Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (16 page)

These questions accompanied me two blocks south to Saint-Merri. You wouldn’t guess it from the exterior, but this church plunges its foundations into late Antiquity. That was when the early popes in Rome upheld the crumbling empire by forcibly converting “Barbarians” into Catholics. Saint-Merri subsumed an older chapel, the resting place of Carolingian miracle-worker Médéric, whose name was later shortened to Merri. Rebuilt three times in its first thousand years, the current church is late-flamboyant Gothic, from 1520 to 1560. Gargoyle spouts stared down at us, commanding us to enter. We listened to an organist practicing in a cloud of incense, then hit the road again.

Rising over Rue de Rivoli and a handsome corner park, the vestigial Tour Saint-Jacques is a blinding shade of white after bottom-up rebuilding that took many years and cost millions. Another marvel of the flamboyant Gothic, built from 1509 to 1523, the freestanding tower lost its church: Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was quarried during the Revolution.

At 54 meters—nearly 180 feet—the tower’s silhouette is still one of Paris’s tallest. It’s also among my favorites anywhere, for all the wrong reasons.

As part of the groundwork for our hike across France, before setting out on the
cardo
I read everything I could about the Tour Saint-Jacques, its phantom church, and Paris’s role in the pilgrimage business. Anyone with a superstitious rib in his body should flee at the sight of the tower. Its history is a chronicle of misfortunes. They should remind us of the fragility of man and stone—limestone.

Caesar’s north-south
cardo
and east-west
decumanus
meet where the tower now stands, making the Square Saint-Jacques the ideal spot for Christians to top a Pagan crossroads with a shrine. Nothing is known of the first sanctuary built here, but by 1259 it had grown into Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—Saint James of the Butcher Shop. Mystery wraps the figure of Nicolas Flamel, its most famous patron. In 1418 he died and was buried under the church. His ghost came back to haunt the tower, it’s said, and caused its ruin.

Crowning the tower is an effigy of Saint Jacques three times lifesize, surrounded by phantasmagoric sculptures nearly as tall symbolizing the Evangelists, all of them copies. Strangely, Saint-Jacques does not point south along his pilgrimage road. He looks west, because his relics arrived on Spain’s west coast by sea.

In 1797, the church was deconstructed, with the proviso that the tower be spared. A certain Monsieur Dubois bought it, sold the bells to a foundry, and set up a gun-shot factory inside. Under the tower’s roof Dubois’s cauldrons melted lead. The molten metal was poured through a broad seive and formed pellets. By free-falling about 150 feet into tanks of cold water they formed perfectly round shot. Dubois was the real alchemist—turning lead into hard cash. Maybe that’s why Flamel’s ghost returned—with a vengeance. The factory caught fire three times, and the tower periodically cracked and threatened to crumble for the next two hundred years.

It was scientist François Arago who persuaded King Louis Philippe to buy back the gutted ruin in the 1830s. Along came Emperor Napoléon III. Unlike his great-uncle he was no enemy of Rome. In 1854, when Napoléon III commanded that Rue de Rivoli and parallel Avenue Victoria be widened and straightened, the Saint-Jacques compound became a park, designed by the emperor’s favorite architect, Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand. An octagonal base with fourteen steps was built—and numerologists to this day have failed to assign significance to the number.

For nearly one thousand years, from the convent and tower of Saint-Jacques pilgrims set forth, crossing Pont Notre-Dame to the cathedral, then striding out to Chartres, Orléans, and Spain, following the ancient Roman road. Today’s pilgrims generally take a bus. The Celtic merchants of pre-Roman antiquity—dealers primarily in tin—were not so lucky. Around 1000 BC they began crossing the Seine in dugouts, or they waded across the natural fords on the north and south sides of Île de la Cité. Time and again the Celts erected rickety footbridges in the latter days of Lutetia, before Caesar showed up in 52 BC. Rome eventually transformed the footbridges into Paris’s first permanent spans. Rebuilt at least a dozen times, the Petit Pont has bridged the same spot from the island to the Left Bank, with variations on the name “little bridge,” for more than two thousand 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, on opposite sides. Both have sixth-century pedigrees. Each is worth a patient visit. The less impressive of the two, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre nonetheless seemed a must: it’s home not only to three holy-water fonts shaped like a pilgrim’s scallop shell, symbol of Saint-Jacques. Better still, the church’s foundations and the wellhead in the forecourt sit atop Roman paving stones. They were lifted from the crossroads of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue Galande—Paris’s other major Roman road, which branched east from here to Lyon, long the capital of Gaul. Up that road came Rome’s warriors, but also the language, religion, foods, wine, and rudiments of culture that the later inhabitants of what’s now called France so skillfully absorbed, reinterpreted, and renamed
en français
.

Almost as exciting was what we discovered at 21 Rue Saint-Jacques: a sculpted 1500s doorway, pocket-size courtyards, an eighteenth-century house, and two spiraling stairwells guarded by plump cats. In the courtyard of nearby 67 we found another sculpted door and balcony.

The treasure hunt was on. One block west of the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Boulevard Saint-Germain stands the scallop-shell-encrusted former Paris residence of the abbots of Cluny. They were Rome’s right arm in France, with the biggest church outside the Vatican, and were even bigger in the pilgrimage business. Cluny’s thousand franchise churches were way stations on Saint-Jacques’s highway to Spain. Their turreted townhouse is now the museum of the Middle Ages, better known as the Musée de Cluny.

We marched around the museum’s medieval garden, searching for the original sculptures from the Tour Saint-Jacques, the ones symbolizing the Evangelists. Three are here, weather-worn beyond recognition. Inside, on the stairway leading to the “Lady with the Unicorn” tapestry, hanging on the wall we found another Saint-Jacques treasure: Nicolas Flamel’s cryptic epitaph carved in stone, many times lost before being displayed here. Appropriately for our quest, the foundations and lower floors of the museum are in the ancient Roman baths of Lutetia, where Emperor Julian the Apostate and countless other patricians soaked and steamed when Paris was the capital of the empire.

Rue Saint-Jacques climbs past the Sorbonne and the ungainly Lycée Louis-le-Grand. At the top of the rise we stopped for the view back, trying but failing to envision the ancient city. A few paces away, a plaque at 14 Rue Soufflot marks where the thirteenth-century Jacobin convent once stood. Ironically it lent its name to a university department where, five hundred years later, in 1789, Jacobin revolutionaries met and wreaked havoc on the church of Rome.

For a millennium—from the Merovingians to the Revolution—this area was studded with monasteries, 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 premodern dimensions. At number 172 a 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.

Enchanted, we tracked back and forth across the street, admiring the gilded grillwork at Au Port Salut, a 1700s pilgrims’ inn, still in business. 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 a mechanic’s garage in the cavernous courtyard of 179.

The narrowest point in the
cardo
lies between numbers 187 and 216—where writer Blaise Cendrars lived. Emulating Caesar, I measured out six paces and frowned. The road was even narrower than the original Roman highway. That’s because from the 1200s on, convents and abbeys colonized off-street lots. Private buildings shouldered in front along the roadside.

The plaque that used to be on number 218 disappeared with the latest replastering, I guessed. I knew from earlier visits that in a long-gone 1200s townhouse that had stood here, Jean de Meung penned the bulk of the medieval bestseller
Roman de la Rose
.

One of Paris’s stranger pieces of architecture is the neo-Romanesque, rusticated Institut Océanique at 193, abutting Rue Gay-Lussac. A Roman villa with thermal baths surfaced under it in the mid-1800s, reaching as far as number 240.

Ever curious, we explored courtyards not yet locked by Digi-codes. Instead of finding ancient mosaics we enjoyed unadulterated Parisian atmosphere—until several 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 before nightfall, we marched on, into the baroque barn of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, at 252. Though only from 1630 to 1685, this church evokes the Order of Haut-Pas—Christian knights who in the 1100s protected pilgrimage routes linking France to Rome. Off the echoing nave we spotted a statue of Jacques. His wall-eyes followed us out.

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

Happily other landmarks have survived. Courtyards, doorways, and dormers—like those at 283 and 284—hint at centuries past. 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 unimpressed by the corinthian columns, a sweeping staircase, and an unexpected garden court.

Repaved and equipped with benches, the half-moon plaza facing Val-de-Grâce convent seemed a good place to rest. 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. The initials “A.L.” appear everywhere at Val-de-Grâce. They stand for the insitution’s founder, Anne of Austria, and her husband Louis XIII. Saint Peter’s and the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome inspired the convent’s triple-aisle nave, soaring dome, and Bernini-style baldachin. Dazed by an overdose of architectural details, we fled outside.

Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques starts at Boulevard de Port-Royal. Behind a smog-blackened 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 miles 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 whose theology courses are in keeping with the road’s pilgrim past.

Saint-Jacques is also the name of a leafy boulevard and an early 1900s Métro station, where the Faubourg becomes Rue de la Tombe-Issoire. As we walked toward Parc Montsouris, a landscaped enclave on the edge of town, I remembered the legendary giant Ysorre, the origin of these curious names. In ancient times, outside the city limits Roman tombs lined the road.

Beyond the Cité Universitaire greenbelt, the
cardo-
cum-Way-of-Saint-James becomes a potholed off-ramp from the Boulevard Périphérique. On it cars roared three abreast in both directions. We pondered the snarled colossus Pompidou built, diesel-scented tears in our eyes. Saint James would surely not have approved, but I couldn’t help thinking, irreverently, that Julius Caesar would have loved it.

Coco Chanel