AS a Cathedral city, Paris hardly comes within the scheme of this book. It has been written about so much and so often, and occupies, both architecturally and historically, such a position as would scarcely justify any but a full and detailed description. This great city, the living, moving source of one of the greatest nations of to-day, and at one time the mainspring of Europe itself, is not to be passed over with a few terse remarks; it is as though one tried to compress the history of France itself into a single chapter. On the one hand, a short sketch can hardly hope to do justice to Paris; on the other, to describe it at such length as it deserves would not be dealing fairly by the lesser towns, and further, this length would be so great as to render absurd its inclusion in a book of traveller’s notes. Rather let it be regarded here in the light of point d’appui from which other places may be visited which do not lie on the direct route from Paris to the provinces. Without attempting any architectural description, however, it may be as well, before we pass outside the city walls, to mention three churches within Paris of which illustrations are given here, and to offer the briefest possible outline of their early history and foundation, as well as that of the great city of which they form a part.

“Paris did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom already existing. The city created first the county and then the kingdom, of which it was successively the head.” In those days Paris ranked no higher than Soissons, Sens, LÂon, OrlÉans, or Rouen; and in ecclesiastical dignity it was inferior to some of them, being, it is true, an episcopal see, but not a metropolitan. Certainly, as we have seen, it was approved as a military station by CÆsar, and beloved as a residence by Julian; and the great position the city now holds in modern Europe and the modern world is rather apt to bias our estimate of these early honours, which were undoubtedly shared by many other of the Gallic cities. Because Paris is now a metropolitan see, the centre of political and social France, we have a tendency to think that in all times the city must have ruled her neighbour towns in this way; whereas it was only by very slow degrees—long after it had become the seat of royalty and the nominal capital of France—that Paris acquired an influence beyond the bounds of her own territories. The great lords of Burgundy, of Aquitaine, of Anjou, of Champagne—they were vassals to the king, they paid him homage, they gave him their military service, but they and their domains formed no part of France; they were almost as separate from any head or centre as were the wide-scattered Teutonic states east of the Rhine. Nor was this felt to be in any way a disadvantage; the kings in Paris would doubtless have welcomed the firm allegiance of these kings in all but name, because it would have meant a fresh access of power, an added strength wherewith to face their other foes; but no idea of national unity had any place in their calculation. Paris had made for herself a dominion, and the time was to come when that dominion should stretch from the sea on the north, south and west, to the river and to the mountains on the east; but as yet that time had not arrived.

THE PONT MARIE, PARIS
THE PONT MARIE, PARIS

One more event which took place after Paris became the capital of France may be recorded here. This is the attempted siege in the days of Joan of Arc, which followed as the sequel to the king’s coronation at Rheims. Having subdued so many cities in the north of France, and given to Charles VII. the crown of his ancestors, it was but natural that Joan should be anxious to lead him in triumph into his capital, which at present declared for the enemy, and was occupied by Cardinal Beaufort’s English troops and the army of Burgundy. The newly-crowned king, however, apparently considered that he had borne his share of the burden in the late proceedings at Rheims, and seemed in no hurry to march upon Paris. Riding through the smaller towns, seeing their gates flung open wide to him, and receiving the homage and acclamations of the people, were occupations far more congenial to his indolent tastes than bestirring himself to take the field again; and to their infinite annoyance Joan and d’AlenÇon perceived that he was gradually but surely working his way down to his castles on the Loire, from whose pleasant meadows they knew well that he would never return. The only wonder is that the Maid did not lose all patience and leave this dilatory prince to his fate. Instead of this she set out with the Duc d’AlenÇon to Saint Denis, leaving Charles at CompiÈgne, whence he followed them, “very sore against his will,” as far as Senlis. Meanwhile each day of delay gave the English time to strengthen their position within the capital; and Joan found that having brought the king to Senlis was by no means the same thing as conquering his unwillingness to strike what she and her party believed might be, if rightly directed, the final blow. Each time the Maid and d’AlenÇon set out to invest Paris, messages came from the royal camp, commanding them to desist and return to Saint Denis. Finally the truth came out; the king cared more for peace and ease on the Loire than for glory in war, and desired to leave the camp. Had Joan believed less firmly in the divine right of kings, it is probable that she would have rebelled and besieged Paris on her own responsibility; on the other hand, had Charles been left to the counsels of d’AlenÇon and the brave captains Dunois and La Hire, there is reason to suppose that he might have been persuaded to follow where Joan led, and might under her guidance have subdued Paris in a very short time. But there were the king’s favourites to reckon with, and these were not men of war, but of peace, and not always of peace with honour—the foolish La Tremouille and the crafty Archbishop of Rheims, one of Joan’s worst opposers—and these advisers easily worked upon the king’s indolent good-nature to find in the eagerness of the Maid an undue desire for fresh conquest. As it was, Joan saw nothing before her but to obey the man to whom, as she believed, God had given the right to go or stay, to fight or to lie in peace, as his Majesty chose. She went to the statue of the Virgin at Saint Denis, bearing her armour; and there, kneeling in the church, she dedicated to Our Lady of Victories the helmet, hauberk and coat of mail in which she had done so many great feats of arms; and then rose and followed her king on his journey to the pleasant lands of the Loire.

The early history of Paris lies buried in the unrecorded pages of the life of primÆval man. Its origin is humble in comparison with that of other capitals, although it bears a strong analogy to those surrounding physical conditions to which Venice owed its existence. Its cradle, according to M. Hoffbauer, Paris À traverse les ages, was a small narrow island in the middle of the young Seine, which had then cut for itself its channel through the alluvial plains which had been left by the retiring sea towards the end of the Geological Tertiary period at the close of the glacial epoch. It was part of a group of five islands, of which three very soon disappeared, their soil being probably used either for embankments or for purposes of defence. As in the great estuary leading up to the morass surrounding London, many changes had been wrought by the hand of man in the general appearance of the Paris basin. It is true that the great embankments constructed by the Romans to keep the waters of the Thames within defined limits are not to be traced in the valley of the Seine, yet the rude habitations of wattle huts built on whatever hillocks were attainable entailed embankments to a certain extent which should keep the Seine within its bounds at times of extraordinary flood. As it stands to-day Paris is in one of the most fertile parts of the territory; it is on the banks of a great river which brings to it by its main stream and by its affluents the tribute of the richest provinces; it is surrounded by materials most necessary for the construction of its public and private edifices; and it is endowed by nature with all the fruitful resources tending towards the aggrandisement both of power and fortune.

The condition of the early inhabitants of the Paris basin was that of one continual warfare against the denizens of the jungle, which with its rich and abundant vegetation covered the surrounding country. Caverns and other places chosen for their abodes were disputed with lions, hyenas and tigers. The chase was their only means of subsistence (the art of husbandry being entirely unknown), and the number of stone hatchets and harpoons, fishing-hooks, lances, &c., found deeply buried in the alluvial soil, bear testimony to the struggle for existence amongst the early inhabitants of the Seine valley.

CÆsar, when he was appointed commander of the Gauls in B.C. 59, found their central point of Paris inhabited by a Cymric or Celtic population, which he calls Gauls in his language but Celts in their own, and separated from the BelgÆ by the Seine and Marne. CÆsar wrote the place “Lutetia,” and when he convoked the inhabitants of Gaul to this town the neighbouring tribe was designated as “Parisii,” and allied to the powerful clan of the Senones.

With reference to the meaning of the word “Parisii,” M. Bulet, in the “Dictionnaire Celtique,” says that “bar” or “par” means in Celtic a boat (bateau), and that the low Bretons call the cargo of a boat “far.” Herodotus (book ii., 96), in his description of the method of floating boats down stream on the Nile by means of a raft fastened on in front with a stone dragging behind, calls the boat “baris,” and says that some of them are many thousand talents burthen. They were probably flat-bottomed, and similar to those now seen on the rivers. The Celtic word “par,” signifying a boat, might well have produced the name Parisii, meaning boatmen, men who passed all their life in the “baris.”

The most ancient emblem of Lutetia which has been preserved from antiquity is that of the prow of a boat which one sees sculptured on the springing of the vault of the Roman palace of the Thermes, built on the left bank of the Seine; the powerful association of the NautÆ Parisiaci, which is found at the head of the Parisian Navigation represented by the prow of a boat, has therefore a direct Celtic or Gallic origin. Living only in rude cabins the early inhabitants naturally possessed no public building. CÆsar therefore conceived the idea of convoking the Gaulish chiefs into one central place or forum, and ordered to be built a “Suggestum,” a tribune from which he could harangue the assembled headmen. This is considered by some French architects as the earliest indication of their ÉdilitÉ naissÁnte. As further evidence of their building and engineering capability, the inhabitants of Lutetia threw out bridges to join their island to the main banks of the river. CÆsar frequently refers to the bridges built by the Gauls, such as the one at Melun, on the Seine, another across the Allier, near Vichy, of which ancient foundations and piers have been found, another at OrlÉans, and of such slender construction as to have especially attracted his attention, and, finally, the bridge of Lutetia across the main arm of the Seine, the predecessor of the present Pont Notre Dame, which has also left traces of its ancient piers.

In Rome the NautÆ Tiberis were a corporation who enjoyed the privilege of carrying corn and other produce from Ostia to the capital; similar associations existed in Gaul in addition to the NautÆ Parisiaci, and on a wall of the amphitheatre of NÎmes is an inscription in which as many as forty places are mentioned where corporations enjoying the same privileges and immunities existed. No wonder the territory of the Parisii increased in commercial activity. Watered by the Seine, the Marne and the Oise, its trade routes by land and by water were fully organised and guarded by powerful associations which existed almost before the Roman Conquest, and attracted the attention of the writer Strabo. It soon developed under such advantages into a prosperous and enlightened city. Roman buildings took the place of the Gallic huts, Roman laws governed the city, Roman customs and manners prevailed amongst the inhabitants, and by the time the first messengers of Christianity had penetrated into Gaul Lutetia had become a city not of the Gauls, but of the Romans. Curiously enough it was from Rome also that these early messengers came, to preach their doctrine to a Roman city. The pioneers were Saint Denis, generally confounded, for the sake of the antiquity of the Gallican Church, with the convert of Saint Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and two companions, Eleutherius and Rusticus; and their work was carried on by Martin of Tours, one of the bravest soldiers of the Emperor Julian, who left the army to preach the faith in Gaul, and to stamp out the cult of the old pagan gods. Speaking of Julian, moreover, may serve to remind us that it was at Paris that he was first proclaimed emperor; here was his palace before his imperial honours came upon him, and here, he declares in his own writings, were spent the three happiest winters of his life, showing that even in these early times Lutetia was a fair and pleasant city, as it is to-day.

In the following centuries Gaul was overrun with tribes from the east, Goths and Visigoths, Alemnanni and Huns, Burgundians and Franks. The last-named broke down the Roman defences all over the land and seized upon Paris. A new era now began for the city. Under Clovis, the first Frank king, it became the official capital of the State in 508, and from this time forward takes its place as one of the great cities of France. After the conversion of Clovis, abbeys and churches were built, great bishops and great saints preached and wrote their message, and indeed the ecclesiastical fabric of the city seems to have grown up more quickly than the civil fabric, until the time of Charlemagne, when craftsmen’s guilds were established, Jewish capitalists admitted within the walls, and a mercantile reputation founded. Then a second time the work of the conquerors seemed to be undone. The Northmen, more terrible invaders than Goths or Franks, plundered the coast-lands and presently swept up the Seine past Rouen to Paris, where they worked such havoc as the town had never before known. The streets were set in flames, the monasteries were sacked and burnt, the priests and monks were massacred without mercy; yet all this evil was to end in better things. The very persistency of the Normans in besieging and pillaging a town four and five times, argued that the town itself must be worth the trouble, and the “lords” of Paris speedily began to look to its safety. Weak, foolish Charles the Fat could devise no better plan than the cowardly one of bribing the invaders to retreat; but Eudes, Count of Paris, knew that this would only be an inducement to them to come again, and determined once and for all to rid his city, at least, of this scourge. This he did with such effect that the crown of France was given to him and the inefficient Charles deposed. It was his nephew, Hugh the Great, who ruled at Paris in Rolf’s day, and waged constant war with Neustria and Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian kings, on the hill-crest at LÂon. Then, at the end of the tenth century, began the feudal monarchy under the Capetian dynasty. The first of the line was the eldest son of Hugh the Great, and the connections which he brought with him promised well for the prestige of his new kingdom. On the one side, he was brother-in-law to the Norman Duke, Richard the Fearless; on the other, his own brother Odo was Duke of Burgundy; in his own right he was lord of Picardy, of Maine, of Chartres, of Tours, of Blois, and of OrlÉans; and his bond with the Church was further strengthened by the fact that he held the lay abbacies of Saint Martin, near Tours, and Saint Denis, near Paris. Thus the kingdom with which Hugh Capet began his reign was a fairly compact strip of land, having as boundaries Flanders to the north, Aquitaine to the south, Champagne to the east, and Normandy to the west. Of this kingdom Paris was nearly the actual geographical centre, and soon became the political centre also.

The early importance of Paris in the tenth century is very different to that of London. Paris at this time was a military position of growing importance, both from its central situation and its place on the island in the Seine. London on her Thames had an almost similar position, but she derived her power not merely from her Teutonic conquerors, but also from her early connection with Roman and Celtic Britain; while as a military stronghold she was no less to be desired.

The eastern point of the city, where the only bridge then existed, traversing the Seine in the exact place where now stands the Pont Notre Dame, a point where the roads through the province converged, was already a place sacred to the Gauls. Here were performed rites and sacrifices to their mysterious divinities in an underground church which existed in the third century. Probably the tradition of dark deeds of persecution of the early Christians, human sacrifices, and missionaries suffering death in the cages of lions which were kept for the purpose of exhibitions, prevented the Parisian boatmen, when they heard of the wonderful tidings of Galilee, from using this Gaulish building, so full of terrible reminiscences, as their first church. The site of the Temple of Jupiter was chosen for the establishment of a church which should stamp out the heathen religion, crush with its heel the serpent’s head and build upon its ruins a temple of the Holy Cross. About 375, on the site of the Temple of Jupiter, was built a church dedicated to Saint Etienne, which may be considered as the first Cathedral of Paris.

To the splendour of this early basilica, built by Childebert in the early Latin style, with its marble columns, some of which are now in the MusÉe de Cluny, the monk Fortunatus bears witness, and his description of the edifice is thus given in M. Hoffbauer’s book on Paris: “Le vaisseau de cette Église repose sur des colonnes de marbre, et le soin avec lequel on l’entretient en augment la beautÉ. Le premier il fut ÉclairÉ de fenÊtres ornÉes de verres transparents par lesquels on reÇoit la lumiÈre. On dirait que la main d’un ouvrier habile a emprisonnÉ le jour dans le sanctuaire. Les feux tremblants de l’aurore naissante semblant se jouer jusque dans les lambris, et le temple est ÉclairÉ par la chartÉ du jour mÊme, quand le soliel ne se montre pas. Le roi Childebert, animÉ d’un zÈle particulier pour cette Église destinÈe À son peuple, l’a dotÉe de richesses qui ne doivent jaimais s’Épuiser; toujours passionÉ pour les intÈrÊts de la religion, il s’est empressÉ d’augmenter ses ressources. Nouveau MelchisÉdech, notre roi est en mÊme temps un pontife qui remplit exactement ses devoirs de fidÈle comme ses devoirs de pasteur. Bien qu’occupÉ dans le palais qu’il habite du soin de rendre la justice, son plus grand dÉsir est d’imiter l’example des saints ÉvÊques. Il quitte la premiÈre charge pour en remplir une autre avec plus d’honneur, et le souvenir de ses grandes actions lui assure l’immortalitÉ.”

By the twelfth century the basilica has disappeared, and its place has been taken, not by a single church, but by two churches side by side—Sainte Marie on the north, Saint Etienne on the south. At the beginning of the century Saint Etienne was the more important of the two, having escaped plunder at the hands of the Normans, who wrought considerable destruction in the sister church; but a twelfth-century archdeacon, Etienne de Garlande, took upon himself the task of restoring Sainte Marie, which became known as the nova ecclesia, and formed the foundation of the great basilica planned by Maurice de Sully. This church, begun in 1163, was to unite Saint Etienne and Sainte Marie; the foundation stone was laid by Pope Alexander III., and in 1218 the remains of the old church of Saint Etienne were destroyed to make way for the south aisle of Notre Dame. The work went on into the thirteenth century; the great west portal was probably finished about 1223, and those of the transepts some forty years later.

“There are absolutely only these two churches (Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle) left standing in the island of the city, and there is nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly exhibits the modern disposition to make a tabula rasa of the past.” In the Middle Ages the great Cathedral of Paris—“cathedral” since the twelfth century—stood in its island of La CitÉ amidst a perfect cluster of lesser churches, of which only the chapel of Saint Louis remains. Mr. Hamerton, whose words are quoted above, gives quite a considerable list of them in his “Paris in Old and Present Times,” Sainte GenÈviÈve, Saint Jean le Rond, Saint Denis du Pas, and its brother church of La Chartre—these are but a few of their names, and yet these names are all that now remain of churches where mediÆval knights and burghers and artificers worshipped, and into whose building mediÆval architects, unknown and forgotten, put their best work and their highest service; even their sites are, in most cases, undiscoverable amongst the great mass of buildings, and bright wide streets, and green gardens of Paris as we know it. Some of these churches, like Saint Aignan and Saint Germain-le-Vieux, have left a few isolated columns and stones, but to find these, as one writer observes, “il faudrait pÉnÉtrer dans les maisons et se livrer À des recherches.” Another, the old Madeleine, has suffered an even worse fate, its last remaining chapel being now transformed into a wine-shop at the corner of the Rue des Marmousets; a private house now stands upon the site of Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs, built, says an inscription on the faÇade, in the middle of the twelfth century, and demolished as late as 1837; and as for Saint Michel du Palais, within whose walls Archibishop Maurice de Sully baptised Philip Augustus in 1165, nothing remains to the memory of the Archangel but the bridge over the Seine. “‘There is my bridge still,’ Saint Michael may think, ‘but as for my church I seek for it in vain.’” These vanished churches are too many all to be numbered here, since in La CitÉ alone there were, up to the eighteenth century, no less than seventeen of them, and outside the walls of the city there were many more.

NÔTRE DAME, PARIS
NÔTRE DAME, PARIS

Happily Notre Dame has better withstood the attacks of time and all the accidents of fire, plunder, and desecration. Five years or so after the completion of the western faÇade a fire broke out, and in the restoration the double-arched buttresses of the former apse disappeared, and the windows were enlarged in accordance with the growing love of light which was being manifested in other cathedrals all through France. In more modern times—towards the middle of the eighteenth century—the extraordinary taste of the late Renaissance period ordered the removal of all the stained glass both of nave and choir—leaving, however, the western rose window and the two in the transepts—and this is, of course, a loss that can never be repaired, although the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc have probably, as Mr. Hamerton says, gone some way towards bringing back the original effect of light in the interior of the church. The exterior of the nave likewise suffered not a little from the doubtless well-meaning zeal of an unarchitectural age, which had literally stripped it bare of all ornament: “One after another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of the buttresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the balustrades—in one word, the entire ornamentation of these same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the buttresses, with the statues which accompanied them and their flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered the services of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the walls.”

“We may take it for granted,” Mr. Lonergan says in his “Historic Churches of Paris,” “that those who dedicated the church to the Virgin were not influenced alone by the fact that a previous temple in her honour had stood on the banks of the river, but by the impetus given to what Protestants call her ‘worship’ and Catholics her ‘cult’ or devotion in the twelfth century.” From the earliest times there existed, especially among sailors and fishermen, the feeling of devotion to the Virgin Mary. They prayed to her who held the Divine Infant on her knees to intercede for the lives of men who sailed across the waters on dark and starless nights. This worship of the Virgin steadily grew all over France, and the founders of the great monastic orders—Saint Augustin, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis, and the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaulx—are all included by Dante as paying special devotion to the Virgin; and history has furnished us with many other names, amongst which are those of Hildebert, the bishop of Le Mans, Yves and Pierre, bishops of Chartres, and the scholar of St. Denis, Pierre AbÉlard. At no time was this more noticeable than in the centuries following the completion of Notre Dame. In consequence of this great growth of Mary-worship, the Virgin came to be regarded as the protectress of the people—as, indeed, she is to this day—and the Church of Notre Dame began to be the people’s church, a kind of centre, civil as well as ecclesiastical, of the city life. For instance, Notre Dame in Paris became not only the house of worship and prayer, but “the house both of God and man,” and this through no irreverent feeling. The parvis or garden in front of the Cathedral became a gathering-ground for the townsfolk—a remnant of this feeling, it would seem, still exists in the markets which in lesser towns are nearly always held round the church—fairs took place there, the buyers bringing their purchases to be blessed by the priest as they passed the church steps; and the various festivals of the Church gave rise to secular feasts and sports of all kinds, as well as to the performance of the miracle plays which were attended by the people with such simple wonder and reverence, and which in England laid the foundation of the secular comedies.

The monks of Saint Germain originally came from Autun, and at first acknowledged the rule of Saint Basil, which was afterwards exchanged for that of Saint Benedict. After its restoration in the eleventh century the foundations became very powerful, and round its walls grew up the bourg of Saint Germain; later it became the Faubourg of that name, the “intellectual quarter” of Paris, the haunt of all the most brilliant spirits of the day; whose streets were trodden by great men, and marked by the footsteps of genius.

The Abbey Church of Saint-Germain-des-PrÉs likewise owes its existence to the Merovingian Childebert. In the sixth century Childebert went on an expedition against the Visigoths in Spain, and returned triumphant with a number of sainted relics, among them the tunic of Saint Vincent and a magnificent gold cross; and in honour of these trophies and for their safe keeping he built in the fields outside Paris a monastery, which was consecrated by Saint Germain, so the legend says, the very day of its royal founder’s death. The abbey was originally dedicated, in memory of the relics which it guarded, to Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross; but after the death of its first abbot, Saint Germain, in 576, it became known by his name. Before the building of the Abbey of Saint Denis, Saint-Germain-des-PrÉs was the burial place of the royal house, and a long line of Childeberts, Chilperics, and Chlothars lie at rest beneath its stones. It was pillaged and burnt by the Normans no less than five times, and therefore, when the Abbot Morard set about rebuilding it in the eleventh century, very little was left of Childebert’s old foundation. Part of Morard’s work may still be seen in the present nave of the church; the choir and apse were built later, and date from the second half of the twelfth century, the church being finally consecrated by Pope Alexander III. in 1163.

ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS, PARIS
ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS, PARIS

The wealth of the monastery even so late as the eighteenth century may be gauged by the indignation of Arthur Young, who in his travels through France in 1786-7 of course visited the capital and its many churches, but looked upon everything with the eye of an agriculturist, and only saw in the rich meadows of the Benedictines so much wasted material for a prosperous farm. “It is the richest abbey in France; the abbot has 300,000 liv. a year. I lose my patience at seeing such revenues thus bestowed, consistent with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with that of the eighteenth. What a noble farm would a fourth of this income establish! What turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, what clover, what sheep, what wool! Are not these things better than a fat ecclesiastic?”

Like Saint-Germain-des-PrÉs, the Sainte Chapelle originated in a sanctuary where precious relics might be safely deposited, though its foundation does not date back to the early zeal of the fresh-converted Merovingian kings, but only to the crusades of Louis the Saint, who brought from the East the Crown of Thorns and some fragments of the True Cross. Legend describes the king as walking bare-foot through the streets of Sens and Paris, displaying his treasure-trove to an adoring multitude; but it soon became necessary to place the relics in sanctuary, and accordingly, in 1245, the celebrated architect, Pierre de Montereau, began to work out his plans under the direction of the king, and completed his chapel three years later. Its form was a curious one, consisting of two stages; the upper one, dedicated to the Sainte Couronne and the Sainte Croix, was reserved for the king and his court; the lower, bearing the name of the Virgin, was given over to servants, retainers, and the general multitude.

This upper chapel, which was then and still is to-day the chief glory of the building, was on a level with the royal apartments in the adjoining palace, and could thus be reached without descending into the court and re-ascending by the staircase. This chapel was the joy of Saint Louis’ life, and during his reign no cost was spared in order to make it a fitting receptacle for the relics which he venerated and believed in as simply as a child, and for which he is said to have paid to the Byzantine emperor the enormous sum of two million livres. As it now stands, the Sainte Chapelle has been almost completely restored, and this restoration, which was carried out in the last century, was embarked upon none to soon, judging from the accounts given of the state of the church after the Revolution. To begin with, it had been desecrated under the rule of the Goddess of Reason, and used for storing legal documents and papers; the beautiful glass of its windows, with its marvellous minuteness of design, was either destroyed or irregularly patched up; the spire was gone, and so was much of the sculpture and ornament, both outside and inside. There it stood, this monument of the piety of St. Louis, its founder forgotten, its glory departed, and its actual structure in danger of being swept away. Even its ancient surroundings, the Great Hall, the Cour de Mai, and the Cour des Comptes of Louis XII., had vanished; their place was occupied by modern law-courts, and the half-ruined church seemed hopelessly out of date and out of place. By a great stroke of good fortune the balance turned in its favour; it was decided not to pull it down, but to restore it as a chapel attached to the courts, where the lawyer might hear Mass; and, thanks to the care and skill of the restoring architect, it stands to-day in all essentials much as it did when Louis IX. worshipped there with his courtiers, when the light from the tall windows streamed in upon the bright armour and rich garments of hundreds of noble figures, staining them with new and wonderful colours, and when the courts below were alive with a motley crowd, townsfolk of Paris, pressing to get a sight of the king’s majesty, servants and retainers thronging round the doors or filing into Mass in the Chapel of the Virgin below, whose low roof and vaulting really gave it the appearance of a crypt to the soaring chapel of the Crown and Cross above it.

Until the time of Henri II. the kings of France lived in the great “Salle des Pas Perdus” as their royal palace; then the Parlement of Paris—a purely legal body—took possession of it, and the easy-going canons of the Sainte Chapelle ministered not to princes and nobles, but to the brisk, alert gens de la robe, who were quick to note and to laugh at their comfortable ecclesiastical placidity and ridiculous petty quarrels. Boileau, the famous satirist, was the son of a registrar, and grew up under the shadow of the law-courts, and it was he who in his “Lutrin” victimised the poor, ease-loving prebends and canons more than any of his fellows, though one of these canons was his own brother, and after Boileau’s death heaped coals of fire upon the head, or rather, upon the memory, of the poet, by allowing his bones to rest within the building at whose servants he had so mercilessly mocked. The lawyers still have the possession of the Sainte Chapelle; but all stalls and seats have been removed and its doors are opened once a year only, when the autumn session begins, being inaugurated by the “Messe Rouge,” celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris himself.

PONT ST. MICHEL AND STE. CHAPELLE, PARIS
PONT ST. MICHEL AND STE. CHAPELLE, PARIS

The Benedictine foundation of Saint Denis, though it stands outside the walls of the city, in a suburb where the tangle of machinery and smoke of factories make strange surroundings for the peace of the cloister, must always claim a right to come within the story of France’s capital, since it is the last resting-place of France’s kings. The legends of Paris and its saints ascribe the original foundation of the abbey church to the following story, which has come to be very well known, concerning as it does the patron saint of France. Saint Denis, who, as we have seen, was the first to evangelise in the marshes of Lutetia, suffered martyrdom under the Valerian persecutions in the third century, in the city where his good work had begun; but after his head had been struck off, the body, instead of falling lifeless at once, rose up from the block, took the head in its hands, and walked out of the city to the neighbouring town of Catulliacum, where it finally sought refuge in the villa of one Catulla, a Roman lady of noble and good repute, who instantly took possession of her sainted charge and gave him Christian burial within her garden. So far is legend; at any rate, a chapel was erected over the shrine, and became, of course, an object of pilgrimage for many years. Then comes the story of Dagobert, the rebellious young prince who sought sanctuary in the chapel against the wrath of his father; and, inspired by a vision of the saint, promised to build a church on the same site. Accordingly, on his accession to his father’s throne, the Abbey and Church of Saint Denis were founded in about 769. In the following century the Benedictine monks purchased their immunity from Norman invaders by large sums of money; but this contract seems to have availed them little, since the pirates, probably hoping for fresh plunder, despoiled the monastery as they had despoiled Saint-Germain-des-PrÉs. After this the foundation fell into a terrible state of neglect. Its abbots were fighting men—not necessarily ecclesiastics, for many nobles in those days held lay abbacies; Hugh Capet, for instance, was abbot of Saint Martin at Tours—and not until the day of the famous Suger did it recover anything like its ancient prestige. Suger was an old pupil of the Benedictines at Saint Denis, and a fellow-scholar there with the young prince Louis l’EveillÉ, afterwards Louis VI., whose chief minister he became in later days. In the days of his prosperity the abbot devoted himself to restoring and beautifying the church, and left full instructions to be carried out by his successor, when death prevented him from finishing what had been so nobly begun. The work languished again, however, until the reign of Louis IX., when Eudes de ClÉment and Matthieu de VendÔme took up the plans once more, and completed the church very much as we now see it.

It was at Saint Denis that was enacted the romance of the scholar Pierre AbÉlard and “la trÈs-sage HÉlois” of Villon, whose story is too well known—and, perhaps, also too secular—to quote here. Both lie buried now at PÈre-la-Chaise, their remains having been removed from the monastery at Cluny in 1791 by Lenoir, to his collection of fragments and old monuments spared from the Revolution. It was after the Revolution that the abbey suffered more terrible damage and desecration than ever invading heathens or conquering English had worked there. The Convention, in its haste to rid the country of every trace of the hated monarchy, must needs assail dead kings and queens as well as living ones. Consequently every tomb was ravaged and the dust of a hundred kings lay mingling with the dust of the common ditch. With the restoration of the Bourbons, Louis XVIII. ordered also the replacement, as far as it was possible, of the bones of his dead ancestors; and the French kings sleep once again at Saint Denis, peaceful and undisturbed as in other years, though a smoky veil hangs over their resting-place and the roar of furnaces breaks the quiet of their ancient tombs.