To begin, a couple of trivial pursuits: Where is the oldest shop sign in Paris? And the city’s oldest tree? Answer: near l’Eglise St-Julien le Pauvre, hunkering on the Left Bank just across the Seine from Notre Dame.

Less trivial is St. Julian’s legend. A wealthy young nobleman of the early Middle Ages, he loved hunting. One day, he drew a bead on a stag who… started talking! “If you put down your bow and arrow,” said the animal, “I’ll tell you a prophecy.” Julian obliged and the stag informed him that he would kill his mother and father.

Horrified, Julian and his wife hurriedly ran away from his parents’ castle. Not long afterwards, the parents discovered the place of refuge one day while Julian was out hunting again. They were exhausted by the search and Julian’s wife put them to sleep in the conjugal bed, then went out to find her husband. He returned during her absence, found people snoring in his bed and – you guessed it – dispatched them both.

On discovering the horrible mistake, and as penance, he and his wife renounced their worldly riches and set up a hospice by a river to serve poor pilgrims and lepers. One service was to ferry the poor toll-free across the river.

One day, a cowled man stopped at the hospice and asked to be taken to the opposite bank. Julian and his wife were just about mid-stream when the stranger stood up and threw back his cowl. It was Jesus, and he pardoned Julian.

Don’t believe it? Well Parisians have for nearly seven hundred years, as is attested by the dramatic mid-river denouement scene shown on a bas relief shop sign at 42 rue Galande, just around the corner from the church and dating from before 1370 – Paris’ oldest commercial ad. (The sculptor obviously knew nothing about rowing: the penitent couple’s oars are wrongly positioned.)

Twice Trashed

And fact? I don’t know about jabbering stags, but there probably was in the 6th century a small riverside hospice on the site of today’s St. Julian the Poor. This had been, in fact, a major crossroads since Gallo-Roman times because it was the junction of the Lutetia’s north-south cardo maximus (later a pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostella, recalled by its present name: rue St-Jacques) and the all-important road that led to Lyons and thence to Rome itself, now rue Galande, extended to the south by rue Mouffetard.

That early hospice was destroyed by 9th century Viking raids and the present St. Julian was begun about 1170 AD, some seven years after Notre Dame, and consecrated around 1240 AD something like a century before big sister Cathedral was more or less complete. The comparison between the two is striking. Notre Dame, pleasantly visible from the shady public garden just by St. Julian, is hugely majestic yet seems to float lightly when its vast Gothic arches and oar-like flying buttresses are bathed in sunlight just over the Seine. St. Julian, in contrast, seems tiny and does appear to hunker modestly like a village chapel with small Romanesque windows (some round, others slightly pointed) and abutments, but minus a transept and boasting only a stumpy bell tower.

The Sorbonne isn’t far, and this was long a favorite church of the university community. Rabelais, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch and Villon all prayed here. Since the Medieval university had no administrative buildings, its archives were kept at St. Julian which also hosted periodic academic general assemblies. In 1524, one of the latter elected a Rector Magnificus immensely unpopular with the students, who thereupon trashed the place so thoroughly that the church had to close. Ill-maintained until the mid-1600s, it lost most of its Western facade and the first two interior bays. Patched in a surprisingly incongruous neo-classical style, this ungainly amputation is clearly recognizable.

All that remains of the original (ca. 1200 A.D.) facade.
Following a student trashing in 1524. St. Julian was closed
and, for over a century, not maintained.

A Magic Well

Nationalized and used as a salt storehouse (not great for the stone) during the French Revolution, St. Julian is said to have been offered during the 19th century to the Catholic Church which… didn’t want it. So it reverted to the Greek Melchites. Today some 5,000 strong in Paris, they recognize the Catholic Pope as spiritual leader but practice a rite close to orthodox liturgy, which explains the presence inside of an iconostasis.

St. Julian is claimed by some to be the oldest church in Paris. That is such a complicated question that I’ll it reserve for another article on Paris-Eiffel-Tower-News.com.

To the East of the church is the above-ground structure (lip, arch and pulley) of a well that was probably actually much closer to the Northern apse. It water was reputed to have curative powers and the good fathers of St. Julian marketed it as a source of revenue. Sold it, that is, until one convinced the others that those powers were a gift of God and should not, therefore, be used for profit. From the day the well’s water was first distributed free of charge, it… lost its power to cure.

The magic well.

Two final surprises among many others linked to St. Julian the Poor. First, enter the little alleyway situated to the right when looking at the church’s main façade. Hold your nose (it’s not just a quaint passageway) and you’ll see, embedded in the wall at the alley’s end, a rectangular slab of sandstone about 1.5 meter x 80 cm. Remember that rue St. Jacques was once the Roman cardo maximus? Well, this was a paving stone in it, discovered during road work there in 1927 and set on its side here soon after. Don’t believe me? Look closely and you’ll see two ruts left by carts and chariots almost two millennia ago.

And the oldest Parisian tree? The probable winner is found in the little garden just to the North of St. Julian. There stands a common locust (or “false acacia”) planted around 1600. In fact, it’s not a Parisian tree at all, indeed not even French, having been brought as a sapling from… Virginia!

---
^* Paris-based Arthur Gillette guides theme- and period-specific strolls to help visitors discover “Paris Through The Ages.” If interested in taking one, or more, contact him on Armedv@aol.com.