In which we visit kings

On Thursday we set off for the Basilique Cathédrale de Saint Denis by train, leaving Blaise at home to go to a talk and then out to dinner with a bunch of philosophers of mathematics, who I'm sure were fascinating.

The Basilica is interesting for three main reasons

1. According to the hagiography of the Catholic Church, Saint Denis, a third century missionary bishop from Rome, was having a great deal of success converting the local Lutetian to Catholicism, and so the local (pagan) priests decided that he needed to be eliminated. They chopped off his head, according to legend, somewhere in the neighborhood of Montmartre, and he picked up his head and carried it the six miles or so to what is now Saint Denis, where he died at the site of what is now the Basilica. (Evidently, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 cephalophores in Church history, most of them French, which may explain the French obsession with the guillotine.)
2. The Basilica of Saint Denis is the first of the Gothic Cathedrals, which makes it an architecturally significant building, regardless of your opinion of head-carrying saints.
3. Nearly every king since Clovis I has been entombed in the Basilica, which makes it a culturally significant building. (To be completely fair, not all of the kings were laid there initially. Clovis, for example, was originally buried in the Abbey of Sainte Genevieve, and his remains were only moved to the Basilica in the 18th century.)

We arrived at the Basilica around 2:30, and paid for our tickets (8€ for me, 0€ for the kids—I love that under 18's are free at French national museums. In fact, if you are an EU resident, under 26's are free) and walked to the entrance to the Necropolis, and discovered that it was locked. Back to check the signs to see if there was an explanation. Evidently a service was in progress from 2:00 until 3:00, and since the Necropolis is in the transepts and side aisles and ambulatory of the Basilica (there's an explanation of the parts of a Gothic church here in case you've decided that there are better uses for your finite brain space), it would have been potentially disruptive for us to be wandering though during a mass. So we went into the crypt, which was open, and learned about the story of Saint Denis and saw his sarcophagus as well as the crystal vase containing the heart of Louis XVII. We watched a video about the history of the Basilica (with cool simultaneous audio in seven languages). And finally they unlocked the doors to the Necropolis, and we followed everyone else inside.