d one of the staircases by which it is ascended, that to
the N., is said to date from the founder's time, and may often have
been trodden by the very feet of St. Louis himself. Little else of the
interior furniture has escaped destruction. The beautiful high altar,
the rood loft, the choir stalls, have long disappeared. Four only of
the statues of the apostles bearing the crosses of consecration are
said to be originals--the fourth and fifth on each side of the nave
counting from the west door; the relics, or all that escaped the
political storms of the _annee terrible_, are now at Notre Dame, and
the reliquary that contained them went to feed the hungry war-chest of
the revolutionary armies. But the thirteenth-century jewelled windows,
as left to us by the admirable restorers of 1855, are of paramount
interest. The wealth of design and amplitude of the series are truly
amazing. The panels, numbering about eleven hundred, are a compendium
of sacred history and a revelation of the world to come: the whole
scene from the Creation to the Apocalypse is unrolled before our eyes,
pictured in a transparent symphony of colour. Seven windows of the
nave and four of the apse deal with Old Testament history: three at
the end of the apse with the New. The eighth window of the nave (the
first to the R. of entrance), dealing with the story of the
Translation of the relics from Constantinople, although the most
restored--nineteen only of the sixty-seven subjects are original--is
perhaps the most interesting, for among the nineteen may be seen St.
Louis figured by the contemporary artist: receiving the relics at
Sens; assisting to carry the relics, barefoot; taking part at the
exposition of the relics with his queen and his mother; receiving an
embassy from the Emperor Baldwin; carrying the Byzantine cross which
holds a portion of the true cross. Another of the original panels
contains a representation of the Cite with the enveloping arms of the
Seine. The rose window at the west end is obviously later, and dates
from the fifteenth century.

In olden times the lower part of the central window of the apse was
made of white glass that the people massed in the courtyard below
might behold the relics as St. Louis and his successors, after
exhibiting them to the privileged congregation in the chapel, turned
round to show them. Against the south wall of the nave is a little
oratory with a squint through which it is said Louis XI. used to
ve