Notre Dame Cathedral By The Numbers

[mobeau69]

1 m = 3.28084 ft

[True Dough]

1. I know DU skews toward the older demographic

but do we have any discussion forum members here who were around to witness the start of construction in 1163?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I was just a kid so I don't remember much about it.

[True Dough]

3. Ha ha!

Your'e a good sport, Velveteen Ocelot. In all sincerity, I hope you thoroughly enjoy your upcoming 860th birthday!

[CurtEastPoint]

4. The wait time figure is just wrong. I've been several times and

once they wave the magic airport wand over you and peek in your purse/backpack, in you go.

[Renew Deal]

5. Nothing happened for 400+ years

Impressive

[Bayard]

6. Louis XIV's bowels are buried there.....

I'm going to have to look that up.

[lapislzi]

7. It begs the question

Where's the rest of him?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

8. I was about to ask the same thing.

And why his bowels and not some more attractive part of him? And Notre Dame being the main cathedral, wouldn't it get to choose which parts it got? Wouldn't they want the heart or a lung or maybe his dick, and let the lesser churches have the bowels?

[Bayard]

9. Per https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/the-strange-death-of-louis-xiv/

The day after the king’s death, his body was cut open, divided into three parts (body, heart and entrails) and embalmed by doctors and surgeons in front of the principal officers of the court, before being placed in a coffin made of lead, which was placed in a coffin made of oak.

The practice of dividing dead French kings into three began with Philippe le Bel in 1314. The idea was that instead of one you could have three final resting places where people could come and pay homage (or, in more troubled times, desecrate the remains and pillage the metals). Louis’s double coffin stood in Versailles for eight days.

(snip)

Louis’s heart was put in the Jesuits’ church in the rue St Antoine, where looters also came during the Revolution and took the gold that encased it. Though this heart was destroyed, the exhibition contains three other royal hearts set in gold in the same way. Only the Sun King’s embalmed innards remained undesecrated by the Jacobins. A recent discovery allowed the identification of the exact location of the barrels containing the entrails of Louis XIV and his father at the foot of the steps to the sanctuary of Notre Dame Cathedral.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

10. OK, so this seems to be what happened:

In keeping with tradition, physicians opened up the king’s body so they could do an autopsy. By studying his corpse, they could tell what caused his death. They wanted to be sure that the king had not been poisoned. Once the autopsy was finished, his heart and viscera were removed so they could be buried in a different place from the rest of his body. This was known as ‘tripartition’ (read below). His heart was locked in a box and his viscera were put in a separate coffin.

http://www.chateauversailles.fr/resources/pdf/en/actualites/le-petit-quotidien-le-roi-est-mort-en.pdf

In accordance with a tradition dating from the death of Philippe le Bel (1314), the bodies of French kings were separated into three parts (body, entrails, and heart), each with its own grave, thereby increasing the number of places where homage could be paid to the dead monarch. Louis XIV’s coffin was placed at Saint-Denis in the Bourbon tomb, without a monument. A recent discovery identified the steps to the sanctuary at Notre-Dame de Paris as the exact location of the barrels containing the entrails of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The heart is buried at the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis on Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris, a church that contained the monuments for the hearts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV until they were destroyed during the Revolution. This exhibition includes the copper plaque placed on Louis XIV’s coffin, borrowed from the Basilica of Saint Denis — where it had been desecrated during the Revolution and then stored in the archives of the Musée de Cluny — as well as funky surgical instruments and apothecary drugs from the Musée de l’Histoire de la Médecine.

https://hyperallergic.com/272382/at-versailles-a-darkly-comic-celebration-of-louis-xivs-death/