July 14: . . . Ste Chapelle . . .

As promised, here is the other photo of the live marionette of probably Victorian vintage, that saw me off from the courtyard of Notre Dame and on to my wander across the Seine, where I got lost in a few blocks, then wandered back, having decided to visit Sainte Chapelle, highly recommended by my friend Lynn.

I'm now going to indulge in a little history that I learned from a guided tour I took mostly because it was available for free about 20 minutes after I got through the entrance to Sainte Chapelle (about 3:30).

I found out that it was located within the building I'd been photographing from the Seine, called the Palace of Justice -- an odd name to give a jail. But, it got that title during the French revolution when royalty housing arrangements changed from the palatial to the cellular.

However, way before that, "at the heart of the Cite, on the probable site of the residence of the Roman prefects, Philippe Auguste built a palace that his grandson Louis IX altered and enlarged." Louis IX was only 12 years old when he succeeded his father Louis XIII in 1226. The Regency was held by his mother, Blanche de Castille until Louis IX came of age and married in 1234. Evidently she helped this along (according to the tour guide at Sainte-Chapelle) by killing off any competition or contentious parties.

To the right is a view of his palace from the Seine and below are a view from the front and a close-up of the gates.

Louis IX lived in a time when France was very rich and powerful and had a "privileged relationship" particularly with Constantinople "after its capture by the Crusaders in 1209." In 1239, Louis IX, being religiously minded, used the opportunity to buy the most precious of religious relics of Jesus from the Emperor of the East, Baudoin II de Courtenay, heavily burdened by debt because of the Crusades, for the at-the-time princely sum of somewhat more than $300,000 (three times more than it cost to build Sainte Chapelle to house them (hah, you didn't think I had a point with all this history).

These relics included the Crown of Thorns and a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. It also, according to our guide, included blood and breast milk from Mary, Jesus' mother, which disappeared when the French revolutionaries took over Sainte Chapelle. (The Da Vinci code anybody? though how these delicate items lasted 1300 years is surely a miracle.)

[Sainte Chapelle has the tall -- 108 feet so happens -- steeple on the left in the photo above.]

Moving right along. To house the relics he'd acquired, Louis had to build a proper reliquary -- Ste Chapelle. It has two floors. The first was a place for royal servants and workers to come to worship.

The photo below is Sainte Chapelle seen from the outside -- the first floor is relatively short compared to the height of the second (with the long tall panels of stained glass), where royalty came to worship. There is a second floor, covered walkway that connects the palace to the church, so royalty didn't have to go down to ground level and climb the stairs.

Walking into the lower chapel is like walking into a jewel box (as you can see to the right). The 21-foot vault (ceiling) is a beautiful blue with gold fleur-de-lis on it -- Louis IX's colours, which are also the colours on the outer set of columns. The red columns have gold castles on them, symbolizing Louis IX's mother, Blanche de Castille (another name for castle). These two sets of columns are what hold the church up in the Gothic style. The lower chapel is dedicated to the Virgin. It's windows tell her story, though the original windows were taken down after the flood of 1690 and no one knows what was on them.

The paintings to the left are of the Annunciation (had to look it up -- means announcement of the incarnation of Jesus in Mary) and are the oldest extant paintings in Paris (according to our guide) though they had to be restored in 1849.

The next part of our tour was up a very narrow set of corkscrew stairs to the upper chapel, which opened out onto a space 34 feet wide and 108 feet long and 67 feet to the vault. There's lots of statistics, but the amazement are the "lancets," which would be one panel of stained glass in sets of four that surround the chapel, replacing the walls. Each "medallion" or pane in a lancet tells a story from the bible. No, I'm not getting into that. I'll give you the wikipedia site to look at, which has some interesting external links you can connect to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Chapelle#Gallery

One thing I found interesting though was that the whole building is a huge reliquary and on the second floor (see photo below) is a replication of the chapel, on which is built another replication of the chapel (see the blue fleur-de-lis on the little ceiling) that housed the actual relics. So, a chapel within a chapel within a chapel.

Because these the king knew he was only a caretaker and that these relics weren't just for his own enjoyment, so to speak, he had to figure out a way to share them with the people. For security and preservation reasons, he didn't want to lug them down the stairs and into the street, so he had built a platform on which that top reliquary could sit and revolve to face the outside, the window would open and the reliquary could be lowered down so ordinary people could pass by and give veneration once a year on Good Friday. Because of his piety, Louis IX became a saint, St. Louis (of the Ile of st. Louis to the east of the Ile de la Cite).

In 1789 during the French Revolution, the crown of thorns and piece of the cross were taken over to Notre Dame and the blood and milk lost. The revolutionaries then turned Sainte Chapelle into a grainery, which didn't harm the structure as much as the flood of 1690.

Even though this place was amazingly beautiful, I didn't feel the atmosphere of blessing in it that I felt in Notre Dame. It was like an empty jewel box. Maybe it was the tours happening, people milling about, a curator/guard who every now and then would say in a wonderful carrying deep bass: silence.

As Lynn said when she described this to me back in Halifax, it would be quite wonderful to be able to be there by oneself or with other silent people on a bright sunny day and absorb the colour and space.

The photo to the right is taken just outside the entrance to the upper chapel. I just missed this beautifully attired French military man posing with his sword held at salute in front of him. Instead he retained his stern expression, but acquired perhaps his girlfriend snuggling in (I think they left together after this photo) and a puzzled tourist.

I'm going to end with the rose window in the upper chapel, which depicts scenes from the apocalypse, a fitting segue into the next stop on my journey, the conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned.