The chapel is rich and beautiful. No catholic church has pews, or, at all events they are very unusual, though the municipalities do sometimes occupy them in France, and, of course, the area was vacant. We were most struck with the paintings on the ceiling, in which the face of Louis XIV. was strangely and mystically blended with that of God the Father! Pictorial and carved representations of the Saviour and of the Virgin abound in all catholic countries; nor do they much offend, unless when the crucifixion is represented with bleeding wounds; for, as both are known to have appeared in the human form, the mind is not shocked at seeing them in the semblance of humanity. But this was the first attempt to delineate the Deity we had yet seen; and it caused us all to shudder. He is represented in the person of an old man looking from the clouds, in the centre of the ceiling, and the King appears among the angels that surround him. Flattery could not go much farther, without encroaching on omnipotence itself.
In returning from Versailles, to a tithe of the magnificence of which I have not alluded, I observed carts coming out of the side of a hill, loaded with the whitish stone that composes the building material of Paris. We stopped the carriage, and went into the passage, where we found extensive excavations. A lane of fifteen or twenty feet was cut through the stone, and the material was carted away in heavy square blocks. Piers were left, at short intervals, to sustain the superincumbent earth; and, in the end, the place gets to be a succession of intricate passages, separated by these piers, which resemble so many small masses of houses among the streets of a town. The entire region around Paris lies on a substratum of this stone, which indurates by exposure to the air, and the whole secret of the celebrated catacombs of Paris is just the same as that of this quarry, with the difference that this opens on a level with the upper world, lying in a hill, while one is compelled to descend to get to the level of the others. But enormous wheels, scattered about the fields in the vicinity of the town, show where shafts descend to new quarries on the plains, which are precisely the same as those under Paris. The history of these subterranean passages is very simple. The stone beneath has been transferred to the surface, as a building material; and the graves of the town, after centuries, were emptied into the vaults below. Any apprehensions of the caverns falling in, on a great scale, are absurd, as the constant recurrence of the piers, which are the living rock, must prevent such a calamity; though it is within the limits of possibility that a house or two might disappear. Quite lately, it is said, a tree in the garden of the Luxembourg fell through, owing to the water working a passage down into the quarries, by following its roots. The top of the tree remained above ground some distance; and to prevent unnecessary panic, the police immediately caused the place to be concealed by a high and close board fence. The tree was cut away in the night, the hole was filled up, and few knew anything about it. But it is scarcely possible that any serious accident should occur, even to a single house, without a previous and gradual sinking of its walls giving notice of the event. The palace of the Luxembourg, one of the largest and finest edifices of Paris, stands quite near the spot where the tree fell through, and yet there is not the smallest danger of the structure's disappearing some dark night, the piers below always affording sufficient support. _Au reste_, the catacombs lie under no other part of Paris than the Quartier St. Jacques, not crossing the river, nor reaching even the Faubourg St. Germain.