153 Paris, Saint-Sulpice "and another even longer coming down".

 Two chunky towers, a separate staircase to get in and out of the pulpit, a collection box for « the propagation of the faith » : it’s Saint Sulpice, just up the road from Saint Michel, the sort of place a film based on a Dan Browne novel should be filmed (can’t be bothered checking if it was). Atmospheric columns, baroque altars, the most amazing door, and, when I visited, a set of stations of the cross as modernish paintings on easels.

Built in the seventeenth century, the church was converted for a few years, at the time of the French Revolution, into a temple in honour of Reason, as the revolutionaries tried to replace the Christian religion, which had supported feudalism, monarchy and slavery for yonks, with something more humanist. You can still see in the church a carved slogan from this time  « Le peuple français reconnaît l’Être Suprême et l’immortalité de l’âme » (The French people recognizes the Supreme being and the immortality of the soul). At the very beginning of the 19^th century the towers were used to install an optical telegraph, which was able to transmit messages  to a chain of towers going as far as Turin! (This was the Chappe telegraph).

Molière’s widow, Armande Béjart, was buried here, as was the great writer Madame de Lafayette. Much more recently Jacques Chirac, and the great antiracist geneticist  Albert Jacquard, had their funerals in this building. The smallest bell of the church is called Henriette-Louise.