This door on the south aisle stands opposite to the one
which leads out into the Square Viviani, and like its northern counterpart it
replaces a Gothic window that once occupied the bay. Above the door you can see the
outline of the arch belonging to the window.
Its hood molding has not survived. The stone work on this side of the church is a
bit rougher than what you saw on the other walls. Much of the smooth stone veneer is
missing, but here you can still see a couple of pieces adjacent to the door frame.The areas south and east of St. Julien once contained the priory cloister, a courtyard, the prior's house, a garden and the Chapel of St. Blaise and St. Louis. Today there is only gravel and a few trees and shrubs along the eastern boundary. The area immediately outside to the door is paved. I suspect the tall shaft to the left has something to do with the central heating--it doesn't appear in any old photos and appears to be fairly new. In advertisements for concerts, mention is sometimes made of the fact that the church is heated in winter. 
This old wall stands as a barrier between buildings in the rue Galande
and the west end of the church. It appears to be very old and you can clearly
see a walled-up archway in the middle. Old plans of the priory enclosure
show that in the 17th century a building stood just south of the church during the
with only a narrow alley between, so perhaps the wall seen here was once part of that building.
The half-timbered structure on the other side of the wall is the Caveau des Oubliettes, a night club
which has its entrance on the rue Galande. The cellars of that building are much older than
the rest of the structure. Their stone vaults date back to the early Middle Ages. 
These windows open onto to the three bays just east of the door. You'll notice that there
are no buttresses between the windows as there are on the north. Some sources believe that the southern wall
of the church was built thicker in order to compensate for the lack of
buttresses. However, some old plans of the church do show buttresses on this wall, so perhaps
they once existed but were removed at some point. The iron railing you see here surrounds a stairway leading down to an
underground entrance. The railing and stairs do not appear in early photos and
must be a 20th-century addition. I don't know where these stairs go, because no sources mention a
crypt or undercroft beneath the church.The large structure on the right is the base of the present bell tower of St. Julien. The door you can see on the west side provides access. To my disappointment, the tower is off-limits to the public so I was not able to climb the spiral staircase inside to photograph the bell. 
The bell tower of St. Julien is constructed of stone to just above the level of the
aisle roof, and this part of it was probably built at the same time as the southern
chapel, but the upper part, which appears to be of stucco, is thought to have been
built at the time of the 1651 reconstruction. As I mentioned earlier, the original
plan was to put the bell tower above the double bay of the southern
chapel. The small tower you see here was merely
intended to house the spiral staircase that provided access to the bell tower.
Some historians believe that a bell tower was actually constructed above the chapel,
but was demolished in 1651, at which time the stair tower was renovated to serve as a
replacement. Others, citing the evidence of some old pictorial maps of Paris,
believe that a needle spire was built above the choir instead. And there are some who believe that the
only bell tower that ever existed is
the one that you see today. Because the church has been so radically
altered by the 17th-century reconstruction, it is not possible to tell which theory is correct.
However, there is a small gable on the roof where
the nave meets the choir, and the exterior stone staircase ascending to it from the present
tower. The stair could have been built to provide access to a spire as well as to the rafters above the vaults.Whatever the truth about its history may be, the present bell tower has a very odd shape. In section, it is an irregular six-sided polygon. Two sides meet at an angle on the roof of the south aisle, and from one of them a door opens out onto the exterior stone staircase leading to the gable. There are several narrow little lancet windows, but no ornament of any kind. The small chimney is an interesting feature that I had never seen before I was allowed to wander around in the area south of the church. It does not appear in any old elevation drawings or photos that I am aware of, and I have no idea when it was built or what it might be used for, unless it is left over from the days when the church was heated by little cast-iron stoves. 
These two windows open onto the double bay of the southern chapel. Like the
other windows of the south aisle, they are surmounted by hood moldings, but you
can see that they are smaller and spaced closer together.
This wide-angle photo of the southern exterior taken from the southeast shows all
of its major structural features--the windows of the aisle and chapel, the tower,
the exterior stair and gable, and the upper windows of the choir. The apse of the
southern chapel and part of the main apse are visible on the right, and on the left you can
also see the southern corner of the façade wall. The triangular-shaped pediment is
like a false front, hiding the shape of the early Gothic church behind it.
The upper nave wall which abuts it is constructed of plaster like the top of the
tower, and its windows are not visible from this angle, because they
are so small and positioned so low as to be hidden by the south aisle roof.
Unlike the apse of the north aisle, which was deliberately shortened on the east
end to preserve the now-lost Miraculous Well, the apse at the end of the south
aisle extends almost as far to the east as the main apse. It has a
single east window. The southern apse has two bands of molding similar to those
accenting the lower windows of the adjacent main apse.
A closer view of the southern apse reveals a cornice with Norman-style zig-zag or
chevron decoration which is found nowhere else in the structure. This type of
decoration is most often seen on Romanesque churches, and its presence reemphasizes
the fact that the east end of St. Julien was constructed during the transition
between Romanesque and Gothic styles.We will now return to the interior of the church and conclude the tour with a visit to the sacristy on the north aisle. |
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St. Julien le Pauvre url: http://www.people.ku.edu/~asnow/ Webmaster: A. Snow This site last updated 11/18/2005. |
