would reach not only thither, but to the very extremities of the land.
In 1793 a mocking and savage crowd forced itself into the Sainte Chapelle, and made speedy havoc of the accumulated riches of five centuries. Besides the great shrine and the bust containing the head of St. Louis, there were statues of massive gold and silver, crosses, chalices, monstrances, and reliquaries, of which the precious material was but of secondary value in comparison with their exquisite workmanship. There were delicate sculptures in ivory, richly-illuminated Missals and Office-books of which even the jewelled binding alone was of enormous value. Every tiling was hammered, twisted, broken, wrenched down, torn, or dragged to the mint to be melted into ingots. But, worse than this, the relics that had been taken to St. Denis were soon after to be snatched from their place of shelter. On the night of the 11th-12th of November in that dismal year this venerable cathedral was desecrated in its turn. We will not dwell upon the horrible saturnalia enacted there; but first of all the treasures of the sanctuary were carried off to Paris, with the innumerable relics they contained, and handed over to the Convention as “objects serving to the encouragement of superstition.”
What was to become of the true cross and of the holy crown in such hands as these? They who burnt the mortal remains of St. Denis and of St. Geneviève would not scruple to destroy the sacred memorials of the Passion. But they were to be saved. Happily, it was put into the heads of the Convention that, in the light of curiosities, some of these “objects” might serve to adorn museums
and similar collections, and they were therefore submitted to the examination of learned antiquarians. The Abbé Barthélemy, curator of the Bibliothèque Nationale, affirmed the crown to be of such great antiquity and rarity that no enlightened person would permit its destruction; and having obtained that it should be confided to him, preserved it with the utmost care in the National Library. M. Beauvoisin, a member of the commission, took the portion of the cross (Crucem magnam) and placed it in the hands of his mother. The nail was saved in the same manner, besides a considerable number of other very precious relics, which, in various places of concealment, awaited the return of better days.
But the hand of the spoiler had not yet finished its work upon the Sainte Chapelle. Not that, like many other ancient sanctuaries, it was wholly demolished, but its devastation was complete. The grand figure of our Lord on the principal pier of the upper chapel, the Virgin of Duns Scotus, the admirable bas-reliefs, the porch, the richly-sculptured tympanum and arches, the great statues of the apostles in the interior, the paintings and enamels which adorned the walls—not one of these escaped destruction at the hands of the iconoclasts of the Revolution, who left this once dazzling sanctuary not only bare but mutilated on every side. And as if this had not been ruin enough, the pitiless hardness of utilitarians put the finishing stroke to the havoc already made by anti-Christian fanaticism. The administrators of 1803 thought they could do nothing better than make of the Sainte Chapelle a store-room for the records of the Republic.
Then were the walls riddled with hooks and nails, along the arcades and in the defoliated capitals. Up to a given height a portion of the rich glazing of the windows was torn down round the whole compass of the building, and the space walled up with lath and plaster, along which was fixed a range of cupboards, shelves, and cases with compartments. Dulaure, in his Description of Paris, highly applauds these proceedings, and considers that the place had rather gained than lost by being turned into a store for waste paper. “The Sainte Chapelle,” he says, “is now consecrated to public utility. It contains archives, of which the different portions are arranged in admirable order. The cupboards in which they are placed occupy a great part of the height of the building, and present by their object and their decoration a happy mixture of the useful and the agreeable. O Prudhomme! thou art eternal.”[12]
And yet this poor flower, so rudely broken by the tempest, had tried to lift her head, as it were, and recover something of the past, when the dawn of a brighter day shed some of its first rays on her.
In the year 1800, while Notre Dame, still given up to schismatic ministers, was utterly deserted, two courageous priests, the Abbé Borderies, since Bishop of Versailles, and the Abbé Lalande, afterwards Bishop of Rodez, first gathered together the faithful within the walls of the Sainte Chapelle for holy Mass, and also for catechisings which were long afterwards remembered. In 1802 these good priests held there a ceremony which for years past had been unknown in France—the First Communion of a large number
of children and young persons, whom they had carefully watched over and prepared. This earliest ray of light after the darkness soon shone upon all the sanctuaries of the land.
When the churches were opened again, priests were needed for them, and of these there remained, alas! but too few. The Sainte Chapelle had to be left without any, and it was then put to the use we have described. A few years later, when an endeavor was about to be made to have it employed for its original purposes, it was found to require so much repairing that the question arose whether it would not be advisable to pull it down rather than attempt to restore it. Happily, neither course was then taken. The architects of the Empire and of the Restoration were alike incapable of touching unless irremediably to spoil so delicate a mediæval gem. Its state was, however, so ruinous that after the Revolution it was impossible to think of replacing the sacred relics in a building no longer capable of affording them a safe shelter; they were therefore, in 1804, at the request of Cardinal Belloy, Archbishop of Paris, given into the hands of the vicar-general of the diocese, the Abbé d’Astros, by M. de Portalis, then Minister of Public Worship. The holy crown, of which the identity was established beyond all doubt, was at first carried to the archbishop’s palace, where it remained two years, during which time a fitting reliquary was prepared for its reception, and on the 10th of August it was transferred to Notre Dame and solemnly exposed for veneration.