The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte Geneviève. Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII, and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”--eighty-four years--as building went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate west façade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip Augustus’s day when it was finished. Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious, [Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME.] a worthy setting for the scenes it has witnessed--scenes splendid, startling, tragic. Here Saint Louis brought the Crown of Thorns and here his funeral took place. Here Philip the Fair rode in on horseback after the battle of Mons-en-Puelle and here he convened the first States General--the first Assembly wherein the burgesses were represented. Henry VI of England was crowned here, so was Marie Stuart, and here it was that Napoleon set the imperial crown upon his own head and then crowned Josephine. Here Henry IV, turned Catholic for the purpose of gaining possession of Paris, heard his first mass, and here, during the Revolution, a ballet dancer posed in the choir as the Goddess of Reason, “in place of the former Holy Sacrament.” Officially, the cathedral is the hub of France, for measurements along the national highways are all made from the foot of its towers. Deep in the hearts of the French people, too, is love for this splendid fane. They love it as a summary of Gothic beauty, as a storehouse of history, and, above all, as the moral fortress of the city, sheltering as it does “Notre Dame de Paris,” the guardian of the city for five hundred years. CHAPTER VI PARIS OF SAINT LOUIS The son of Philip Augustus, Louis VIII, whose accession was celebrated in Paris with high festivity, reigned for three dismal, unprofitable years. His wife, Blanche of Castile, reared to a manhood of conscientious rectitude their son, Louis IX, whose virtues were recognized by canonization less than thirty years after his death.