Sightseeing in Paris

By the time David and I finally arrived in Paris, I had given up any idea of finding the city of my dreams – Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dancing around the fountain in an “American in Paris”, Ingrid Bergman’s hair blowing in the wind as she and Humphrey Bogart drove around Paris in “Casablanca.”

 “We’ll always have Paris” became “I’ll have Paris but without you.”

So what did we do?  All the usual tourist things: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame.  We walked up the Champs Ellysee toward the Arch de Triumph and through the narrow alleys on the Left Bank.  We lunched on onion soup in sidewalk cafes without any encounters with the likes of Hemingway or Sartre. 

Notre Dame Cathedral looked just like the pictures engraved on my mind.  The facade with its triple arched doorways and twin towers was gray, as in the movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”  Then we stepped inside. In the dim foyer was a sign: “Notre Dame n’est pas un musee” (“Notre Dame is not a museum”).   Organ music, undoubtedly piped from a recording, set the mood.   The vast nave was cold and damp.  Candles burned before a small statue of the Virgin Mary.  At the rear and in the transepts, huge “rose-shaped” windows, in brilliant blue stained glass, were glorious. 

Then I took David to a place I’d read about, not included in the usual Paris tour.  Near Notre Dame, behind the Palace of Justice, is the Sainte Chappell.  St. Louis – the French king for whom St. Louis, Missouri, was named and also the cathedral in New Orleans – built this small church to display the horde of relics of saints which he purchased or purloined from all over the Middle East.  The church is empty now.  Many of the relics were of doubtful authenticity.  Some, such as the Crown of Thorns, are in the Notre Dame treasury.  

All that remains inside the Sainte Chappell are the windows, the most magnificent display of stained glass which has survived since the Middle Ages. In multi-colored vignettes they picture the entire story of the Bible.  David was awe-struck.  “Wow!  Isn’t this beautiful!”

His Mom was impressed that this teenager from the cultural waste land of the Illinois prairies responded in this way, not because he knew – or cared – anything about medieval glass or St. Louis – but simply because the windows were beautiful.