Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/94

 PARIS New Opera House. and the magnificent and richly decorated opera house, built just before the end of the second empire. Many of the churches are remark- Church of Notre Dame, rear view. able for their architecture, paintings, or his- toric associations. Most impressive of all is the cathedral of Notre Dame, a noble specimen of the early pointed style of so-called Gothic ; it is cruciform, with an extreme length of 390 ft., width of transepts 144 ft., height of vault- ing 105 ft., width of western front 128 ft., flanked by two massive towers 224 ft. high. (See CA- THEDRAL, vol. iv., pp. 118, 119.) Near by is the arrowy spire of la Sainte Chapelle. This church was originally built in the surprising- ly short space of three years, 1245-'8, by order of St. Louis, to contain the crown of thorns and piece of the true cross bought by that monarch from the emperor of Constantinople. Injured by the wear of time, wasted by fire, desecrated to a strange variety of base uses before, during, and after the revolution, the labor of re- storing it to almost more than its original splendor busied learned archaists and skilled architects from 1837 to 1867. " It now pre- sents," says the most eminent of them, "the completest, perhaps the finest, specimen of the reli- gious architecture of the middle of the 13th century." St. Ger- main des Pres is a venerable in- stance of the Romanesque style ; that of the renaissance is largely illustrated in St. Eustache, and more curiously in St. Etienne du Mont; the Italian or Palladian style beautifully in St. Paul et St. Louis. Ste. Genevieve, an im- mense pile, better known as the Pantheon, is distinguished for its Corinthian portico of col- umns 60 ft. high, supporting a sculptured ped-