Palace of Tau

Stand for a moment on the cobbles beside the cathedral and listen. Footsteps echo off pale limestone. Pigeons settle on carved ledges high above you. Just to the south of the great Gothic church, a quieter building sits behind its courtyard, its facade calm and orderly, almost modest beside its neighbour. This is the Palace of Tau, and for centuries it was the place where the kings of France slept, dressed, and feasted on the most important day of their reigns.

First, the name. Tau is a letter of the Greek alphabet, and its capital form looks like our letter T. The early palace on this site was laid out in that T shape, and the name stayed long after the plan changed. It is a small detail, but it tells you how old this ground is. People here were naming buildings after Greek letters when Reims was already one of the great church cities of Europe.

This was the palace of the Archbishops of Reims. And the archbishops of Reims held a privilege no other churchman in France could claim. They crowned the kings. The tradition reaches back to Clovis, king of the Franks, who was baptised here by Saint Remi around the end of the fifth century. From the Middle Ages onward, a French king was not fully a king until he had been anointed in the cathedral next door.

That is why this palace mattered so much. Before a coronation, the king came to stay here. On the morning of the ceremony, he walked from these rooms into the cathedral. And afterwards, he returned for the great coronation banquet, held in the long hall that you can still visit today. So the palace was not just a residence. It was the backstage of the French monarchy, the place where a man prepared to become sacred.

One of those kings arrived under extraordinary circumstances. In 1429, Joan of Arc brought Charles the Seventh to Reims through territory held by his enemies, so that he could be crowned here in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. For Joan, the coronation at Reims was the whole point. A king crowned anywhere else, she believed, would not truly be a king. Standing here, you are close to the ground where that belief became history.

Now look at the building itself. Much of what you see dates from the end of the seventeenth century, when the palace was rebuilt in the classical style of the age of Louis the Fourteenth. The architects Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who also worked at Versailles, and Robert de Cotte are associated with this rebuilding. Notice the balance of the facade, the regular windows, the restraint. It was designed to look dignified, not dramatic. The cathedral provides the drama.

But older layers survive inside. The palace chapel dates from the thirteenth century, the same great age of Gothic building that produced the cathedral. It has two levels, a lower and an upper chapel, a common arrangement for a palace church. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. The calm seventeenth-century front hides a medieval core. You are walking through several centuries at once, just by moving from one room to the next.

The heart of the visit is the Salle du Tau, the Hall of Tau, where the coronation banquets took place. Look up. The ceiling is a great curved vault of wood, shaped like the inside of an upturned boat. At one end stands a large carved fireplace. Imagine the long tables, the king seated in honour, the nobles of the realm crowded along the walls, and the heat and noise of a feast that marked a new reign.

That hall has a darker story too. In September 1914, during the First World War, German shells struck Reims. The cathedral caught fire, and the Palace of Tau was badly burned as well. Much of the timber roof was lost. What you see today is the result of a long and careful restoration in the decades after the war. The rebuilding was itself an act of national memory, a way of saying this place still mattered.

Today the palace is a museum, and it holds treasures from the cathedral. Among them are original sculptures that once stood on the cathedral facade. They were brought inside to protect them from weather and pollution, and copies now take their place outdoors. Seeing them up close is the second surprise. Figures designed to be viewed from far below turn out to have expressive faces, careful folds of cloth, and details no one in the street could ever see.

The treasury holds objects linked directly to the coronations. One is the reliquary of the Holy Ampulla. According to a long-held legend, a dove brought a small flask of holy oil down from heaven for the baptism of Clovis, and that oil was used to anoint the kings. During the French Revolution, in 1793, the original flask was deliberately smashed as a symbol of royal power. Tradition says that a small fragment was saved.

Other pieces carry the same weight. You may see a twelfth-century chalice associated with Saint Remi, and the so-called Talisman of Charlemagne, a precious jewel with a long and debated history. There are also objects from the coronation of Charles the Tenth in 1825, including vestments and ceremonial textiles. That ceremony was the last coronation ever held at Reims. After it, the long tradition that began with Clovis came to an end, and the kings never returned.

As you leave, pause again in the courtyard. Turn and look at the cathedral rising beside you, then back at this quieter palace. Together they told one story for more than a thousand years: the church that made the king, and the house where he waited. The banquets are over. The crowns have gone. But the stone is still here, warm in the afternoon light, and the footsteps on the cobbles are now yours.