LiveJournal 11/29/2003

Paris Day 3

St. Chapelle – Sunday 10am Paris

The bottom chapel of St. Chapelle is plain enough for the worshipers it was designed to satisfy. Scott and I both got our souvenir coins for 2 euros. We then walked around the lower chapel, taking in it’s staid and plain order. We then ascended a tight spiral staircase into the upper chapel. The first thing I laid eyes on was the fabulously wonderful stained glass windows! It’s absolutely the most awesome display of stained glass that I have ever laid my eyes on. This is the same work that was taken down for World War 2 to prevent damage. Even thought today is overcast and rainy in Paris there is enough beauty in this chapel to take my breath away each time I look up. This sight has about the same awesome presence that the Mona Lisa had in Le Louvre.

Le Cathedral de Notre Dame –

I just lit a candle for my paternal grandmother and added it to the rest of the candles. This cathedral defies easy description in that it steals the breath and leaves you in awe.

Le Tour Eiffel – 1:30pm

I am writing this entry from the first stage of the tower. I have scaled it, taken my pictures, bought my trinkets, and fed the resident pigeons that live in this tower. Being an acrophobe I can’t believe I actually did it!

Le Catacombs –

Hundreds of thousands of dead Frenchmen staring up at me from their bones, neatly stacked in a macabre manner. It made my skin prickle and it felt as if I was being smothered with a dullness on my thoughts and an overwhelming sense of depression from the sight of so much mortality.

Sacre Coeur – 6pm

The song on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack goes “The view from the Butte will make the wretched sigh…” and boy, did it ever! The view from the roof of Paris is absolutely fabulous!

On the dawn of the third day we decided to take on Ile de Cite, which was the place to find the bird exhibit, St. Chapelle, and Notre Dame.

Later on that day I stood beneath the Eiffel Tower and debated with Scott about whether I would be brave enough to scale it. When I was back in the states, before our trip to Paris I made a pact with myself that I would scale the Tour Eiffel just because I didn’t want any regrets on this trip – to let my fears override what could be a wonderful experience. Standing beneath the Eiffel I initially wanted to touch it, to make a physical contact with such a historical object. When I had walked down the promenade and under the tower I decided that my fears be damned and headed for the West Leg. I walked up, ordered my tickets to ride the elevator, and stood in the vestibule with Scott waiting for the Eiffel towers elevators to arrive on the ground level. During this time I cracked a joke that after this I should write “An Acrophobes Guide to Paris”. I was terrified in the elevator but once we were underway I was amazed at how quick and relatively painless the first escalation was. When we reached the first stage of the tower Scott walked along the outer edge and I made do with walking around the inner core area and we eventually stopped in the shops on the first level and bought our trinkets and had a snack, and took our pictures.

After the Eiffel came the Catacombs, where Paris interred it’s bursting graveyards in an underground Ossuary titled “The Empire of the Dead”. The entire journey required going down about 100 feet or so, traversing 1.7km of twisting tunnels under Paris, then up 100 feet and out to street level. The experience was very disquieting – seeing reminders of mortality in such profusion brought my usually airy thinking right to the ground. I felt as if my thinking was getting stuck in the mud, being shackled. The area is very well treated and it felt sacred and sanctified. There was a distinct lack of vermin in the tunnels which surprised me immensely, I suppose not even rats want to hang around this much assembled mortality. Both sides of the tunnel were edged with a wall of bones, femur bones mostly laid lengthwise along the ground with the knob where the knee is facing the people walking down the tunnels. Throughout the entirety of the Catacombs human skulls line the floor, half-way up, and the top of the pile of femur bones, making a three-lined wall. Behind all the legs were tossed odd shaped bones and broken bones, so hands, feet, ribcages, vertebrae and shattered assorted bits were tossed between the leg-wall and the rock-wall. Every 5 feet there was a bright incandescent light mounted on the wall, giving the entire area a very pale and dim illumination. There were several sections where the people who assembled the ossuary approached mortality with a sense of art and Christian grace – there were several sections where short squat crosses were cut from the stone of the walls and made into little altars and nearby the bone-wall had a series of skulls arranged in a similar cross pattern. It was both awesome in it’s sheer immensity and awesome in it’s depressiveness to be one of the most memorable things about my entire Paris trip.

Sacre Coeur –

The second time we went to Montmartre we decided to run up to the Butte of Montmartre and enter Sacre Coeur, a Catholic basilica. This church was more restrictive in it’s forbidding the use of photography and talking so we weren’t able to do much tourist appreciation while inside the church. Sacre Coeur shares an awesome ceiling with Notre Dame, only in Sacre Coeur, the ceiling is a huge frieze of Christ’s passion. We eventually left Sacre Coeur after being set upon by aggressive parishioners and a very particular building manager who instead of simply pointing to the exit we should have used pushed us instead. We left Sacre Coeur feeling that it was best left to the Christians inside and that while it was pretty inside it wasn’t really a great place to go. Next time we go to Paris I would feel dandy in forgetting Sacre Coeur – let the horde have it’s pleasure dome.

An example of the birds on sale at the Sunday Bird Exhibit on Ile de Cite in the heart of Paris. These little friends were moving so fast and I didn’t use a flash because it would have given them heart attacks, each picture came out a little blurry – especially for the more nervous birds in their cages. On the whole tho many of these birds, heck, even the surrounding wild pigeons were rather tamed and used to people so walking up and looking close didn’t cause a blur of feathers and a chattering of squawks and peeps.

This stained glass window was the upper part of a two-part picture. St. Chapelle has these windows, 12 on a side depicting the books and stories of the bible. The day was overcast so the windows were simply stunning, not as they are during a clear day – when they are notably mind-blowing.

Notre Dame. It was so vast and high that I had a seriously hard time getting the right frame for the pictures I wanted to take. Much like a lot of Paris, in order not to disturb the people in mass, flash photography was forbidden, but non-flash photography was allowed. I was musing to myself that Notre Dame is grand enough to restore anyones faith, be they Christian or Pagan – it was just that beautiful.

Here is a perfect example of the bone-wall in the Catacombs. Here you see all the legs and skulls, behind this wall were all the assorted bones that couldn’t be stacked properly. The best I can say is that this experience was stunning.

The Eiffel Tower. I got to the first stage and I’m glad I did, because I don’t think I could have lived with the regret if I chickened out on such a wonderful experience.

Proof positive that I was in the Eiffel Tower. 🙂 Here I was terrified of what was behind me and how high up I was but at least I was calmed by the fact (which they proudly display) that in gale-force (180km/h) winds, the Eiffel’s top only displaces 18cm. If we go back we hope to do it when there isn’t so many clouds and maybe with a better camera so we can catch the panorama of Paris that you can just make out behind me in this picture as I try to hold up the display case with my hand. 🙂