La Tour Saint-Jacques-de-la-Bourcherie

Today we visited, and climbed up, la tour Saint-Jacques-de-la-Bourcherie.  This is a tower of legend.  Originally the bell tower of a church in the very oldest centre of Paris, the tower now stands alone.  The church itself was destroyed in the aftermath of the French revolution.  The tower however was persevered, perhaps due to its usefulness as a watch tower for fires or for military purposes.  One of the famous early characters associated with the church was Nicholas Flamel, a personage famous enough to have made an appearance in recent children's literature.  He was an alchemist alleged to have commuted lead to gold.  Certainly he was wealthy, and a patron of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Bourcherie.  His house faced directly onto the church.  After his death his house was taken apart stone by stone, in a futile search for the secret to his wealth.

Blaise Pascal is said to have performed experiments on atmospheric pressure in the tower, observing a slight change in pressure from the base to the summit of the tower.  His statute now stands in the arches of the tower.

And Léon Foucault is said to have used the tower for his initial experiments with a long pendulum demonstrating the rotation of the earth, before his famous public demonstration in the Paris Observatory.  In the 1820s, the tower was privately owned, and used to produce lead shot.  Molten lead was dripped from a copper sieve at the top of the tower into a pool of water at the base, producing perfectly round lead shot.  This also lead to a couple of fires that gutted the interior of the tower.

Recently the tower underwent a multi-year renovation.  Depending on who you ask or what you read, this is either the first year in a couple of decades that the tower can be publicly visited, or the first time ever.  And today was the very last day that it was open.  Due to the extreme narrowness of the stairs, only 19 people per hour can visit the tower.   I had happened to spot a sign advertising this, and so yesterday mid-morning we went to see if we could sign up for one of the tours.  No, all booked.  A very friendly Parisian woman who had just visited the tower noticed our interest, and told us it was not to be missed - the very best view of Paris.  She had lined up yesterday for a tour spot at 5:30am - they start taking bookings for the day at 8am.  So we had an early start today.  Here are Silke and Jerome, on the very dark very early morning walk from our apartment.

And in the queue at 6am....

I did find some chocolate croissant for us.  Where can you find chocolate croissants at 6am on a Sunday morning in Paris?  The train station of course!

And here is the view,