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. [Illustration: PONT ST. MICHEL AND STE. CHAPELLE, PARIS]