Sainte-Chapelle: Brought to you by Safelight Auto Glass

There are so many King Louis that after a while they all start to blur together — wigs, thrones, and a whole lot of questionable decision-making. But to my way of thinking, the greatest achievement since Crab Louis first hooked up with Thousand Island has to be courtesy of Louis IX, better known as Saint Louis, who gave us Sainte-Chapelle.
Originally built as his private chapel, the place now finds itself awkwardly pressed into service as part of the judicial courts. So yes, you enter through a courtyard surrounded by stern stone buildings, past a few scattered office windows, and up spiral staircases so narrow you half expect to bump into Quasimodo. (This is Paris, after all.) Then, just when you’re wondering if you’ve made a wrong turn, the stairs spit you out into one of the most dazzling displays of Gothic architecture ever conceived.
And talk about timing. The very moment I arrived, the clouds outside broke open and the sun streamed through those windows as if on cue. What happened next is hard to describe without sounding like I’ve been hitting the absinthe: the entire chapel lit up in a dizzying display of color, a kaleidoscope of jewel tones that left everyone — myself included — gawking like wide-eyed kids.
The upper chapel has fifteen towering stained-glass windows, each more than fifty feet high, each crammed with biblical scenes that tell the story of the world from Creation all the way to the Apocalypse. That’s more than a thousand individual panels of painstaking detail, stitched together in fire and sand by craftsmen whose names have long been forgotten but whose work still steals the show seven centuries later. And hovering above it all is the Rose Window, the so-called Rose of the Apocalypse, which looks less like a window and more like a cosmic fireworks display captured in glass.
Now, Louis IX didn’t build all this just to show off his taste in windows. Sainte-Chapelle was meant to house Christianity’s most sacred relics, chief among them the Crown of Thorns. Yes, the real thing. Not the one worn by some guy from the second national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. The relic is still kept there, I’m told, though I didn’t lay eyes on it myself. I was too busy standing in the middle of the chapel with my mouth hanging open, hypnotized by those windows, and trying not to look like too much of a tourist.