The Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just beyond the outskirts of early medieval Paris, was the burial place of Merovingian kings of Neustria. At that time, the Left Bank of Paris was prone to flooding from the Seine, so much of the land could not be built upon and the Abbey stood in the middle of fields, or prés in French, thereby explaining its appellation. The abbey church remains as the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.
Lowry probably knew the church from his 1933-34 stay in the city; "We are in the car with the girls as they pass ...the spire of Saint-Germain-des-Prés" ( The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: a scholarly edition of Lowry's "Tender is the Night" Edited by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen Pg. 70).
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