Stained Glass Spectacular

Day 4 of our adventure took us to the streets of Paris - covering many areas of historic importance, beauty and fun. We bundled up because it was feeling mighty cold...layers were the order of the day, combined with gloves, scarves, hats, boots and anything else that we thought would keep us comfortable as we walked and gawked at the sights around us.

Our first sight of the day was Saint Chappelle. Built in 1248 for King Louis IX (the only French King who is now a saint), this Gothic church was built in an amazing 5 years to house the Crown of Thorns. The lower portion is the basement and was used for worship by the commoners and staff. It is an impressive space, painted and decorated over every inch with the fleur-de-lis (a sign of royalty), angels and castles done in a relief and gold paint process on the pillars. The area is a bit cramped with all of the people milling about, but still a very beautiful and well-done church.

As we climbed the spiral staircase to the room above, we had absolutely no idea of the breathtaking beauty that we were about to witness. As you step into the room, it is suddenly very light and you immediately look up (with your mouth open, I challenge anyone to keep their jaw tightly shut) in total amazement at the sights before you. 15 separate panels of stained glass depicting over 1100 scenes of the bible are displayed here, depicting stories from Genesis all the way through Revelations as well as the story of how the Crown of Thorns made it's way from Jerusalem to Constantiople to Sainte Chappel. (The Crown, incidentally, is no longer at Sainte Chappelle. It is now kept at Notre-Dame and is shown only on the first Friday of the month and during Easter)

We took a lot of pictures of this church (see all of them in the album titled - big surprise - Paris - Day 4), but I have to admit that as I look through them now, I don't feel as if I have really captured the essence and magnitude of the chapel. You will just have to take my word for it and try to get there yourself - I think that I am going to declare this my favorite sight of the trip (and that is no easy task, let me tell you!) I think that part of the lure for me with this chapel is the craftsmanship and work that went into creating each panel of the stained glass. Craftsmen made glass (which is, essentially, melted sand), coloring it by mixing in metals like cobalt (blue) or copper (green). Then they'd assemble pieces of different colored glass. The pieces were held together by lead. Details like the folds in the robes came by either scratching on the glass, or by baking in imperfections. It was a painstaking process of finding just the right colors, fitting them together to make a scene... and then multiplying by 1,100.That is one arduous, time consuming and tedious process. Add to the difficulty the speed in which this was accomplished, and we are hard pressed to find anything else like it.

After a good deal of time taking in the sights at Sainte Chappel, we crossed the street for lunch at a great little place called Tabac du Palais. Our waiter didn't speak a ton of English and suddenly...Holly's three years of French paid off! She ordered everything in French for all of us and interacted with the slightly flirty (but very nice) waiter. We of course teased her about it but it was nice to be able to have someone do a bit of translating for us. I also was introduced to my new favorite lunch thing - salad with goat cheese toast (there is a french way to write it, but if I can't decipher it enough to write it, there is no way that it is going to translate well!)

We then set out to visit the Luxembourg Gardens , all 60-acres of which were built in the early 17th century by Marie de Medicis - the widow of recently assassinated Henri IV. She was lonely and homesick for Florence, so she re-created the Pitti Palace and gardens of her childhood memories. The entire process for completion took about 180 years, but even if they were done sooner, it wouldn't have made a difference for Marie, as she was exiled to Germany by her (not so loving) son, Louis XIII, upon his ascension to power. We saw the gardens in the dead of winter and even then they were spectacular. Looking at the pictures of what these gardens do in the spring and summer make me want to go back just to visit them - they are amazing.

The temperature dropped in the later part of the day to about 34, so we picked up our walking pace. We completed our Left Bank walking tour past the Panthéon (an 18th century church finished during the French Revolution that has since been used as a mausoleum for some of the big French names such as Voltaire), Rue Mouffetard (one of the oldest streets in Paris...it used to be a Roman road), a popular spot under Ernest Hemingway's apartment and then we ducked into a Haggen Dazs for some ice cream and cappuccino - quite a combination! We had to once again rely on the interpretive skills and knowledge of the words HOT (chaud) and COLD (froid) in French to get our order squared away by the Schnoogs...we didn't want coffee flavored ice cream!

The day wrapped up as we continued walking to the Metro station (we are seasoned pros by now) and I somehow broke my smaller camera. This dialed up the need for a battery charger for the Canon G7 even more, so we set out to find one without any luck. The hunt was a good one and we tried hard, but unfortunately the store that did have it was out of stock. Fortunately, Holly had a camera, so we started to share the photo-taking duties and reserved the big camera for the super-scenic and zoom pictures.

Who could imagine me somewhere without a camera??