Rue de la Huchette & Saint-Séverin: The Stone Palm Tree
Why is it significant?
Walk down Rue de la Huchette, through the smell of grilled meat and the shouts of waiters, and keep an eye on the house numbers. At number 23 there is a tiny theatre, barely bigger than a living room.
Key Facts
| Place | Rue de la Huchette & Saint-Séverin: The Stone Palm Tree |
|---|---|
| Address | 3 Rue des Prêtres Saint-Séverin, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85210, 2.34570 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk down Rue de la Huchette, through the smell of grilled meat and the shouts of waiters, and keep an eye on the house numbers. At number 23 there is a tiny theatre, barely bigger than a living room. Since 1957 it has played the same two plays by Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, almost every night, one of the longest unbroken runs of any theatre in the world.
On your left, just off the street, look for a gap between the houses so narrow you could almost touch both walls. That is the Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, the street of the fishing cat, often called the narrowest street in Paris, at under two metres wide. Nobody agrees on the cat. The best story is of a black cat that fished in the Seine, back when the river lapped at the end of the lane.
Now turn up toward the church of Saint-Séverin, with its gargoyles leaning out over the street. It was rebuilt in the fifteenth century in the Flamboyant style, the last firework of French Gothic. Go inside if you can and walk behind the altar: there, in the double ambulatory, one pillar spirals upward like a twisted palm trunk, its ribs fanning out across the vault. And the windows around it are not medieval at all. They were designed in the 1960s by the abstract painter Jean Bazaine, a storm of colour inside a Gothic forest.
Beside the church lies a little garden enclosed by an old gallery. It was a charnel house, where bones from the overcrowded cemetery were stacked under the roof. The story goes that in 1474, in this cemetery, surgeons performed one of the first recorded operations for kidney stones, on a condemned archer, with the king's permission. He is said to have survived, and to have been pardoned.
Look up, too, at the bell tower: one of its bells was cast in 1412, and is said to be the oldest in Paris. Now continue a few steps east to Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and a small garden facing the river, where something very old is leaning on a crutch.