Mire du Sud

A marble obelisk stands alone in the middle of a quiet street, marked by a deep vertical groove running down its face. This stone needle is the Mire du Sud, a precise meridian marker set here in eighteen oh six to help map the Paris Observatory. When surveyors peered through telescopes from the observatory roof, they used the line carved into this pillar to calibrate their instruments perfectly north and south. It remains a lonely, silent witness to the exactitude demanded by early celestial mapping.