How have I never been to Sainte-Chapelle? For various reasons (language student, living on the south coast etc), I’ve been to Paris quite a few times. In fact, to be brutally honest, I’ve been too many times. Many an August day I’ve spent there, breaking up a three day drive home from wherever we’d been on holiday, many a school trip there. The latter were more fun – less heat, slightly fewer tourists, more friends. Last year – that is, January 2018, nearly two years before this current trip I’m talking about – I fell for the lure of a quiet January weekend and really cheap flights from Southampton (I couldn’t get to London for that price) and this year I really wanted to try out the Eurostar. Which was great.
But what do you do in Paris on a wet November weekend when you’ve already seen everything ten times?
It turns out there’s actually quite a lot I haven’t seen because I instinctively circle the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame and Sacré-Cœur.
The one I really wish I’d discovered before the grand age of 34 was Sainte-Chapelle. It’s on the same island as Notre Dame, you just turn right out of Cité metro instead of left.
Quick status update on Notre Dame, by the way. All the buttresses have been reinforced with wooden ones under their arches, the windows have massive sticky labels over them, there’s non-stop whirring and clanking of work going on inside the fences and the western towers are astonishingly white & clean. In short, it’s survived incredibly well. And if there’s one thing I already know from #BeforeItBurnsDown, it’s that it’s relatively uncommon for massive ancient cathedrals to have not had a major fire. It’s how Canterbury ended up so Gothic. The outlook for Notre Dame is so much better than I thought it would be when I was watching it on the news in April.
So, Sainte-Chapelle. It’s a chapel but it’s also big and Gothic and it kind of looks like someone started building a cathedral and then abruptly stopped. It looks too short. Not that it’s all that easy to see it among the other buildings of the Palace of Justice. It was built to house relics: the Crown of Thorns, pieces of the True Cross etc. They were moved out of the Chapel and into Notre Dame’s treasury long ago, and presumably among the stuff that was rescued at great personal risk from the fire.
You enter into the Lower Chapel. Guidebooks skim over this but it was enough to stop me in my tracks. I’ve said this a few times lately but I mean it literally and in real life, it must be a really annoying habit for anyone walking behind me. The Lower Chapel has quite a low ceiling and it’s quite dark but it’s so rich and colourful. This is Perpendicular Gothic done short and squat and in technicolour. We all know how much we hate those gaudy painted Roman statues but for once, I mean technicolour with the greatest reverence. There’s gold. There’s red. There’s blue. Fleur-de-lys motifs all over the low vaulted ceilings. Patterned walls. It’s gorgeous, in the original sense of the word. This is where the poor folk worshipped but bear in mind this building was built for the royal household. The poor of that court would have been far from the starving beggars on Paris’s filthy streets.
Upstairs these days is accessed by two very narrow winding staircases. There would have been a more suitably royal entrance in use – the huge door at the west end, I presume, but we mere tourists may not enter that way.
The upper chapel is breathtaking. Perpendicular Gothic but made really tall and thin. The majority of the walls up here are stained glass panels telling the entire story of the Bible plus the story of the Chapel. The supporting pillars have been carved to look like clusters of pencil-thin delicate columns and so you hardly notice that the clusters have to be solid enough to carry the weight not only of so much glass but also of the soaring roof.
This place really sparkles in the sunlight but I was there on a wet miserable November day when there wasn’t so much as a drop of golden sun, let alone enough rays to bring those spectacular windows to life. So I got out my lensball.
Yes, I am ridiculous. I bought a polished crystal-glass ball for taking photos. No, I don’t have the photographic skill to make them very good and I didn’t get to do much practice in the glittering surroundings of the upper chapel. I took a few photos through this daft thing and then wanted to out it away. In order to free up hands, I popped my camera in my pocket. Or so I thought. I missed and it tumbled from pocket height to the floor. I tutted, picked it up and put the lensball back in its bag in its box in my bag and then I took out my camera again.
It wouldn’t switch on. The zoom lens buzzed, achiever nothing, flashed a “system error!” message at me and gave up. Nothing could fix it. I took the battery out. I fiddled with the lens. I twiddled the mode dial. I offered up a prayer to the God that clearly isn’t in this spectacular chapel. To no avail.
This was November 15th. One thing you probably don’t know about my Pilgrimage to Canterbury is that on the Friday night, my camera sensor suddenly went. On a previous camera a few years ago, it developed a splodge on the sensor and I was told it was repairable but would cost more than a new camera. I knew this time would be the same so on Saturday in Canterbury I made a pilgrimage to an industrial estate and bought a new camera. That was October 12th. The camera that died on the stone floor of Sainte-Chapelle was less than five weeks old.
It was infuriating. How inordinately stupid to drop it. How inordinately expensive had this trip become?! And worse, no photos that entire weekend. I had my phone but the iPhone SE is not celebrated for its camera, it struggles in anything other than broad daylight and I can’t stand its lack of zoom. You can’t see anything in my phone photos. As it happened, I’d brought my Instax camera with me and an old-fashioned film camera. A year or two ago, I found three long-forgotten rolls of film so I spent £3 on a camera on eBay to put it in. It’s a novelty that makes me feel as self-conscious as the Instax. I wish I could do something arty with it but the pictures just look like early 90s holiday snaps. The Instaxes, on the other hand, mostly came out pretty striking. That camera really likes grey days.
So for the second time in under six weeks I had to buy a new camera. So much for my plans to start making a collection towards something more DSLR-like for when the old-new camera gave up.
So, yeah. Sainte-Chapelle is absolutely worth seeing and I have no idea how I’ve missed it so many times. But if you go, bear in mind the floor is solid rock and will eat cameras for breakfast.