Cathedral Cities of France Part 10

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 G.o.ddess of Reason, and used for storing legal doc.u.ments and papers; the beautiful gla.s.s 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Louis XII., had vanished; their place was occupied by modern law-courts, and the half-ruined church seemed hopelessly out of date and out of place.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 Ma.s.s; 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. wors.h.i.+pped there with his courtiers, when the light from the tall windows streamed in upon the bright armour and rich garments of hundreds of n.o.ble 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 Ma.s.s 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 n.o.bles, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Catulliac.u.m, where it finally sought refuge in the villa of one Catulla, a Roman lady of n.o.ble 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-Pres. After this the foundation fell into a terrible state of neglect. Its abbots were fighting men--not necessarily ecclesiastics, for many n.o.bles 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'Eveille, 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 finis.h.i.+ng what had been so n.o.bly begun. The work languished again, however, until the reign of Louis IX., when Eudes de Clement and Matthieu de Vendome 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 Abelard and "la tres-sage Helois" of Villon, whose story is too well known--and, perhaps, also too secular--to quote here. Both lie buried now at Pere-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 a.s.sail 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.