Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
restored--nineteen only of the sixty-seven subjects are original--is
perhaps the most interesting, for among the nineteen may be seen St.
Louis figured by the contemporary artist: receiving the relics at
Sens; assisting to carry the relics, barefoot; taking part at the
exposition of the relics with his queen and his mother; receiving an
embassy from the Emperor Baldwin; carrying the Byzantine cross which
holds a portion of the true cross. Another of the original panels
contains a representation of the Cite with the enveloping arms of the
Seine. The rose window at the west end is obviously later, and dates
from the fifteenth century.
In olden times the lower part of the central window of the apse was
made of white glass that the people massed in the courtyard below
might behold the relics as St. Louis and his successors, after
exhibiting them to the privileged congregation in the chapel, turned
round to show them. Against the south wall of the nave is a little
oratory with a squint through which it is said Louis XI. used to
venerate the relics unobserved.
We step out from the west door of the upper chapel to examine the more
richly decorated upper portal. The carvings are all modern and, except
such as were suggested by traces of the old work, are copied from the
west front of Notre Dame and other churches. Many a solemn and many a
strange scene have been enacted in this royal oratory; the strangest
of all perhaps when Charles V. of France, the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles IV., and his son Wenceslaus, king of the Romans, in the _role_
of the three Holy Kings, came to venerate the relics and laid
oblations before the shrine.
Before we turn away from the building we should observe on the west
facade above the rose window wherein the architect has literally
sported with the difficulties of construction in stone a charming
design of fleurs-de-lys framed by quatrefoils along the balustrade;
the central design is an R. (rex), crowned by two angels. The present
spire is a fourth erection. The second, which replaced the original
spire in 1383, was one of the wonders of Paris, and fell a victim to
fire in 1630. A third, erected by Louis XIII., was demolished in 1791,
and in 1853 Lassus, Viollet le Duc's principal colleague in the
restoration of the chapel, designed the graceful fleche we see to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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