الفصل الفصل 14 · NOTRE-DAME.

He took an

interest in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it that I am a

veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from the _de Officiis_

of Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and a

barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics, nor in

rhythmics, that sophism of sophisms. I am the author of the

Mystery which was presented to-day with great triumph and a great

concourse of populace, in the grand hall of the Palais de

Justice. I have also made a book which will contain six hundred

pages, on the wonderful comet of 1465, which sent one man mad. I

have enjoyed still other successes. Being somewhat of an

artillery carpenter, I lent a hand to Jean Mangue’s great

bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it was tested,

on the Pont de Charenton, and killed four and twenty curious

spectators. You see that I am not a bad match in marriage. I know

a great many sorts of very engaging tricks, which I will teach

your goat; for example, to mimic the Bishop of Paris, that cursed

Pharisee whose mill wheels splash passers-by the whole length of

the Pont aux Meuniers. And then my mystery will bring me in a

great deal of coined money, if they will only pay me. And

finally, I am at your orders, I and my wits, and my science and

my letters, ready to live with you, damsel, as it shall please

you, chastely or joyously; husband and wife, if you see fit;

brother and sister, if you think that better.”

Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the

young girl. Her eyes were fixed on the ground.

“_Phœbus,_” she said in a low voice. Then, turning towards the

poet, “_Phœbus_,—what does that mean?”

Gringoire, without exactly understanding what the connection

could be between his address and this question, was not sorry to

display his erudition. Assuming an air of importance, he

replied,—

“It is a Latin word which means _sun._”

“Sun!” she repeated.

“It is the name of a handsome archer, who was a god,” added

Gringoire.

“A god!” repeated the gypsy, and there was something pensive and

passionate in her tone.

At that moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened and fell.

Gringoire stooped quickly to pick it up; when he straightened up,

the young girl and the goat had disappeared. He heard the sound

of a bolt. It was a little door, communicating, no doubt, with a

neighboring cell, which was being fastened on the outside.

“Has she left me a bed, at least?” said our philosopher.

He made the tour of his cell. There was no piece of furniture

adapted to sleeping purposes, except a tolerably long wooden

coffer; and its cover was carved, to boot; which afforded

Gringoire, when he stretched himself out upon it, a sensation

somewhat similar to that which Micromégas would feel if he were

to lie down on the Alps.

“Come!” said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, “I must

resign myself. But here’s a strange nuptial night. ’Tis a pity.

There was something innocent and antediluvian about that broken

crock, which quite pleased me.”

BOOK THIRD.

CHAPTER 14. 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.