Chapter I: Notre-Dame

The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic
and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in
growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant,
before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and
men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without
respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip
Augustus, who laid the last.

On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of
a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. _Tempus edax, homo
edacior_[18]; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is
blind, man is stupid.

If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the
diverse traces of destruction imprinted upon the old church,
time’s share would be the least, the share of men the most,
especially _the men of art_, since there have been individuals
who assumed the title of architects during the last two
centuries.

And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples,
there certainly are few finer architectural pages than this
façade, where, successively and at once, the three portals
hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated cordon of the
eight and twenty royal niches; the immense central rose window,
flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by his deacon
and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery of trefoil arcades,
which supports a heavy platform above its fine, slender columns;
and lastly, the two black and massive towers with their slate
penthouses, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed
in five gigantic stories;—develop themselves before the eye, in a
mass and without confusion, with their innumerable details of
statuary, carving, and sculpture, joined powerfully to the
tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to
speak; the colossal work of one man and one people, all together
one and complex, like the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister
it is; prodigious product of the grouping together of all the
forces of an epoch, where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of
the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth
in a hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word,
powerful and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems to
have stolen the double character,—variety, eternity.

And what we here say of the façade must be said of the entire
church; and what we say of the cathedral church of Paris, must be
said of all the churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. All
things are in place in that art, self-created, logical, and well
proportioned. To measure the great toe of the foot is to measure
the giant.

Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to
us, when we go piously to admire the grave and puissant
cathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles assert: _quæ
mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus_.

Three important things are to-day lacking in that façade: in the
first place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised
it above the soil; next, the lower series of statues which
occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the upper
series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France, which
garnished the gallery of the first story, beginning with
Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding in his hand
“the imperial apple.”

Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil
of the city with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while
thus causing the eleven steps which added to the majestic height
of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the rising tide of
the pavements of Paris,—time has bestowed upon the church perhaps
more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over
the façade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old
age of monuments the period of their beauty.

But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the
niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central
portal, that new and bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein
that commonplace and heavy door of carved wood, à la Louis XV.,
beside the arabesques of Biscornette? The men, the architects,
the artists of our day.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown
that colossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude
among statues, as the grand hall of the Palais de Justice was
among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among spires? And those
myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces between the
columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling, standing,
equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, gendarmes, in
stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,—who
has brutally swept them away? It is not time.

And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly
encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble
sarcophagus, with angels’ heads and clouds, which seems a
specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who
stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the
Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV.,
fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?

And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows,
“high in color,” which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers
to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal and the arches
of the apse? And what would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth
century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash, with which
our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He
would remember that it was the color with which the hangman
smeared “accursed” edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du
Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable’s
treason. “Yellow, after all, of so good a quality,” said Sauval,
“and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet
caused it to lose its color.” He would think that the sacred
place had become infamous, and would flee.

And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand
barbarisms of every sort,—what has become of that charming little
bell tower, which rested upon the point of intersection of the
cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no less bold than its
neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle,
buried itself in the sky, farther forward than the towers,
slender, pointed, sonorous, carved in open work. An architect of
good taste amputated it (1787), and considered it sufficient to
mask the wound with that large, leaden plaster, which resembles a
pot cover.

’Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been
treated in nearly every country, especially in France. One can
distinguish on its ruins three sorts of lesions, all three of
which cut into it at different depths; first, time, which has
insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it
everywhere; next, political and religious revolution, which,
blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselves tumultuously
upon it, torn its rich garment of carving and sculpture, burst
its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tiny
figures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their mitres,
sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more
grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid
deviations of the Renaissance, have followed each other in the
necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have wrought more
harm than revolutions. They have cut to the quick; they have
attacked the very bone and framework of art; they have cut,
slashed, disorganized, killed the edifice, in form as in the
symbol, in its consistency as well as in its beauty. And then
they have made it over; a presumption of which neither time nor
revolutions at least have been guilty. They have audaciously
adjusted, in the name of “good taste,” upon the wounds of gothic
architecture, their miserable gewgaws of a day, their ribbons of
marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy of egg-shaped
ornaments, volutes, whorls, draperies, garlands, fringes, stone
flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids, chubby-cheeked cherubim,
which begin to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine
de Medicis, and cause it to expire, two centuries later, tortured
and grimacing, in the boudoir of the Dubarry.

Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated, three
sorts of ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles
and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of
violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures; this is the work of
the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations,
amputations, dislocation of the joints, _restorations_; this is
the Greek, Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to
Vitruvius and Vignole. This magnificent art produced by the
Vandals has been slain by the academies. The centuries, the
revolutions, which at least devastate with impartiality and
grandeur, have been joined by a cloud of school architects,
licensed, sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment
and choice of bad taste, substituting the _chicorées_ of Louis
XV. for the Gothic lace, for the greater glory of the Parthenon.
It is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. It is the old oak
crowning itself, and which, to heap the measure full, is stung,
bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.

How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing
Notre-Dame de Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, _so
much lauded by the ancient pagans_, which Erostatus _has_
immortalized, found the Gallic temple “more excellent in length,
breadth, height, and structure.”[19]

Notre-Dame is not, moreover, what can be called a complete,
definite, classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque
church; nor is it a Gothic church. This edifice is not a type.
Notre-Dame de Paris has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave
and massive frame, the large and round vault, the glacial
bareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have the
rounded arch for their progenitor. It is not, like the Cathedral
of Bourges, the magnificent, light, multiform, tufted, bristling
efflorescent product of the pointed arch. Impossible to class it
in that ancient family of sombre, mysterious churches, low and
crushed as it were by the round arch, almost Egyptian, with the
exception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, all
symbolical, more loaded in their ornaments, with lozenges and
zigzags, than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with
animals than with men; the work of the architect less than of the
bishop; first transformation of art, all impressed with
theocratic and military discipline, taking root in the Lower
Empire, and stopping with the time of William the Conqueror.
Impossible to place our Cathedral in that other family of lofty,
aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed
in form, bold in attitude; communal and _bourgeois_ as political
symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second
transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable
and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which
begins at the return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX.
Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Romanesque, like the first;
nor of pure Arabian race, like the second.

It is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect
completed the erection of the first pillars of the nave, when the
pointed arch, which dates from the Crusade, arrived and placed
itself as a conqueror upon the large Romanesque capitals which
should support only round arches. The pointed arch, mistress
since that time, constructed the rest of the church.
Nevertheless, timid and inexperienced at the start, it sweeps
out, grows larger, restrains itself, and dares no longer dart
upwards in spires and lancet windows, as it did later on, in so
many marvellous cathedrals. One would say that it were conscious
of the vicinity of the heavy Romanesque pillars.

However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque to
the Gothic, are no less precious for study than the pure types.
They express a shade of the art which would be lost without them.
It is the graft of the pointed upon the round arch.

Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this
variety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a
page not only of the history of the country, but of the history
of science and art as well. Thus, in order to indicate here only
the principal details, while the little Red Door almost attains
to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the fifteenth century,
the pillars of the nave, by their size and weight, go back to the
Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would suppose
that six centuries separated these pillars from that door. There
is no one, not even the hermetics, who does not find in the
symbols of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their
science, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was
so complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the
philosophers’ church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round
pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with
which Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity,
schism, Saint-Germain des Prés, Saint-Jacques de la
Boucherie,—all are mingled, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame.
This central mother church is, among the ancient churches of
Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of
another, the haunches of another, something of all.

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least
interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the
historian. They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a
primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by
the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic
Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture are
less the works of individuals than of society; rather the
offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man
of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps
accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations
of human society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of
time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on
the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the
beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of
architecture, Babel, is a hive.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending,
_pendent opera interrupta_; they proceed quietly in accordance
with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it
finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself,
develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can.
The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort,
without reaction,—following a natural and tranquil law. It is a
graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which
starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large
volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the
successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same
monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in
these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human
intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the
architect, the nation is the builder.

Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture
of Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries of the
Orient, it appears to the eyes as an immense formation divided
into three well-defined zones, which are superposed, the one upon
the other: the Romanesque zone[20], the Gothic zone, the zone of
the Renaissance, which we would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone.
The Roman layer, which is the most ancient and deepest, is
occupied by the round arch, which reappears, supported by the
Greek column, in the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance.
The pointed arch is found between the two. The edifices which
belong exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly
distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of Jumiéges,
there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of
Orléans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the
edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence, complex
monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. One is Roman at
the base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is
because it was six hundred years in building. This variety is
rare. The donjon keep of d’Étampes is a specimen of it. But
monuments of two formations are more frequent. There is
Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by
its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal
of Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Prés. There is
the charming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the
Roman layer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen,
which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its
central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.[21]

However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect
the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its
skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not
attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the
same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may be the carved and
embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath
it—in the state of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least—the
Roman basilica. It is eternally developed upon the soil according
to the same law. There are, invariably, two naves, which
intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an
apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for
interior processions, for chapels,—a sort of lateral walks or
promenades where the principal nave discharges itself through the
spaces between the pillars. That settled, the number of chapels,
doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity,
according to the fancy of the century, the people, and art. The
service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture
does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows,
arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines
all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best
suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these
edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The
trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.