Parisian Scenes - Day 19

Good morning (or other time of the day) to everyone,
I'm still sick, yay. But at least, after a pillfull night and some good sleep, I'm feeling a little better, and so I manage to keep up with my morning post.

I would like to introduce you to Saint-Jacques Tower (or, as they call it in French, Tour Saint-Jacques. These guys really like to flip the words everywhere, it's so confusing sometimes). This interesting tower is located at the 4th arrondissement of Paris, and it has a really interesting story (like most buildings in Paris).

As you can see, this is just a tower, without any apparent connection to any other building. However, when it was built, in the 16th century, it was a part of the church Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. Can any of you guess what this name means? I'll make it easy for you: Saint James of the butchery (at least according to Wikipedia, Jacques means James, which is news to me - I always thought it was Jack, which it actually John, for another unclear reason).

Why would anyone name a church after the saint of butchers, you ask? Well, this church was located very close to the Les Halles wholesale market of Paris (which was discussed here several times over the past few days, come to think about it), and one of the things you sell in such a market (and really one of the worst smelling and dangerous things if something goes bad) is meat. So, there you go.

So what happened to the church, and how come the tower survived? Well, during the French revolution the church was destroyed, and for some reason the tower is the only thing that survived, which currently makes it a national historic landmark - and a very lovely one, too. Over the years, the various French governments decided to decorate this tower with a surrounding park, renovated it, and made it the beautiful souvenir from old times that it is now.

I also heard a rumor that you can climb up the stairs of this lovely structure if you come on certain days and times, but haven't had the chance to check it out for myself yet. I looked at this page in an attempt to understand more, and it appears that you can, indeed, go up this tower in a guided tour of 50 minutes, but it seems very complicated to make a reservation there.

Oh well.
Health to all!

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