

Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace
Special | 52m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
It was Versailles before Versailles...
It was Versailles before Versailles: a palace in the heart of Paris with a 2,000-year history. This documentary strips away layers of political, military and religious history with one goal: to gather clues in order to digitally reconstruct the lost palace, piecing together the size, shape and texture of the palace with scientists and historians to discover its hidden surprises.
Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace is presented by your local public television station.
Distributed nationally by American Public Television

Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace
Special | 52m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
It was Versailles before Versailles: a palace in the heart of Paris with a 2,000-year history. This documentary strips away layers of political, military and religious history with one goal: to gather clues in order to digitally reconstruct the lost palace, piecing together the size, shape and texture of the palace with scientists and historians to discover its hidden surprises.
How to Watch Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace
Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
♪♪ ♪♪ -Once upon a time, in the heart of Paris, there was a palace.
It was the very first residence of the Kings of France.
Before Versailles.
Before the Louvre.
It stood here on the most prestigious island of Paris, the historic cradle of France, facing Notre Dame.
The Palais de la Cité, so majestic in the Middle Ages, has become a phantom of the past.
Over the centuries, this architectural masterpiece has almost totally disappeared.
Swallowed up by Paris itself and erased from our memories, as if the Palais de la Cité had succumbed to a curse.
But why?
And what did it look like?
For the first time, a team of experts will attempt to recreate the palace in 3-D.
Thanks to science and new excavations, they will gather lost pieces of the puzzle... ...to reconstruct the Palais de la Cité at its peak in the 14th century and bring the ghosts that haunted it back to life.
From the Romans to the Vikings.
From Saint Louis to the cursed kings.
All of them have left us clues about the Versailles of the Middle Ages.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ This is the story of the very first palace of the French Kings.
It was built on the Ile de la Cité.
Located in the center of Paris, the island is protected by the Seine, which divides the capital, the right bank to the north, the left bank to the south.
Today, the Ile de la Cité includes the religious center on the east side, with the Notre Dame Cathedral, and to the west, the heart of the judicial system, with the Prefecture of Paris and the Palais de Justice.
It's here that the palace is buried.
Known at the time as the Palais de la Cité.
To reconstruct it, a revolutionary technology is needed.
Photogrammetry, which will reconstruct history in 3-D.
Architect Yves Ubelmann is one of its pioneers and biggest innovators.
At his side is engineer Marjorie Coulon also an expert drone pilot, an indispensable tool for taking the thousands of photos that photogrammetry requires.
[ Bell tolls ] Marjorie begins up on the rooftops.
-It's not very safe.
There's the lower parts here.
We're going to have a hard time.
-To do the photogrammetry.
Marjorie has to cover every detail, every angle of the building with her photos, which requires some tricky maneuvering.
-I'll have to get some detail from the spire, but it won't be hard.
[ Camera shutter clicks ] -The thousands of photos will be assembled by artificial intelligence to create a virtual representation of the buildings via a cloud of digital points.
Marjorie and Yves first identify the elements still in place by modeling the site in its current form.
-So we see this huge architectural structure that covers the entire Palais de la Cité.
It's huge.
It must be, what, eight hectares?
-Yeah, it's quite a mess.
It seems like everything is intertwined.
-We can see how the Palais de Justice completely covers the Palais de la Cité.
-Only one building of the ancient palace survives intact, the Sainte Chapelle.
So it's here that their work begins, retracing, then recreating the original structure with the help of the site's leading specialists.
The Sainte Chapelle was built in only seven years, from 1241 to 1248.
An architectural challenge undertaken by Saint Louis.
Louis IX, known as Saint Louis, is the most famous of the kings who reigned from the Palais de la Cité.
A mystic and fervent of the Crusades, Saint Louis was also behind the construction of what is arguably the palace's finest feature.
-It's really wonderful.
Every time I come here, it's an emotional experience.
We're inside fireworks.
-Yes.
That's it exactly.
It's like we're in a firework display.
-Since the 13th century, the Sainte-Chapelle has held us captive.
No church matches its sublime light.
The Gothic style is radiant, glowing through the spectacular rose window, enlightening the mere mortals who worship within.
Everything in the building is designed to arouse emotion.
-What gives us this impression of depth when we enter the building?
-It's the fact that we have spans that are wide enough to fit these quite large bay windows.
And then suddenly, in the apse, we accelerate the rhythm by introducing much narrower windows, especially the first one.
It's like everything is accelerating and it creates an illusion of narrowing and slimming even more pronounced as we move towards the tribune.
-Because it was to here where all eyes were drawn, where Jesus' crown of thorns was displayed.
-Can we go there to see where there was -- -Up there?
Yes, yes.
-I'm going.
-All right.
-Yes.
-Let's go.
-Let's take the Kings and Queens stairs there, please.
So is this a kind of service staircase to get to, um... -Yes, well, that's where the King really went.
-Wow.
What a view.
-Yes, it's beautiful here.
We're really in the place that only the king, some dignitaries of the clergy would know about.
To open the big reliquary box and even eventually take out a relic, show it to some people who were there, or potentially to a more packed crowd that might be in the courtyard.
In fact, it's the most sacred place in the entire kingdom.
-Yes.
-The Sainte-Chapelle was designed as a kind of immense jewelry box to protect the crown of thorns.
-The crown of thorns gave this place global significance.
And rulers from around the world came not only to meet the King, but also to have a thorn from this crown.
And so it became a kind of New Jerusalem.
A kind of symbolic center of the world, at least from a religious point of view.
♪♪ -With her drone, Marjorie will go over the building with a fine tooth comb.
-I can easily take 10,000 pictures here.
-With the hope of uncovering other clues that the human eye cannot detect.
♪♪ The drone allows Marjorie to get up close to the chapel's 1,113 stained glass windows.
They represent scenes from the Bible, from Adam and Eve.
To the apocalypse.
♪♪ Thanks to the photos taken by Marjorie, the very first piece of the puzzle is about to appear in the virtual model of the Palais de la Cité.
♪♪ ♪♪ Here is the Sainte Chapelle as it stands today.
But it didn't look quite like this in the Middle Ages.
With the magic of digital technology, the past can be resurrected.
-So the interesting thing about virtual space is that you're able to go back in time and bring buildings back that have since disappeared.
-Yes, because you could add the Trésor des Chartes, this little building that was built at the same time as the Sainte Chapelle right next door, but which is a kind of mini Sainte Chapelle, destroyed during the revolution.
This is where the most important government documents were kept -- the treaties, the reports.
In short, everything that was the heart of the royal administration.
In a way, it was the state that was invited into the Sainte Chapelle, right next to the Relic de la Passion.
-Yves and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam can now enter the virtual model.
A model that reveals every nook and cranny of the Sainte Chapelle.
Where new clues can be uncovered.
♪♪ -And when I see this model, I always ask myself this question.
How does it really hold?
How does this glass jewelry box manage to stand the test of time?
-It's quite mysterious.
There are several explanations.
It's true that there are no buttresses like we often see in Gothic buildings from the 13th century.
Here, we do without them because it's a little bit smaller, maybe.
But mainly there's the fact that in the lower chapel -- Oh, and now we see it appearing.
It's incredible.
You can see it's made differently from the upper chapel, since it has low sides supported by struts, a kind of interior buttress.
It's the opposite of a Gothic cathedral, which has large buttresses on the outside.
But here, they're on the inside, so it solidifies the lower part of the building.
-So the two levels balance each other out.
-That's it exactly.
We have a base that was probably used to help the counter bearing of the upper chapel.
-But then how does the upper chapel that looks like it's made of glass, how does it stand?
-So you see these large windows that look like they are all different from each other?
In fact, they have something in common.
There are iron bars that run horizontally throughout the stained glass.
These iron bars go through the wall, encircling the whole building.
This is a remarkable new discovery.
-But one question remains.
When were these ingenious iron bars installed?
Are they the result of a recent restoration?
Or do they date back to the much earlier time of its construction under Saint Louis?
If so, it would be an incredible technical feat for its time.
♪♪ A researcher has been trying to date this iron fortification for nearly 10 years.
Maxime L'Héritier is an historian who specializes in construction techniques.
He's interested in a very specific part of the iron chain, hidden not in the stained glass windows, but in the chapel's stone.
It's in the attic of the Sainte Chapelle, off limits to the public, where we find the evidence.
-There, what we see on the upper part of the walls of the Sainte Chapelle is, first off, there's a large system of tie rods that was put in place in the 19th century.
But what's interesting is to see that just above it, protruding out of the wall, is a small piece of iron about 10 centimeters long, that you can see has been cut.
-This particular clue looks very similar to this iron spike.
Sketched by one of France's most famous architects, Eugene Viollet le Duc.
After studying the Sainte Chapelle, he was convinced of the existence of a hidden iron chain, but never found it.
He imagined these metal spikes connected to each other to form a chain that encircled the Sainte Chapelle and reinforced it.
Viollet-le-Duc's spikes look very similar to this piece of iron, recently discovered by Maxime L'Héritier.
He gets to work taking a sample in order to try to date it.
If it dates back to Saint Louis, it would be one of the earliest forms of reinforced concrete, a revolution before it's time.
To do so, L'Héritier heads to the laboratory at the University of Paris-Saclay.
-We can see the shape of the piece we have in the addict is exactly that.
-Helped by physicist and chemist Philippe Dillmann, they focus in on tiny black dots visible within the iron.
They're actually impurities, iron waste found in large quantities on production sites.
-This will allow us to date this iron sample.
Because in the Middle Ages, there was a change in the technical process of iron production.
If we can identify that this iron was made in these new smelting ovens, that means it was contemporary with the construction of the Sainte Chapelle at the time of Saint Louis.
-Studying just how these metal spikes were made will zone in on the date of fabrication.
-Well, you have carbon here, so that's great.
It's perfect for dating.
The impurities have been analyzed, and it turns out that they are compatible with the methods used in the Middle Ages.
-So these are irons that were produced in a smelter furnace, meaning it's compatible with the construction.
-Yes, it's completely compatible with construction in the 13th century.
So that's great.
Another iron element of this Sainte-Chapelle that dates from the construction and was not a later addition.
We know that for sure now.
-Encircled by its innovative iron chain, the Sainte-Chapelle has stood erect since the time of Saint Louis.
To outside eyes, it's as if by a miracle.
The Palais de la Cité has seen within its walls the emergence of reinforced concrete's predecessor 600 years before its invention.
Making the first residents of the French kings a laboratory of innovative and revolutionary techniques for the time.
-For us, the Sainte-Chapelle is an extraordinary piece of the puzzle because it's completely intact.
But the palace is actually much older.
So we will have to go back to the foundations of the palace to find clues that will give us the whole picture.
-Because in order to resurrect the palace, Yves must first understand its origins.
But historically, the foundations of the Palais de la Justice have been off limits.
But an historic moment is about to change that.
The highest Paris court and its police are leaving the iconic Quai des Orfevres to move to a brand new building north of the capital.
Part of the vacated premises are now accessible to archeologists.
-We're going to go down there and see what's underneath.
Do you have anything there?
-Nothing at all.
-David Couturier, researcher at the Pôle Archéologique of Paris, has the privilege of supervising excavations.
With the hope of reaching as far down as the Roman period.
-Shift your helmet a little bit because that's all I can see.
That's fine.
If you can stabilize it, that's fine.
We go back in time as far as possible according to the constraints we might encounter.
We know that we have medieval layers, but we would like to know if there are older layers, particularly those dating to antiquity, to know if the ancient occupation is present here.
We don't know.
It's an adventure.
To witness these excavations, it's an exceptional opportunity for us that will certainly enable us to find new pieces of the puzzle that are still there, but have been hidden.
-The last major excavations on Ile de la Cité date back to the 19th century, led by the archeologist Theodore Vacquer, the very first to have brought ancient Paris to light.
At the time, the capital was undergoing a lightning fast modernization under the direction of Baron Haussmann.
Each time he started a demolition project, Théodore Vacquer took advantage of the opportunity to excavate.
Little by little, he unearthed the ruins of Roman Paris, then known as Lutetia.
The Historical Library of Paris houses most of Vacquer's precious archives.
Nobody knows them better than historian Didier Busson.
-So this is typical of Vacquer.
These are Roman fragments that he discovered on Ile de la Cité, which were reused for the construction of the palace, more accurately, for the fortress that was at the western end of the island that was built in the second part of the fourth century.
-More than 10,000 documents are kept in the so-called "Vacquer papers."
-These all come from the wall of the courthouse.
And they are photographs.
-Photos that are among the first in archeology.
-That was the old police headquarters located inside the palace.
-Hundreds of images of the walls and buildings were brought to light.
-I lived part of my life with Vacquer.
He's the founder of modern Parisian archeology, that's for sure.
You should always go back to Vacquer to see what he wrote.
There are always interesting things to find.
-Among them, remnants of a Roman palace beneath what would become the Palais de la Cité.
-And there, Vacquer discovered this long wall.
It is the first wall of the palace, and the gate that now forms the entrance of the courtyard is in the exact same spot as the entranceway to the Roman palace.
Since the Romans, the palace has been rebuilt over and over, more or less on the same topographical data.
-But was the Roman palace similar in scale and stature as the future Palais de la Cité?
-Watch your feet.
-The excavations underway by David Couturier and his team may provide the answer.
They have made a surprising discovery in the very heart of the buried palace.
-We found partial remains in a burial site.
The skull is missing here.
We found the shoulders.
The right shoulder, the left shoulder, the spine, the top of the spine, and the beginning of the rib cage.
It's really the top of the individual that's present.
The rest is surely trapped underneath.
We'll stay within the framework of the excavation, but show that there is a burial site.
He has his feet towards the east, his head towards the west.
So he's a Christian, meaning the burial is later than the fourth century.
But we don't know more than that.
-A decapitated body that has no business being here.
It's a total mystery.
But its location could indicate the palace's perimeter.
Because in ancient times people were buried outside the palace walls, never inside.
If archeologists can prove that this individual was buried during the Roman occupation, it would be proof that the Roman palace was smaller than the palace of the French kings.
Fragments of the skeleton are sent to CIRAM, a laboratory in Bordeaux that specializes in carbon dating.
♪♪ This curve corresponds to that of the carbon 14 found in the bone fragment.
It reveals a series of probabilities that will indicate just when this unknown person met his or her fate.
-We can probably say that the individual is aged and lived between 260 and 531 AD.
-This range coincides with the time of the Lower Roman Empire, when the first palace appeared Ile de la Cité.
Since no bodies could be buried within the palace walls, the presence of the skeleton confirms that the perimeter of the palace must have been smaller than that of the king's palace.
Yves Ubelmann now has enough clues to recreate the original Roman palace.
-Yes, we can already see that the island was much smaller than now, since it was only 10 hectares, while now, it's three times more.
And the island is surrounded by this Gallo-Roman fortification, which is two meters thick.
Now we can see the key building, the palace in the center of the ramparts.
So we had only two clues to reconstruct this palace.
First off, a piece of the surrounding wall.
And then also a replica of the palace's entrance made by Theodore Vacquer -Yes, and what's actually quite astonishing is that this entrance corresponds to the entranceway of the current courthouse.
So we can clearly see that the palace has always been rebuilt upon itself from as far back as the Roman period.
-So we recreated the palace based on these new facts, a quadrangle of 100 meters on each side and an enclosure of about one hectare.
-It was certainly something rather rustic, since it was originally a military building, which only became a palace when the emperor stayed there with his court, his staff, and his officers.
But it's this early palace which will later become the most prestigious palace in Europe in the Middle Ages.
-In 1476, the Roman Empire collapses, but not the palace.
For the next 400 years, it served as a simple stopover for passing French kings who made their permanent homes elsewhere.
It could have faded from history then, but a dramatic event was about to change the palace's destiny.
It came with the men of the north, the Vikings.
♪♪ In the eighth century, these Scandinavian navigators regularly set sail to pillage Western Europe.
We are in the year 885 AD.
Their ships crossed the channel to France, penetrating the country via the Seine River.
But nothing goes as planned.
The Parisians opposed their passage.
Then the Vikings began the siege of Paris.
And it's the Palais de la Cité that will be at the heart of the battle.
In the eastern suburbs of Paris, at the headquarters of one of the world's leading video game companies, this spectacular contest plays out in the hit game "Assassin's Creed."
It's here that Yves Ubelmann meets with historian Thierry Noel in the hopes of digitally reliving this decisive battle.
-Maybe you want to play?
-I'd love to, yes.
-Then you're going to be a Viking.
You're the one who actually storms Paris.
-Now we have a massive defense here.
-Right.
It's the Ile de la Cite.
So we can recognize the Roman fortifications.
-As no visual references of the palace from this period remain, game designers had carte blanche to imagine its size and appearance.
-Here, the representation borrows architectural elements from Aix-la-Chapelle, Charlemagne's palace.
It's a wise choice because it's from the same period, and it's rather impressive to see.
-The game allows Yves to relive the historical moment when the palace's destiny is about to change.
-So here we're facing Count Eudes I assume.
-Count Eudes, in charge of protecting the palace.
When the Vikings arrive in Paris, the French King Charles III is far away in the royal residence of Aix-la-Chapelle.
In his absence, it is Count Eudes who defends the city and the palace.
-Your army will never take Paris.
And you will never have peace.
-Facing him is Sigfred, the Viking leader.
The Vikings besieged Paris for more than 18 months, mounting countless attacks against what became the heart of the resistance, the Palais de la Cité.
The siege was merciless, and eventually, the Vikings declare victory.
Eudes the Parisians are abandoned by Charles III, who prefers to pay ransom than to continue the fight, for which the king will pay a heavy price.
Eudes eventually dethrones Charles III, making Paris and the city he saved the capital of France.
The Palais de la Cité will become the royal residence throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.
The palace's golden age is about to begin.
Hugues Capet, Louis VI, Philippe Auguste, Saint Louis, Philippe le Bel.
These emblematic monarchs of the Middle Ages succeeded one another, each bringing something new to the palace, which would reach its zenith in the 14th century.
The phantom Palais de la Cité will finally reveal itself.
♪♪ Thanks to a decisive clue hidden on an unexpected site more than 60 kilometers north of Paris.
♪♪ Here at the Chateau de Chantilly, Yves Ubelmann meets with archeologist Herveline Delhumeau.
-I'm taking you to see a document which is going to make a huge difference in your study of what the palace looked like in the Middle Ages.
-The Chateau de Chantilly holds priceless treasures.
It has the richest collection of old paintings in France after the Louvre.
-The painting gallery.
♪♪ -The castle also has a book cabinet containing nearly 20,000 volumes.
♪♪ Among the most precious and oldest, this book of illuminations dating from the 15th century, a turning point in Yves' investigation.
-So here we are in the presence of the original "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry", which is undoubtedly the most reproduced manuscript in the world because of the quality of the large miniatures, which teach us a lot about life in the Middle Ages.
-It's incredible.
-The page that interests us the most in this book is this one.
Where we discover the Palace of the Kings of France on Ile de la Cité, such as it was at the end of the reign of Charles V, in the 14th century, at the height of its splendor, when it was the Versailles of the Middle Ages.
-It's wonderful and extremely accurate.
-We have there all the buildings erected between Louis VI, le Gros, and Charles V. Almost.
It's a condensed version of all the different stages of construction the palace underwent.
-From the Viking attack to the middle of the 14th century, this visual anthology will allow Yves and his team to reconstruct the Palais de la Cité building by building.
♪♪ Among the masterpieces in the Palais de la Cité, a tower.
It appears clearly here in "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry."
Then in the Tableau du Parlement.
And again later in this map of Paris made in the 18th century.
Marjorie Coulon and engineer Gregory descend beneath the Palais de la Justice on the hunt for what might remain of this tower.
-No idea if I can move forward with my gear.
Now that's better.
-This base is all that is left of what was known as the Grand Tower.
-It's not much, but it already allows us to determine a number of things.
-Most of the tower was destroyed by fire in 1778.
-It is the slope of the base of the tower.
That is to say, the tower does not form a perfect cylinder.
It flares out.
-The base is for its support, its foundation.
And this slope will have to be digitized to determine its angle.
-And then there are things that we can see right away.
All the blocks have been cut extremely well at an equal height, all along the base.
So that means that it was expensive and was meant to show off.
It's really an ostentatious architecture, typical of Philippe Auguste.
-Philippe Auguste had the longest reign in the Palais de la Cité.
For nearly 43 years, he quadrupled the size of the kingdom and reinforced the rule of the king over the other lords.
His dominance was reflected in the erection of a grand tower to his palace.
[ Camera shutter clicks ] To help Marjorie reconstruct this tower, Gregory Schulme uses laser grammetry.
Thousands of laser points are sent across the surfaces, allowing the computer to recreate what exists, and from there, accurately project the rest of the missing tower.
Its circumference, its diameter, but also its height.
In the "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry", another important feature of the palace is shown -- its walls.
Lost from view for centuries, these walls are about to once again reemerge into the full light of day.
Archeologists turn their attention to what can be uncovered on the surface.
Chief architect Christophe Bottineau and site administrator Cécile Rives moved the excavation to another part of the Palais de la Justice, recently vacated by the police.
♪♪ Here, workers get busy stripping away the centuries, wall to wall carpeting, layers of paint, dry wall.
The goal is to find the original walls of the Palais de la Cité.
-We have the medieval wall that separates the King's garden from the main garden.
-And so going this way, we had the king's personal chambers.
-And here we go up towards the chapel and the king's chambers that we have here.
It's actually the extension of the wall in front of the king's apartment.
-There was another piece of the puzzle.
-Another surprise awaits them.
The excavations have revealed the lower section of one of the most feared towers of the Palais de la Cité, the Bonbec Tower.
-This is the oldest part, that's for sure.
-Bonbec, or Good Beak, refers to the unfortunate prisoners who were tortured here, almost always confessing.
-You can see in these photos taken before the major restorations that the towers seem a bit squashed.
That's because the docks were built on the Seine in the 17th century and obscured the whole lower portion.
They sunk the kitchens and buried the whole lower part of all the towers.
-Here, this small window is actually at the level of the Seine, overlooking the Quai de l'Horloge.
We can see the feet of people walking by.
-The Bonbec Tower as we know it today, does not accurately resemble the original tower.
It was elevated in the 19th century, like the three other towers, to embellish the palace's outward appearance.
The clock tower and the two twin towers, the Caesar Tower and the Silver Tower.
-These four towers are quite different from what they looked like in medieval times.
There's a facade that was built in the 19th century.
They were elevated by one level.
So we can remove all these 19th century additions to recreate them as they really were in the Middle Ages.
-Thanks to these findings, Yves and Marjorie are able to place the first elements of the medieval palace in the digital reconstruction.
-On my side, I was able to reconstruct the tower, which was almost 30 meters high.
In theory, it held the royal treasure, but it was perhaps also used as a panic room, a fortified room for the king, just in case.
-Archeological digs have uncovered a wall that separates two very important areas of the palace.
First, there's the king's apartment which was located here in the heart of the structure.
-This is where the king and his family lived privately.
And we have a second piece of the puzzle that's brought by this wall.
It's this garden that was positioned here on the western tip of the island.
-And the excavations have also allowed us to specify the shape of the Bonbec tower, which was in fact one floor lower than today's tower.
So we can make the same adjustment on the other towers, the Caesar Tower and the Silver Tower.
But not the clock tower, which resembled the belfry of today.
-And along the medieval facade towards the tip of the island, there was a building called the Water Room, which had its base in the Seine and served as a large meeting room.
And if we add the Sainte-Chapelle that we have already modeled, we're starting to get a good overview of this monumental palace.
♪♪ -Our experts are entering the home stretch in their quest to recreate the Palais at its pinnacle.
The final piece of the puzzle lies behind this facade.
It is the outer facing of what is called the Conciergerie, named for the Concierge, who was actually a high ranking statesman entrusted with the keys to the palace in the king's absence.
This was the vibrant heart of the Palais de la Cité, where the king and his court gathered.
-We have a three meter difference.
-Easily.
-So there we go.
We have the Conciergerie.
-Yes.
In fact, the large lower room of Philippe la Bel's palace.
-It's gigantic.
-A huge room.
-It's the largest medieval hall that still exists in Europe.
69 meters long, 27 wide, more than 1,700 square meters in total, just under eight meters high.
This immense room could accommodate more than 2,000 people.
But time has plunged it into obscurity.
-Did we have openings here?
-Absolutely.
Now they're walled.
But we had here medieval windows that opened on to the courtyard, allowing daylight into this room.
-This lower chamber actually hides another, much more majestic one.
It was the palace's piece de résistance.
-We think there was a spiral staircase in each corner.
-So from there, you could go up?
-Yes.
-Where did the stairs go?
-To the large upper room of the palace.
-So there was a room, a big room.
-Above this one.
This one is used as a gigantic basement to a no less gigantic upper hall.
-The king behind this ambitious construction was Philippe le Bel, known as "The Iron King."
During the almost 30 years of his reign, he freed the serfs and subdued the nobility.
Under Philippe le Bel's reign, the palace changed its dimensions one last time, tripling in size with the great hall at the center of the massive extension.
-And what happened to this room?
-This room burned down completely in 1618.
A huge fire destroyed most of the center of the palace, but luckily spared the Sainte-Chapelle.
-Today in place of the King's Hall, lost to flames, is an equally grand space, opening up on to the various court rooms of the Palais de justice.
Through a hidden staircase, Marjorie is about to discover a new and unexpected clue.
-We walk into this empty office, and all of a sudden, there's a super old piece of wall that just pops up out of nowhere.
I can only imagine what they were thinking at the time.
-The guys just said, "Okay, we're going to make a new wall, but we're going to try and keep a part of the old one."
But, you know, we're going to be careful.
[ Laughs ] Okay, here we go.
[ Camera shutter clicks ] -This orphaned ruin turns out to be an essential piece of the puzzle.
It is one of the only remains of the Great Royal Hall, undoubtedly one of its entrances.
-I'm making very precise sketches so we can reconstruct the arch in its entirety.
A simple clue like that of just a few square meters will also help us imagine the rest of the room's architectural design.
-Another detail will help Yves in the reproduction of this lost great room.
-This headless statue was most likely on the exterior of the hall.
It makes us think of the statues that were reputedly inside the hall.
43 statues that represented the entire succession of kings who inhabited the palace.
-It's these statues that gave the Great Room all of its prestige.
This 16th century engraving by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau confirms their presence in the Great Hall.
The sculptures were human sized, present on each side of the central columns as well as the walls.
On this medieval miniature, we can also see that they were painted.
Yves heads to the Sorbonne's Laboratory of Molecular and Structural Archeology to try and recreate these colors with the techniques of the time.
-I'm just going to ask you to put on a gown.
♪♪ -The chemists Maggie Chabert and Emmeline Pouliet have been able to recreate the blue color used in the palace during the Middle Ages.
To do this, they started with a stone that was almost more precious than gold at the time, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.
-First we have to follow the extraction process of the pigment.
So we're going to use the treaties on painting by Cennino Cennini, an essential text on the painting processes of the 14th century.
-Was it written for painters of the 14th century so they could do their own preparation?
-Exactly.
-This treatise has the formulas to follow, to create the key colors of the Middle Ages.
To make blue paint, one must first boil six ounces of pine resin, add three ounces of pistachio, and pour all of it into beeswax.
For Cennino Cennini, making colors is also a question of... sex?
-"One can say it takes a particular skill to succeed.
It's a job for beautiful young girls rather than us men.
They're always at home, and more consistent, have sharper fingers.
Beware of the old ones."
-Well, that says a lot about the culture of the time.
-And then it continues to evolve every day.
-So now we're going to add the powder to that mix.
-It's a beautiful color.
-Voilà!
The deep blue transformed into paint.
These shimmering colors indicate how much less gloomy the Middle Ages were than what we imagine.
A visual explosion of which we can still glimpse in the stained glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle.
The lapis lazuli blue.
The vermilion red.
The golden yellow.
These colors are the same as those that covered some of the walls of the palace, and therefore also the famous statues of the Great Hall.
These spectacular statues finally come back to life thanks to Yves and his team, and with them the whole decor of the Palais de la Cité's masterpiece unfolds.
The Great Hall.
♪♪ -You've succeeded in restoring the gigantism of this extraordinary room, which has completely disappeared.
It's here that the kings entertained and where France's history took place over centuries.
-So now, Herveline, I suggest you go outside to see the palace as it was in its prime.
-Thanks to this exhaustive investigation, the Palais de la Cité of the 14th century is finally revealed.
It's by this majestic staircase that one penetrates the residence of the French kings.
We see the successive additions and embellishments by the respective royal inhabitants, like the Grand Tower of Philippe Auguste.
The king's apartments, enhanced by Philippe le Bel.
The palace garden cultivated since Saint Louis.
And here is the spectacular facade, with the terrifying Bonbec Tower.
The twin towers of Silver and Caesar.
And the clock tower.
The Palais de la Cité was home to France's rulers for more than 350 years.
An exceptionally long time compared to the Palace of Versailles, which was only a royal residence for less than a century.
-It's quite exciting to see this part of French history brought back to life.
Thanks to the digital reconstruction, we can finally feel the grandeur and majesty of this palace.
-We can see just how grandiose it actually was.
One of the largest palaces in Europe.
-And yet, this palace was about to fall prey to a catastrophic turn of events beginning on February 22, 1358, in the very heart of the palace.
-So, Herveline, which room in the palace are we in now?
-We're in the bedroom of the prince.
It's here that a dramatic event will take place in 1358.
The prince, the future Charles V, is about to be kidnapped.
Blood will be spilled in this very room.
And this event will seal the fate of the palace for centuries to come.
-It's here that Etienne Marcel, head of the merchants of Paris, along with 3,000 men, kidnap the heir apparent, Charles V. Their attempt failed, but once free, Charles V decreed that no more kings would reside in the Palais de la Cité.
And so the palace fell out of favor.
Bit by bit, the castle was taken over by functions of the government, relinquishing its once royal residence, eventually turning the king's palace into their prison.
During the revolution, Marie Antoinette was incarcerated before being guillotined.
The French monarchy would end where it began.
Turning the Palais de la Cité into a ghost of history.
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Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace is presented by your local public television station.
Distributed nationally by American Public Television