The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-10-25
ST. DENIS.
The sepuIchre Of the French NJ

The Sepulchre of the French NIonarchs,
1t is to be regretted that at nearly all the
spots where the great contending armies in
Europe have met, the most noble churches
of France are built. The cathedrals of Stras-
burg, Metz, and Rheims are known to every
tourist, and admired, almost venerated,
wherever men have hearts to love beauty of
form consecrated to the spirit of religion.
And st. Denis, adds the Louisville Courier
Journal, is no exception to the list. The
beautiful facade, the portals emblematic
of the coronation of the Virgin and the Pas
sion, the rose window imaging the baptism
of Clovis, and the six hundred statues
of the cathedral at Rheims are happily unin-
jured, but the fine old Gothic Church of St.
Martin, at Metz, with its towers, its apses
and paintings of the Lorraine school, are un-
doubtedly like the spires, the clock, and the
high altar of Strasburg-in ruins. Its de-
fenselessness saved Rheims; but the fortifca-
tions which have necessitated the terrible
destruction and loss of life at Metz and
Strasburg will, we are afraid, be equally
fatal to the Abbey of Saint Denis. While
the bells here in hundreds of churches
are summoning worshippers to praise
and prayer, another peal may be heard in one
OF the most ancient fanes of France-the
peal of the cannon. With the exception of
the brief period of insanity when, at the
commencement of the great Revolution, the
Parisians installed the Goddess of Reason in
the affairs of Jehovah, until Robespierre, with
a strange mixture of impiety and compunc-
ton, declared that the new republic recog-
nized God, the tower of the abbey of st.
Denis had for twelve hundred and forty-two
years been a memorial and q sanctuary of
worship.
But independents of its beauty and sanctity,
the old abbey is venerable from historic as
sociations. Since the days of Dagobert it
has been the burial-place of the monarchs of
France, and despite the lapse of time and the
assaults of the Revolution, its aisles and
transept and crypt TEEN with monuments of
the past. Napoleon restored it; the Bour-
bons, the Orleanists, and the late empire re-
paired it; and again the long range of royal
tombs, vacant of their dust, scattered by a
decree of the convention in 1898, decorate
the upper church. There were terrible
weeks in 90. In the course of three days
fifty-one tomks were rifed, and the ashes of
queens and kings and marshals torn up in
every stage of decay, and after subsection to
every species of indi gnity thrown in a heap
into two trenches hastily dug without the
walls of the church. A soldier with his
sabre cut the beard from the lip of Henry of
Navarro, and the body of Turenne, so little
injured by time that the likeness, still recog-
nized, was placed in glass case and ex-
hibited as show to crafty idle curiosity.
Abbey Church of st. Denis remained roof
less:-
SPY ruin was its shrine profaned
BY smoke each holy image strained"
But Napoleon reftted the desecrated sepul-
chral vaults of the Bourbons as a mausoleum
for the new regime TO the vaults below the
high altar have again been carried the burnt
remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,
the cofins of Louis XVIII and others of the
family. But worthier than these, greater
than most in the long roll of French kings,
here rest, in a rarely visited corner, all that
is mortal of the last Conde, the father of the
Due d'Enghien, who died at st. Leu.
Between 1906 and 1947 more than 81 1,000,-
600 were expended in the restoration of st.
Denis, and now, in all probability, bonn
bardment will again destroy the grand old
church. The column erected to the memory
of Henry Ill assassinated in 1899; the monu-
ment to Francis III, husband of the beautiful
| Queen of Scots, surrounded at its base by
weeping angels, like Prometheus by sea-
nymphs on the rock of Caucasus, may be de-
stroyed, and the efigy of Duguesclin in the
| transept be as powerless to protect as the
| renown of Turenne beneath the tower But
if the towers of the abbey be levelled to the
dust, and Prussians march where Paris is since
Lutetia was, the fame of st. Denis will never
! fade from the memory of man. 1t was at St.
| Denis, in the time of Charles VII, that the
oriflamme was raised beneath whose conquer
ing folds the Maid of Domremi led the beaten
hosts of France to victory from Orleans to
Paris. What the Parthenon was to Athens,
the Grotto of Egeria to Rome and Numa, the
cave where Mahomet concealed himself when
the religion of the Koran was confined to his
Uncle Ali, his wife, and few determined
followers-what the ark was to David, the
holy of holies to Israel-that is st. Denis to
| France.
Historically speaking, Paris itself is but an
outgrowth, a complement of the towns which
Dagobert built All over France, in the wilds
of Brittany, in the plains of Normandy, in the
fertile levels of Champagne-wherever the
real thought and strength of the people hold
sway-St. Denis is like the burial place OF
Mohammed in Mecca, the high place and
altar of Gaul. The town is protected by 9
fort upon the southeast, but is scarcely capa
BILE of prolonged defense. Its 26,542 in
habitants must suffer the horrors Of a siege ol
Weld to the frst summons of the advancing
army. The memorials of the past are no
easi obhterated, but as the ehivalry of the
middle ages becomes more nearly crushed
with the materialistic spiiit of the nineteenth
century, so the monuments of the past grow
in grandeur, and exert more powerful inhu
ence upon the destinies of mankind.
''Man," said Sir Thomas Browne in tn