Sainte-Chapelle

The building is arranged on two levels: palace staff gathered below, while the royal family, its guests, and the canons were above. The upper chapel rises almost entirely in colored stained glass; among the windows is one showing the arrival of the holy objects in the French kingdom. A covered passage once led here from the palace, but the royal apartments and this gallery disappeared long ago.

Louis IX (Saint Louis) kept ten keys to a huge chest in the altar area on his person. The king handed them over only to someone he trusted and required a receipt. Behind double doors of silver and gilded copper lay the objects for which he built Sainte-Chapelle.

The most important was considered to be a circlet of reeds which, according to Christian tradition, was Christ's Crown of Thorns. In twelve thirty-eight, it was controlled by Baldwin II, ruler of the Latin Empire created by the Crusaders, with its capital in Constantinople. Baldwin needed money to keep the disintegrating state afloat. His council had already pawned the crown to Venetian lenders, and the relic was being prepared for shipment to Venice.

Louis IX (Saint Louis), king of France, who would be canonized after his death as Saint Louis, wanted to bring the revered holy object to Paris. He settled Baldwin's obligations and paid about one hundred thirty-five thousand livres for the crown and other relics—roughly half the kingdom's annual income and far more than the chapel building itself would later cost.

On August nineteenth, twelve thirty-nine, Louis took off his ceremonial robes, put on a simple tunic, and carried the crown barefoot to Notre-Dame. Sainte-Chapelle did not yet exist. The king needed a permanent repository inside his residence on Île de la Cité. Between twelve forty-two and twelve forty-eight, builders erected two chapels, one above the other. Palace staff prayed in the lower one. The king, his family, people he invited, and the canons conducting services entered the upper one. A covered gallery, now gone, led here from the royal apartments.

Sainte-Chapelle literally means “Holy Chapel”; the holiness in the name refers to the relics. In the upper chapel, a chest almost three meters wide was installed for twenty-two holy objects. It was raised onto a special tribune in the apse so that its contents could be shown to those gathered. The king kept the keys, the canons conducted services before the relics, and courtiers stayed beside the objects for which Louis had spent a fortune.

The sale gave Baldwin the respite he needed, but it did not save his state. In twelve sixty-one, the Byzantines retook Constantinople, and the former emperor spent the rest of his life in exile. The crown remained in Paris.

Louis ordered his own story to be included in the stained-glass windows of the upper chapel. In the window devoted to the transfer of the relics, he and his younger brother, Robert of Artois, are depicted barefoot. They carry on their shoulders cloth-covered litters bearing the crown. This scene was placed after the biblical kings, within a story that begins with the Creation of the world and ends with the arrival of the holy objects in the French kingdom.

During the French Revolution, services here ceased. People melted down the large chest and the smaller reliquaries; many of the objects kept in them disappeared. The Crown of Thorns survived. After several moves, it was transferred to the treasury of Notre-Dame in eighteen oh six.

Sainte-Chapelle now has neither the royal apartments, nor the silver chest, nor the crown itself. A tribune recreated in the nineteenth century stands in the apse, and in the stained glass Louis and Robert still carry cloth-covered litters toward it.