After exiting the Square Viviani by the iron gate, go across the rue St. Julien
le Pauvre and have a look at the northwest corner of the church.
You will see a tall, massive buttress on the right, and a wall with a single
round-arched window to the left. This wall and buttress are part of the original
façade of the church. The wall used to be the end of the north aisle and
once it stood as tall as the buttress, but the top one-third has since been removed.
In the 14th century, a house called La Maison de l'Ymaige de Saint Julien et de
l'Annonciation stood between the end of the north aisle and the street, and the
window you see here today was walled up. Parts of the old house were still attached to the
church as late as the early 1900's, and can be seen in old photographs.About halfway up the angle between the buttress and the wall, there is a small trompe or squinch, which looks like a curved dimple in the stonework. Above it, the angle bulges outward slightly to accommodate a passage within the upper part of the buttress. The door to the passage can be seen on the far side. The buttress was one of two that divided the original façade into three parts. Between them stood the Gothic portal of St. Julien, which projected slightly forward from the main building. Two-thirds of the original façade, including the portal, were demolished in 1651. As you go further south on the rue St. Julien le Pauvre, you will see the present west entrance. 
The 16th century Neoclassical façade of St. Julien, with four Doric pilasters
flanking the entrance and an entablature of triglyphs and pediment looks a bit odd
juxtaposed with the remains of the Gothic west front on the left. A small round
oculus window occupies the center of the unadorned pediment and
a plain stone cross sits atop its peak. (The west side of the church was cleaned and
repaired in 2001, which makes the stone appear different here than in the picture above.
Click here to see how it looked in 1999,
before the cleaning). The present west entrance is set back some 20 feet or so
from where the original portal used to be, with a small paved courtyard out in front surrounded
by iron railings. This is due to the 1651 renovation, during which two bays of the nave
and south aisle were removed along with the portal. The space once occupied by the
lost bays became the courtyard, or parvis. The two westernmost bays of the north aisle
were saved and turned into a sacristy.Out by the street stands a little historic marker giving a brief history of the church. Beneath a little image of a ship (La Nef Parisienne, symbol of the City of Paris) the marker reads: Histoire de Paris. Èglise Saint-Julien-le Pauvre. Lieu de sépultures mérovingiennes, cette chapel, située au carrefour de deux voies romaines stratégiques, est offerte, à l'état de ruines, par le roi Henri 1er au chapitre de Notre-Dame en 1045. Vers 1120, elle devient un prieuré dépendant de l'abbaye de Longpont, destiné à jouer un certain rôle dans la vie intellectuelle du quartier. Les recteurs y sont élus, et les assemblées de l'Université y siègent jusqu'au saccage de 1524. Affectée à l'Hôtel Dieu en 1651, elle se trouve dans un tel état de dégradation que les bâtiements du XIIe siècle sont en partie rasés, et très remaniés. Grenier à sel sous la Révolution, elle est rouverte au culte en 1826 et affectée au rite catholique grec en 1889: une iconostase réalisée vers 1900 sépare le choeur de la nef. 
Not much is left to suggest what the original façade might have looked like.
Next to the remaining buttress is a ruined fragment of the original portal wall,
and attached to it are part of a frieze and a group of small colonnettes with
beautifully carved foliage capitals which
date to the middle of the 13th century. These colonnettes are probably
jamb shafts that once supported the left side of the portal arch. Another group
of carved capitals thought to be from the original Gothic façade are still preserved in the
sacristy of St. Julien and will be seen later in the tour.
Higher up on the south side of the old buttress are some more little
colonnettes flanking an opening which has a curved wall inside it. This is the
space behind the bulge you saw in the angle on the opposite side.
The colonnettes to the left were on the exterior and formed part of a façade gallery that
once ran above the Gothic portal of St. Julien, and the ones on the
far right must have been inside the church originally. You can just see some more
colonnettes embedded in the wall to the right as well. The opening between the
groups of colonnettes is a doorway which opened into the north end of the
façade gallery. The curved passage inside the door went off to the right and
emerged out of the back side of the buttress, where
the roof of the north aisle is now. One historian believed that there may have
once been a triforium gallery inside the church which ran along the nave above
the north and south aisles and was connected to the façade gallery by a
door in both of the large portal buttresses. Since all of these areas of the church were
completely rebuild in 1651, no one knows for sure.
There is also a popular theory that the oldest street sign in Paris, a 14th-century
bas-relief located at no. 42 rue Galande, once ornamented the tympanum of the old Gothic portal of
St. Julien. The relief depicts St. Julien the Hospitaller and his wife rowing Christ disguised as a
leper across a turbulent river towards a chapel on the shore. Since the Hospitaller is
considered to be one of the patron saints of the church, it would be easy
to assume that this relief originally came from there, and the perhaps was moved to
the rue Galande after the Gothic portal was torn down. However, the building
where the relief can be seen today was already known in 1380 as the "Maison de la
Heuze et de Saint-Julien" (House of the Boot and of Saint Julien) and "La Maison où au
dessus est l'enseigne de Saint Julien" (house where above is the sign of Saint
Julien) which strongly suggests that this other building is the sculpture's original location.
In the south wall of the sacristy are two walled-up arches and
a column with a plain capital embedded in the wall between them. The arches
and column used to be part of the nave arcade
on the north aisle. The space beneath the arches was filled in with rubble from
the demolition of the Gothic portal, closing off the last two bays of the north aisle
from the parvis and making them into a separate room. The second walled arch is
cut off on the right side by the façade wall,
and the column that supports it on that side is actually inside the church. Above
the two arches runs a string course which is at the same level as the old
façade gallery, and was once part of the decor of the original nave.
In the left corner, you can see the remains of of a cluster of columns with foliage capitals embedded in the wall. These were once located inside the church, against the west wall. Part of an arch that was in the old west wall can be seen above the capitals. Other capitals of this cluster are located inside the sacristy, and will be seen later in the tour. 
The two outer entrance doors of St. Julien are modern and made of metal painted
a dark green. In this 1999 photo, the stone framework of the door appears badly
damaged and the pilaster on the right lacks part of its shaft.
At the time of the French Revolution, the church was
used as a warehouse, and a number of wooden sheds were built up against its walls,
scarring the stonework. A coopers' workshop once blocked this entrance, and barrels
filled the courtyard.Above the door is a marble plaque which gives another brief history of the church, focusing on who owned it at different points in time. It was placed there by Mgr. Arsène Attié and the text is by André Mesureur. 
In this 2001 photo, you can see that the two Doric pilasters to the right of the
entrance doors have been restored with new shafts and the framework of the door
itself has been repaired. To the right of the pilasters you can see traces of a walled-up
window with a round arch, and what appears to be a planter with a shrub growing in
it. The "planter" is actually an old well. Before
the 17th century renovation, this well used to be located inside the church
at the 5th bay of the south aisle, and may have supplied water for baptisms.
Until very recently, the well had an iron armature
which was removed at the time of the recent repairs and not replaced. On the far
side of the well in the corner of the parvis is a
large rectangular piece of sandstone, an old
Roman paving stone that was dug up in 1927 on the rue St. Jacques. As the historic
marker out by the street says, this street was once a major Roman road, and during
the Middle Ages it became part of a pilgrimage route to the shrine of St. James
at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, which is how it got the name rue St.
Jacques (street of St. James). |
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St. Julien le Pauvre url: http://www.people.ku.edu/~asnow/ Webmaster: A. Snow This site last updated 03/21/2006. |
