Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He has been spending the month of July and August in France. He grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip. Asher has a love of history so his dispatches are often full of historical details.
On another fine afternoon, a group from the language institute went for another excursion in Paris. This time it was to visit the church of St. Germain des Prés and some literary cafés, such as Les Deux Magots, which was the location where many coffees were drunk by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, important philosophical figures in twentieth century existentialism and Marxism.
I included a picture of St. Germain with the Deux Magots directly in front.
We visited the church first, so I will start with that. St. Germain des Pres is a very important Parisian church mostly because it is one of the oldest churches in the city.
An abbey was founded on the site in the sixth century by Childebert I, son of Clovis, first king of the Franks. The church was later destroyed by the Vikings and then rebuilt in the tenth century. It was an important center for education, housing many early manuscripts of great value. You might recall the reference to the medieval monasteries as being great centers of learning in the last post. The church was updated with some Gothic features in the eleventh century. And throughout the early modern period it continued to be a place of scholarship, holding some of the most important manuscripts in France. In perhaps a sign of its great intellectual merit, the church is the resting place of Rene Descartes, perhaps one of the most famous French philosophers of all time.
During the French revolution, part of the old abbey was used as a prison for revolutionary prisoners. After a particularly fiery speech by Georges Danton in 1792 in which he called for the death of those not wishing to pledge allegiance to the revolutionary government, many prisoners held inside were summarily executed. The church was badly damaged, and after the revolution, it was restored to the Church but in a severely deteriorated state, needing significant repairs.
The church is not particularly impressive when one approaches it on the outside. It is mostly made of stone, but the bell tower that is visible is quite important, being the only one of three to survive to the present day; it was built in the tenth century.
Once one goes inside, one is struck by a strong palette of color, mostly blues, greens, and reds. The murals on the inside were painted in a neoclassical style in the nineteenth century and were recently renovated. Thus, it is really quite a bright interior. 
Off to the side is the Chapel of St. Symphorien, a very simple chapel that is about the same age as the bell tower. It houses the tomb of St. Germain. I have included the picture. 
It is quite a historically rich church located in an increasingly upscale part of Paris. The guide explained to us that in the past half century, many of the cafes and bookstores have been replaced with Louis Vuitton and Rolex stores.
After visiting the church, we walked across the plaza to the Deux Magots, which I mentioned at the beginning of the dispatch. The cafe dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Magots literally refers to "figurines from the Far East," and if you go inside there are indeed two figurines mounted on the wall from the far east. These are the magots. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the cafe was not just frequented by Sartre and de Beauvoir, but also by literary and artistic figures like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Camus. It is still open and a very popular tourist destination.
After this, we walked a bit more through the neighborhood. We stopped by the Café Procope. This is a much older institution, having been founded in 1686. Its coffee was drunk by more than one notable patron, including in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, Jean de la Fontaine, and other authors of the Encyclopedia, the great project of the French enlightenment. A little later, it admitted through its doors Benjamin Franklin (who spent considerable time drumming up French support for the American revolution in Paris), Danton, Marat, Robespierre (all important figures in the French revolution), Napoleon Bonaparte, Honoré de Balzac, and Victor Hugo (the last two of which are, of course, giants of nineteenth century French literature). This place is also still open today and bears pictures of its famous customers.
Later, King Louis Philippe had many statues built around the garden of notable women in French history, including Marie de' Medicis.
Part of the garden is built in a French style, imitating the lavish details and rigid lines of the Baroque era; some of it is built in an English style, imitating the looser, wilder styles of the Romantic period.
After this, the tour ended, and frankly, I think most of us were happy for it. The temperatures at that point were quite elevated in Paris, and walking across vast stretches of open area with little tree cover was less agreeable than it might have been on another sort of day.
Nevertheless, it was a splendid experience to be able to witness yet more majestic French buildings and gardens.
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