Capitole, Saint-Sernin and the Latin Quarter

Hôtel du Grand Balcon

Where the Aéropostale pilots made their base in the 1920s.

You're at the corner of the rue des Lois and the rue Romiguières, in front of a hotel that became, in the 1920s, the base of the Aéropostale pilots. The building dates from the 1850s and was run by the Marquès sisters as a proper family pension. Then the aviators moved in. Jean Mermoz kept room 20, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry kept room 32, the one with the big balcony that looks onto the Place du Capitole.

Between flights to Spain and Morocco, the pilots carried their friends up the stairs on their backs so high heels would not wake the landladies, and they turned the dining room into a dance floor. Saint-Exupéry's room has been kept almost as it was, down to the moldings, and part of the building has been listed as a historic monument since 1999. Look up at that balcony. It already frames the route of this walk: the Capitole facade behind you and, at the far end of the rue du Taur, the brick tower of Saint-Sernin.

Église Notre-Dame du Taur

The church named for the bull that dragged Saint Saturnin.

You're at the church that gives the street its name. Taur comes from the Latin taurus, the bull. The story says that after Saturnin was tied to a bull at the Capitole, the animal ran along this route and only stopped here, where the martyr's body was released and first buried. A shrine stood on this spot from the late fourth century, until the relics were carried in procession to Saint-Sernin in 402.

The building you see now was raised between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its most striking feature is the clocher-mur, a flat wall belfry 42 meters high, crenellated like a fortress and fitted with thirteen bells, one of them from the fifteenth century. It faces the street directly, so the whole rue du Taur funnels toward it. One practical note: the church currently opens only in the afternoon, so check before you plan to step inside.

The church was known as Saint-Sernin-du-Taur in the twelfth century, and it has carried the name Notre-Dame du Taur since 1534.