A Medievalist Walk Through Paris

I mentioned, the post before last, that I’d gone on holiday in July 2019 and was meaning to blog bits of it, and now here indeed we are. My partner and I lit out pretty much as soon as the 2019 International Medieval Congress was over, with the ultimate destination of Venice. But, because of worrying about our carbon footprint, the good advice of the Man in Seat 61, a liking for seeing the places one passes through in travelling over just passing directly over them and, I admit, a certain basic rail enthusiasm on my part, we did this by train. There are many advantages to travelling Europe by train, for sure, but one thing that must be admitted is that it’s slower, and a full day’s journey will very often leave you only some of the way towards your destination and needing an overnight stop en route. Given the which, you might as well make it Paris, right?

Probably the oldest thing we saw, in some sense at least, the Pont de Neuf; photograph by Rebecca Darley

Now, I did not go to the city that claims itself as Europe’s most romantic, with my partner, and spend the whole time we had there visiting medieval sites, I promise. Still, you can take the medievalist out of England but you can’t take the medievalist out of him, not completely, so I did, you know, notice, when we found something medieval, and of course I had my camera with me.

This is the Tour de Saint-Jacques, which having been built in the early 16th century is not properly medieval, I suppose, but I didn’t realise that when I saw it. Photograph by your author

And this is the other side, which if anything looks less Renaissance. There was once a church to go with this, you understand, which was older than the tower, but it was demolished in 1793. Photograph by your author

I liked the effect of the sunlight from one side being let through the portals here. Photograph by your author

And this person seems to have the shoulder-angel/shoulder-devil problem beloved of modern comics, but I’m not sure that’s a sound basis for periodization. Photograph by your author

It’s also a little difficult to navigate central Paris without passing the cathedral of Notre Dame, though at this point, it had only recently had quite a bad accident, as you may remember…

The state of things from the east in July 2019. Photograph by your author

The west end, obviously at the same time. Photograph by your author

… so we couldn’t go in. Even what was left and not under wraps…

End of the south transept, under work. Photograph by your author

Woodern formers for replacement vaulting, waiting for deployment. Photograph by your author

… was quite impressive, though.

Details of the south face. Photograph by your author

Upside the north side of the apse, photography by Rebecca Darley

There were several of these animal grotesques, but this one is my favourite. Photograph by your author

Of course, not everything which medievalises is yet medieval, as indeed we’ve already seen and would, as it transpired, again.

South face and portal of Saint-Eustache, which goes back to 1213 as a place of worship but back to a century-long early modern construction process as this building. Photograph by your author

And, to be honest, once you’re inside, baroque is definitely calling. But because it’s still not quite there, it’s actually pretty impressively Gothic still. Photograph by your author

But, if you are a medievalist in Paris, of whatever period or stamp, even if your companion or companions are not, you should probably still weigh upon them that they need to go and see the Sainte-Chapelle.

Exterior view, giving me problems of perspective as you can see, and also mistakenly taken at tiny size, for which I apologise. This and all the following photographs in the post are by me

Firstly, there’s almost no other building like it, because when the famous Crusader king and nowadays saint, Louis IX, had it built, between 1238 and 1248, to house his collection of relics of Christ, he went properly overboard on it.

Tomb niche and window in the lower storey

Paint and pillars in the lower storey

Apse, vaulting, a more modern statue of the founder of the building, and a lot of fleurs-de-lys

But secondly, that’s only the downstairs, and beautiful though it is (and very full of fleurs-de-lys), it is in no way a preparation for the visual shock of emerging from the staircase into the upper storey. Everyone who did so stopped immediately, causing a long trail of complaints from the queue on the stairs until each of them, too, got to the top and had their own encounter with the awe.

You can see everyone trying to capture the same moment and impact as I was here, but I can also tell you, there is no way a photograph can convey the sudden shock of the light and space

The sky-high stained glass sequences are a triumph of Gothic ability to make tall stuff stay up, and also turn the interior into a kind of full-body Kaleidoscope

You can tell from the blur here how much light there actually was, in places

An angel, carved in a corner, trying to be noticed against the background

But after a while of soaking up the whole space, the eye begins to want something to catch onto, and my companion was first to realise that this window panel was all about the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (610-641), which then drew our attention

What is Heraclius, shown here carrying the True Cross on horseback through a battle, doing here, you may ask? And of course we have already exposed part of the answer…

… because Heraclius, inheriting, as we’ve heard, a war with Persia in which the Persians had taken Jerusalem and captured the relic of the True Cross that had been there since the fourth century, was able to recover it and restore it to Jerusalem, as seen here, in 628, having liberated it from the heathen, an aspiration that Louis IX also held dear…

Of course, Heraclius is, therefore, only here as a precursor to the deeds of the church’s actual patron, Louis IX, which also take up a full panel

In fact, it seems as if Louis meant to be here himself, presumably having also liberated Jerusalem, to reside in the shared glory of his relics and his various great predecessors. But of course, things didn’t work out that way, and what parts of his body made it back to Paris were buried in good old traditional Saint-Denis instead. So this niche remains empty, still waiting for the king who never got back here.

Poignant, but also superb. So on the whole, I would recommend it! Like the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, though obviously that’s not medieval, it’s a place where almost any amount of queuing is worth it to see inside. But of course, we were still only passing through. More photos of other places will therefore follow! But I’ll dripfeed some more academic content in first, in case that’s what you’re coming here for rather than holiday snaps…