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-BOOK THIRD. 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, *** edacior; 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 facade, 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 facade 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 facade 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: quoe mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.
Three important things are to-day lacking in that facade: 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 facade 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 *** arch? who has
dared to frame therein that commonplace and
heavy door of carved wood, a 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-Grace 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 Hotel 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 chicorees of Louis XV. for
the Gothic lace, for the greater glory of the Parthenon.
It is the kick of the *** 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."
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 *** 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 Pres.
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 Pres, 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,
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 Jumieges, there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the
Sainte-Croix of Orleans.
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'Etampes 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 Pres.
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.
Facies non omnibus una, No diversa tamen, qualem, etc.
Their faces not all alike, nor yet different, but such as the faces of sisters
ought to be.
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.