| Seemingly the backdrop to the artefacts on display, the tapestries that hang in most rooms are in fact the highlight of the collection. In room 3, there's an exquisite Resurrection scene embroidered in gold and silver thread, with sleeping guards in medieval armour, and a fourteenth-century embroidery of two leopards in red and gold. Scenes of manorial life are hung in room 4: these sixteenth-century Dutch tapestries are full of flowers and birds, and include scenes such as a woman spinning while her servant patiently holds the threads for her, a lover making advances, a woman in her bath which is overflowing into a duck pond, and a hunting party leaving for the chase. Room 5 holds attractively naïve wood and alabaster altarpiece plaques found in homes and churches all over Europe and produced in England by the Nottingham workshops. Adjacent (room 6) are some wonderful backlit fragments of stained glass from the Sainte Chapelle, removed here during the chapel's mid-nineteenth-century renovation. It's fascinating to see the workmanship close up, particularly in bizarre little scenes such as one of a martyr having his eyes gouged out. Down the steps and inside the modern building built around the old baths, room 8 houses the twenty-one thirteenth-century heads of the Kings of Judea from the west front of Notre-Dame, lopped off during the French Revolution in the general iconoclastic frenzy, and only discovered in a 1977 excavation near the Opéra Garnier. The blurred, eroded faces and damaged crowns of the Old Testament kings are lined up in a melancholy row of fallen nobility, next to a stage of headless robed figures. Arching over the frigidarium (room 9), the cold room of the Gallo-Roman baths, the vaults are preserved intact – though temporarily protected by corrugated sheets pending funds for restoration. They shelter two beautifully carved first- and second-century capitals, the so-called Seine Boatmen's Pillar and the Pillar of St-Landry, which has animated-looking gods and musicians adorning three of its faces. From the Roman baths it's a smooth transition to room 10, with its (modern) vaulting and mainly Romanesque works, notably two harrowing wooden Crucifixions. Three alarmingly fish-eyed heads, detached from the portals of the royal basilica at St-Denis, guard the entrance to room 11, with its Gothic sculptures.
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