Chapter I: Preface

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about
Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of
one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the
wall:—

ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in
the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic
caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes,
as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand
of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially
the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the
author deeply.

He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been
that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this
world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon
the brow of the ancient church.

Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not
which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that
people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous
churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years.
Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well
as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon
scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.

Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author
of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing
whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower
of Notre-Dame,—nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed
up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from
the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word,
in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the
church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the
earth.

It is upon this word that this book is founded.

March, 1831.

CONTENTS