raised viewing platform you can watch artisans shaping gargoyles, statues and cornices. The scaffolding will come down in stages starting from the top, a novel way to turn a long, dusty job into edifying entertainment.

Talk about bad luck. Built from 1509-1523, the tower’s last 2 centuries are a chronicle of misfortunes that also remind us of the fragility of stone—limestone in this case. But to understand the monument’s origins you have to travel further back, to the Bronze Age.

That’s when Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes first crossed the Seine at the Ile-de-la-Cité, a natural ford. The east-west Atlantic trail followed the river’s right bank. The north-south trail linked what’s now Senlis and Orléans (and in 1973 was cut off by the Boulevard Péripherique, Paris' beltway). The Bronze Age Mediterranean-Atlantic intersection became the Roman’s “cardo-decumanus” where raised, paved highways met (curiously, 3 Roman paving stones flank the Left Bank church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, about 100 meters off the Rue Saint-Jacques). These highways morphed into medieval Paris’ axis-thoroughfares. The church of St-Jacques-le-Majeur, recorded since at least 1060, sat at the crossroads, welcoming pilgrims to and from Saint-Jacques’ Spanish shrine. Today the crossroads is where the Rue Saint-Martin and Rue de Rivoli meet, on the 4^th arrondissement’s western edge.

After Philippe Auguste’s city walls had completely girded Paris in 1220, the Right Bank boomed, filling with slaughterhouses, tanneries and butcher shops. By 1259 the pilgrimage church had grown, sprouted a tower and changed its name to Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.

Mystery still wraps the figures of Nicolas Flamel and his wife Pernelle—wealthy, pious benefactors who in 1389 paid for the addition to the church of a northern portal. The pair are recalled by the names of nearby streets and by their townhouse, the oldest in Paris, from 1407, still standing in the Rue Montmorency (between the Centre Pompidou and church of Saint Martin). The Flamels theoretically made their fortune as booksellers, but many Parisians believed they were alchemists able to turn base metals into gold.

On the side tympanum of Saint-Jacques’ church the couple were shown kneeling at the Virgin Mary’s feet, flanking Saint-Jacques and Saint John the Baptist. In 1418 Nicolas was buried under the church in what’s now the Square Saint-Jacques. His ghost, chroniclers say, came back to haunt the tower, and almost caused its ruin. His cryptic stone epitaph—many times lost and recovered—is in the Musée de Cluny on the stairway to the “Lady with the Unicorn” room. (From the tower, walk south up the Rue Saint-Jacques, turn right on the Rue du Sommerard and you’ll see the museum on your right).

By the early 1500s the church’s medieval belltower seemed inadequate. Though the Renaissance had already peaked in Italy, Paris still preferred the flamboyant Gothic—witness the churches of Saint-Merri, near the Centre Pompidou, and Saint-Sévérin on the Left Bank. Architect Jean de Felin designed a massive belltower, joining it to the base of Saint-Jacques’ west side. On its crown soared a 3.5-meter-tall effigy of Saint-Jacques surrounded on each corner by 2.5-meter-tall phantasmagoric sculptures symbolizing the Evangelists, carved by Pierre Rault. Nearly 2 dozen statues of saints filled niches on each of the tower’s three levels. Stone tracery, gargoyle spouts and elaborate carvings decorated the façades top to bottom. The tower’s exceptional height made the carillon audible all over town.

So populous and prosperous was Saint-Jacques’ parish that soon the crypt, charnel house and graveyard overflowed with coffins, swamping caverns under what’s now the square and Rue de Rivoli (the stench, it’s said, lingers in the métro today).

Fast forward to 1793, when Revolutionary crowds ransacked Saint-Jacques, throwing the tower’s sculptures to the ground. Only the 4 rooftop animal statues symbolizing Mark, Luke, John and Matthew survived (3 are in the Musée de Cluny’s reserve, the fourth has disappeared). Four years later the church was auctioned and quarried for building stone, with the proviso that the tower be spared. A certain Monsieur Dubois bought the tower, sold the bells to a foundry, and set up a gun-shot factory.

Under the tower’s roof Dubois’ cauldrons melted lead. The molten metal, poured through a broad seive, formed pellets. By free-falling nearly 50 meters into tanks of cold water on the tower’s ground floor they formed perfect round shot. Dubois was the real alchemist—turning lead into hard cash. Flamel’s ghost returned with a vengeance, though, and the factory caught fire 3 times, destroying everything on the former church’s grounds, including a covered marketplace.

It was scientist François Arago who persuaded king Louis Philippe to buy back the gutted, damaged tower in the 1830s. In 1854, when the Rue de Rivoli and parallel Avenue Victoria were widened and straightened, the Saint-Jacques compound became a park, designed by Baron Haussmann’s favorite architect, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. The ground level around the tower was lowered, an octagonal base with 14 steps built. And up went scaffolding.

Architect Théodore Ballu, in charge of the tower, hired Jean-Louis Chenillon to sculpt a new colossal Saint-Jacques. Nineteen different artists carved the 19 other statues of saints on the façades. Crumbling stonework was repaired. Since the bells were gone the belfry was sealed with stained glass windows by Stanislas Oudinot. Finally in 1862 the scaffolding came down. The tower won landmark status.

But bad luck continued. During the 1871 Commune, massacred “Fédérés” were buried in the park in a mass grave. When the métro was put through in 1900 their bones were reburied at the tower’s base, where they remain.

The 19th-century restorations didn’t last. Stones kept falling. By 1906 scaffolding was up again. In 1909, 1912, 1932, 1968 and 1978 scaffolding in whole or in part masked the tower, sometimes for up to 5 years. Copies of copies replaced cracked, eroded sculptures. Mismatched, inherently fragile limestone types, bad mortar, pollution and acid rain were what led to the current rebuilding campaign. This time 30 sculptors, stonemasons, stained-glass restorers, carpenters and coopers have 3 years and 8 months to get it right.

Will the remake last? Check back in a century or so.

 

Meanwhile, a secular skeptic, I’ve spent three months walking across Burgundy, then, on leg two, from Le Puy en Velay to Spain following the Chemin de Saint-Jacques – aka The Way of Saint James.

On October 18, 2006, buffeted by a spectacular wind storm, Alison and I made it through the frowning mountain pass used by neolithic tribesmen, Basques, Roman invaders, Charlemagne and Roland (of blow-your-horn fame) and of course Napoléon, reaching Roncevaux (or Roncesvalles, in Spanish), on the south side of the Pyrénées, more or less intact.

Click on Burgundy or Le Puy-to-the-Pyrenees To read about our journey, see photos and hear the sounds of the French countryside—brooks, streams and rivers, wind, TGV high-speed trains, church bells, restaurants and cafes, roosters, cows and donkeys, chefs, priests, museum directors...

In early 2007 the newsletter-website Paris Notes will be running a story tracing the Rue Saint-Jacques through Paris.

If you'd like to be in touch with us for more information about our trek, or would like to inquire about setting up an accompanied tour in Paris, Burgundy or the Midi, please email info@parisparisthebook.com and type TREK QUERY in the subject line.

 

David Downie is the author of the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” with 30 B&W photos by Alison Harris www.parisparisthebook.com.

 

 

 

Bells of Sainte Genevieve