Place St-Michel and Around
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Place St-Michel and Around
The pivotal point of the Quartier Latin is place St-Michel, where the treelined boulevard St-Michel begins. The name is redolent of student chic, though these days dull commercial outlets have largely taken over the famous "boul’Mich". Nevertheless, the cafés and shops around the square are constantly jammed with young people: either students or, in summer, foreign backpackers. A favourite meeting point is the fountain at the back end of the place, which spills down from a statue of the archangel Michael stomping on the devil. The pink and white confectionery of surrounding stone cunningly conceals the blank gable end of an apartment block behind.
The touristy scrum is at its ugliest on around rue de la Huchette, just east of the place St-Michel. The only sign of the street’s former incarnation as the mecca of Beat poets and Absurdists in the post-World War II years is the Theatre de la Huchette, at no. 23, the last of Paris’s "pocket theatres", which still shows lonesco’s Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Prima Donna) and La Lecon almost fifty years on – well worth a trip if your French is up to it. The rest of the Huchette quarter is given over the cheap bars and Greek seafood-and-disco tavernas. Connecting rue de la Huchette to the riverside is the evocatively named rue du Chat-qui-Peche (Fishing Cat Street), a narrow slce of medieval Paris as is used to look before Haussmann set to work clearing the way for the boulevards.
At the end of rue de la Huchette, rue St-Jacques follows the line of Roman Paris’s main thoroughfare. Its name, however, derives from another kind of route: that of the celebrated pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella and the shrine of St-Jacques, just across the river, and this easy bit of sloping road was a gentle taste of what lay ahead.
One block south of rue de la Huchette, and west of rue St-Jacques, stands mainly fifteenth-century church of St-Severin, with its entrance on rue des Pretres St-Severin. It’s one of the city’s more intense churches, its interior seemingly focused on the single, twisting, central pillar of the Flamboyant choir. The effect is heightened by deep stained glass designed by the modern French painter Jean Bazaine. The flame-like carving that gave the flamboyant ("flaming") style its name flickers in the window arch above the entrance while, inside, the first three pillars of the nave betray the earlier, thirteenth-century origins of the church. Outside, on the south side of the church, you can see the remains of what looks like a cloister enclosing a modest courtyard garden on two sides; this was in fact a charnel house for the mortal remains of fifteenth-century parishioners. Today, it’s the last surviving one anywhere in the city.
One block to the south of the church, rue de la Parcheminerie is where medieval scribes and parchment sellers used to congregate. It’s worth cricking your neck to look at the decorations on the facades, including that of no.29, where you’ll find the Canadian-run Abbey Bookshop.
