No historical pilgrimage to Paris would be complete without a visit to the Sanctuary of its protomartyr and the burial-place of its kings. Taking train from the Gare du Nord, either main line or local train-tramway and being arrived at the railway station of the grimy industrial suburb of St. Denis, we cross the canal and continue along the Rue du Chemin de Fer and the Rue de la Republique, to the Cathedral, architecturally the most important relic of the great age of the early ecclesiastical builders. The west facade before us, completed about 1140 by Abbot Suger, is of profound interest, for here we may behold the round Romanesque arch side by side with the Pointed, and the very first grip of the new Gothic on the heavy Norman architecture it was about to overthrow. The sculptures on the W. portals, however, almost wholly and clumsily renewed, need not detain us long. We enter and descend from the sombre vestibule. As we wait for the verger we revel in the airy and graceful symmetry of the nave and aisles; the beautiful raised choir and lovely apse with its chevets and round of chapels, where structural science and beauty of form are so admirably blended. The choir was so far advanced in 1143 that mass was sung at the high altar during a heavy storm while the incomplete ribs of the new Gothic vaulting swayed over head. In 1219, however, Suger's structure was nearly destroyed by fire and the upper part of the choir, the nave and transepts were afterwards rebuilt in the pure Gothic of the times, the more active reconstruction being effected between 1231 and 1281. A visit to the monuments is unhappily a somewhat mingled experience. Owing to the inscrutable official regulations in force, the best of the mediaeval tombs are only seen with difficulty and from a distance that renders any appreciation of their beauty impossible.[237] The monuments are mainly those claimed by Lenoir for his Museum at Paris when the decree of 1792 was promulgated, ordering the "effacement of the proud epitaphs and the destruction of the Mausoleums, that recalled the dread memories of kings": they were restored to their original places so far as possible by Viollet le Duc. The head of St. Denis is said to have been found when his shrine was desecrated and appropriated by the revolutionists, and in the cant of the time was brought back to Paris by "a miracle greater and more authentic than that which conveyed it from Montmartre to St. Denis, a miracle of the regeneration of opinion, registered not in the martyrology but in the annals of reason." [Footnote 237: We cannot too strongly impress on the traveller the desirability of visiting the admirable Musee de Sculpture Comparee at the Trocadero where casts of the most important sculpture and architecture in France, including many of the monuments, here and elsewhere in Paris, may be conveniently studied.] [Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.]