Square René Viviani

Square René Viviani holds the oldest tree in Paris, a robinia planted in sixteen hundred and one. The square occupies a patch of land once owned by the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre, where local parishioners kept their burials for centuries. In nineteen twenty-eight, the city cleared the crumbling structures and leveled the uneven ground to create this small garden. A jagged stone fragment from a twelfth-century well sits near the center, marking the spot where the old church cemetery once stood.