The Romanesque tower of this unusually shaped Gothic church overshadows the neighborhood's narrow streets. The dusty churchyard covers the only remaining boneyard in the city, used as a burial place for the impoverished or the unclaimed during plague years. Ruined cloisters cling to the edge of rue St-Jacques, on the far side of the churchyard. In the 11th century the church that stood here was the parish church for the entire Rive Gauche. Louis XIV's cousin, a capricious woman known simply as the Grande Mademoiselle, adopted St-Séverin when she tired of St-Sulpice; she then spent vast sums getting court decorator Le Brun to modernize the chancel in the 17th century. Note the splendidly deviant spiraling column in the forest of pillars behind the altar. Métro: St-Michel.