The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Esmeralda was led astray by specious reasoning and violated by the unscrupulous men who had professed to adore her. Having been ruined, tried, and condemned to death as a whore, a witch, and a murderess, she stood in a loose white shift before the cathedral, awaiting her last shriving. Then, suddenly, without warning, Quasimodo swung down on a rope and swept her off her feet into the air. Up she flew, up past the portals, and the Gallery of the Kings, and the great western rose, up to the perches of the gargoyles, in whose hideous company Quasimodo was at home. Here Esmeralda found sanctuary, and Quasimodo took care of her.

  But there would be no happy ending. The Parisian mob, convinced that Quasimodo had kidnapped their beautiful gypsy girl, decided to rescue her from his clutches. They threw themselves upon the west front of Notre Dame; but the cathedral resisted their efforts, standing firm, like the gates of a great city closed against its besiegers. Indeed, Notre Dame did more than resist: she responded. Her gargoyles spewed forth a hellish bile of molten lead, and flames licked the sky between the two towers. The very stones of the cathedral joined in the defense, as slates and lintels began to rain down upon the besiegers. The mob was driven back.

  But one young man made it up to the Gallery of the Kings. He laughed, flushed with success; but almost before he knew it, one of the stone kings rushed at him, grabbed him by his feet, swung him over the edge of the balcony, and dashed his brains out on the wall below. Quasimodo appeared on the gallery, the limp body of his victim in his hand; for it had not been Our Lady of Paris who had defended herself, but her tutelary spirit, the hunchback. He turned away from the terrified crowd and ran back inside. He hurried through corridors, up turnpikes, along ledges, until he came to Esmeralda’s sanctuary—only to find that his own gypsy lady of Paris was gone.

  Soldiers dispersed the mob, and order was restored. The next morning, the bourgeoisie of Paris opened the doors and shutters of their houses. In the square in front of the cathedral,

  some goodwives, milk-jugs in hand, were pointing in astonishment to the strange devastation in the main portal of Notre Dame and to the two rivulets of congealed lead between the cracks in the sandstone. This was all that remained of the night’s disturbance. The pyre lit by Quasimodo between the towers had died out.

  Looking out from the gallery of the chimerae at the top of Notre Dame, Quasimodo surveyed the city and the sky before him. He “raised his eye to the gypsy, whose body he could see in the distance, hanging from the gibbet, and shuddering beneath its white robe in the final throes of death . . . and he said, with a sob that caused his chest to heave: ‘Oh, all that I have loved!’ ”

  Hugo had composed an elegy for a Notre Dame that had long passed away; but his fictional cathedral was also a marvelous modern invention. The novel was finished in January 1831, and it was on the book stands by March. It was a huge success, and thousands of people not only read the tragedy of the Ladies of Paris but went to visit the place where it had all happened. They could not help but construct in their minds what Hugo had described in words, ignoring the interventions of later ages and imagining splendors that had been destroyed. In 1837, the duchesse d’Orléans told the author, “I have visited your Notre Dame.”

  Hugo had transformed the building into Notre-Dame de Paris, and it was not long before his reading public demanded that the stones of the building be made to correspond to the words of the book. In 1845, Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus began that very task.

  THERE WAS MUCH to do, for the Notre Dame de Paris of Hugo’s novel was hidden under several centuries of what the writer called the blindness of time and the stupidity of man. There is a spectacular canvas painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1804 that provides a record of what the church had looked like before Viollet-le-Duc began his work. In this picture, the medieval carvings and traceries that would become the imagined haunt of Quasimodo and Esmeralda are invisible under a layer of baroque marble, green and red and white, and the apse resembles nothing so much as a gilded salon at Versailles or a scene at the opera.

  In the center of David’s painting, a diminutive man is gesturing before a golden throne. Napoleon Bonaparte, in deliberate imitation of Charlemagne, holds a laurel wreath aloft in his right arm; he is about to lower it onto the head of his wife, Josephine, to crown her as empress. The pope himself is visible at the high altar, and the aisles of the church are filled with the great and the good of France.

  David’s painting suppressed their expressions of horror and fascination at Napoleon’s shameless appropriation of the scenery and props of the ancien régime. It is said that one of them, a former general of the French Revolution, was heard to mutter, “What a shame that the 300,000 Frenchmen who died to overthrow one throne are unable to enjoy the superb fruit of their sacrifice!” It is not recorded what happened to him after the ceremonies.

  Ten years later, Louis XVIII—a real king—walked down the nave of Notre Dame, to give thanks for his own coronation and the restoration of the monarchy after a quarter century of failed republic and ersatz empire. The cathedral was by then as exhausted and tawdry as a painted theater set after the lights have come up and the show is over. In 1829, history almost repeated itself in miniature: Louis XVIII was deposed in “three glorious days” of revolution, and for a moment it looked as if the republic might be restored. It was not. The king was replaced by his cousin Louis Philippe, of the House of Orléans.

  That summer, the young Victor Hugo, alarmed by the apparent fragility of the restored monarchy, decided that if history would not take care of the preservation of Notre Dame de Paris, his novel would. He locked himself into his apartment and started to write.

  HUGO’S FANTASY OF hunchbacks and gypsy girls was an exercise in romantic fiction. But as his contemporary readers would have known all too well, it was closely based on history—and recent history at that.

  On 23 October 1793, at the height of the revolution, the Commune of Paris sent the people to Notre Dame. The archbishop of Paris appeared before them and rent his vestments and declared that there should be no religion but Liberty; then, like the fools in Victor Hugo’s novel, the mob climbed up to the gallery on the west front and cast down the twenty-eight statues of kings that stood there. The smashed monarchs, decapitated and mutilated, were thrown into the Seine or planted in the pavement of the Rue de Santé to be used as bollards.

  The cathedral was already a wreck. Two years before, in February of 1790, the high altar of Notre Dame had been replaced with one dedicated to the fatherland. The people assembled before it to take their oath to the nation, and even Louis XVI, that Most Christian King, was forced to attend. In November of the same year, the clergy of the cathedral were handed an expulsion order. Soon after they had departed, the agents of the people came to Notre Dame and confiscated all the paraphernalia of Christian superstition. They tore down images of Christ and the Virgin, and the saints and the aristocrats and princes of the church who had worshipped them; and they sent these images off to the Museum of Antiquities they had created in an old monastery, for that was where they believed such nonsense belonged. The agents of the people ripped out candlesticks and thurifers and reliquaries and lamps, and took them down to the National Treasury, where the gold and the silver and the brass were melted down for the benefit of the republic. A year later the spire that crowned the crossing of the building was also taken down, and the lead melted for shot. But it wasn’t until 10 November 1793 that the complete conversion of Notre Dame was finally achieved.

  That day, a diva of the Comédie Française crouched behind a pasteboard set, awaiting her entrance. It was dark and hot, the Phrygian cap on her head pinched her pretty curls, and her Grecian gown kept slipping down her shoulders; but Mademoiselle Maillard was used to such privations. Anyway, it was all in the name of the revolution. Emerging on cue, Mademoiselle Maillard found herself at the door of a hastily contrived belvedere inscribed with the phrase “À la Philosophie,” flanked by plaster busts of Rousseau and Voltaire. This temple stood ato
p a rocky mountain, and Mademoiselle Maillard picked her way over to a throne and took up the shield and spear of Athene. There she sat, still as a statue, while the chorus girls of the Comédie and the representatives of the people made offerings to her, crying her name: “Reason! Reason!” The November sunshine that poured through the clerestories washed the goddess and her pale temple in a dispassionate, rational light.

  After they had finished adoring her, the representatives of the people picked up the goddess of reason and bore her westward away from her altar, down the nave of her temple. Mademoiselle Maillard bobbed from shoulder to shoulder, the light catching, from time to time, her pale Grecian robes. Then a pair of timber portals swung open, and the goddess of reason found herself in the chilly autumn air, borne high above the stinking mud of the street outside and the malodorous mob who were still chanting her name.

  Behind the goddess rose the facade of her temple, like a great city of building piled upon ruined building, to which clung the mutilated remains of the vanquished foes of Reason. The gates were flanked by sculpted figures whose wings had been removed, whose heads had been chopped off, whose anachronistic scepters had been ripped from their hands. Above the central portal, a relief of Christ dispensing the arbitrary religious justice of the Last Judgment had been defaced. The gallery above was bare of all figures, and the pedestal at the heart of the rose window was empty. The towers were freckled with stumps of stone: here and there, a claw or a bat’s wing protruded from the buttresses, reminders to the people gathered below that the sleep of Reason engenders monsters.

  A year later, Jacques-Louis David, the arbiter of taste for the revolution—who would go on to become the arbiter of taste for Napoleon’s empire—proposed a monument to the conversion of the cathedral into a republican temple. Hercules, the symbol of revolutionary might, would stand at the prow of the Île de la Cité, perched on top of a mountain; and that mountain would be made of all the smashed angels and saints that had been thrown down from Notre Dame. The victory of Reason over the reactionary forces of religion would be complete.

  IT WAS A victory that had been nearly a hundred years in coming. The cardinal Louis-Antoine de Noailles, archbishop of Paris at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had charm, an easy wit, and vast amounts of money. He was an adherent of the Jansenist doctrine, which decried the theatrics of traditional religion and argued for a Christianity that would enlighten its adherents with reason rather than stupefy them with mystery and ritual. By the time that Noailles took the Episcopal throne, Notre Dame was filled with the instruments of mystery and ritual. Successive kings, aristocrats, clergymen, and guilds had filled the nave with votive gifts: paintings, statues, tombstones, and metalwork. Louis XIV had even encased the entire sanctuary of the cathedral in the baroque marble arcades that would later provide the backdrop to the operatic moments of glory of Napoleon and Mademoiselle Maillard. The cathedral was dark and cluttered and, in the opinion of Noailles, in severe need of enlightenment.

  In the 1720s, Noailles ordered the floor of Notre Dame, uneven with countless burials and worn with centuries of shuffling feet, to be repaved in marble, smooth and white, so that the light which fell into the nave would be reflected from it. He had his men whitewash the walls of the cathedral, which had been blackened with centuries of candle wax, smoke, and incense, so that sunbeams might fall upon radiant surfaces and illuminate the congregation in their devotions. The successors of Noailles followed his lead. In 1741, the cathedral authorities arranged to have the stained glass of the clerestory windows removed and replaced with clear glass. Most of the glass itself—which, after all, depicted childish stories for the illiterate—was taken away and smashed, and never seen again. They also removed the crumbling gargoyles that disfigured the exterior of the cathedral, for by the 1770s it was not unknown for some hideous beast to crash down onto the pavement, terrifying the ladies. Now, when the spring drizzle and the summer storms fell on Paris, the rainwater no longer spouted from the mouths of monsters, but was discreetly conducted away in lead downpipes of the most modern design.

  By the time of the revolution of 1789, most of the barbaric features of the Cathedral of Notre Dame had already been covered up and cleared away. All the revolutionaries had needed to do was to call on the Comédie Française to add the finishing touches to their Temple of Reason.

  VIOLLET-LE-DUC’S TASK was to restore Notre Dame to the state that had existed before time and man had wrought their destruction upon it. Once upon a time, he supposed, Notre Dame had been the building its original makers had desired it to be; that was the state to which Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus now hoped to restore it. The problem lay in ascertaining who those original makers had been, and what they had desired. For this temple of the holy Virgin, quite unlike the one on the Acropolis, had never been built to a single design.

  Notre Dame had been started in 1163, when Maurice de Sully, the bishop of Paris, traced his crozier in the ground of the Île de la Cité. Sully’s cathedral, however, differed in important respects from the Notre Dame that Hugo and Viollet knew and loved. Where they looked up and saw tall clerestories, and imagined them sparkling with colored glass, Sully had placed an expanse of solid wall pierced with much smaller windows. Where Hugo and Viollet marveled at the cathedral’s complex external armature of flying buttresses, Sully’s workmen had made a simple pile of heavy masonry to stabilize the thrust of the vaults within. The original Notre Dame had not been the vessel of light, the skeleton of thin stone ribs and glittering glass, that the nineteenth century admired; nor had its originator, Maurice de Sully, ever imagined it so.

  Sully died in 1196, thirty-three years after he had traced his crozier in the ground, and work stopped briefly, with only the sanctuary and three bays of the nave of Notre Dame having been finished. Construction began again in 1200, and a new generation of masons set themselves to the completion of the nave. As the great hole in the west end of the cathedral was closed, the interior became darker and darker. Soon it became apparent that the clerestory windows in the side walls were too small to admit enough light into the nave, and so the masons decided to enlarge them.

  This change in the design of the building raised its own problems. When the high windows of the nave had been small, the structure of the cathedral had been strong, since there was a large expanse of wall under the high vaults. As the masons set about enlarging the clerestory windows, they soon realized that they were turning this expanse of wall into an expanse of glass, ill suited to holding up great loads. Unless the masons desired the vaults to fall, they would have to invent another way of supporting them.

  They devised half bridges—arcs boutants, they called them—that carried the weight of the vaults away from the walls and out to external buttresses. These buttresses, towers of solid masonry, then transferred the load vertically down to the ground. In combination, the buttresses, the arcs boutants, and the ribs of the vaults formed a stone cage so strong that it required no walls to stabilize it. Now the masons were able to turn what had once been heavy heaps of stone into luminous banners of glass that glowed high above the nave.

  And so the design of Notre Dame de Paris departed from the intentions of Maurice de Sully, since by the application of reason to experience the masons had been able to improve on the original. The final bays of the nave of the cathedral were filled with light on the inside, while on the outside they formed a fantastic skeleton of stone arches and buttresses pointing upward to the sky. And the masons of Notre Dame were so impressed with what they had done that even before they had finished the building they started to rebuild it—or, at least, to alter what they had already built to match their new design. They worked their way back up the nave to the original altar of Maurice de Sully, and they enlarged all the high clerestory windows so that light began to pour into what had previously been dark. They worked their way down the side walls of the cathedral, adding their arcs boutants and their buttresses, and where previously there had been only heavy masonry the very
building itself gradually seemed to dissolve into the lightness of air.

  Decade after decade passed, and still the masons kept on with their labor of altering the unfinished cathedral. As Victor Hugo wrote of their work:

  Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Often architecture is transformed while they are still under construction: pendent opera interrupta, they proceed quickly in keeping with the transformation. The new architecture takes the monument as it finds it, is incrusted on it, assimilates it to itself, develops it as it wants . . . The man, the individual and the artist are erased from these great piles, which bear no author’s name; they are the summary and summation of human intelligence. Time is the architect, the nation the builder.

  Time never stopped being the architect of Notre Dame; through the hundreds of years since Maurice de Sully’s death, the cathedral was reimagined and remade over and over again. If Viollet-le-Duc wanted to find an original state to which the cathedral could be restored, he was going to have to invent it.

  VIOLLET PREPARED A drawing of the sanctuary of the cathedral as he imagined it had been when Quasimodo and Esmeralda had haunted it. Napoleon’s throne was cast out, and the temple to Philosophy vanished. The yellowed distemper that covered the stone was stripped away. At the heart of the sanctuary he sketched a Gothic altar, covered in beaten copper and studded with gems. It was as if four centuries had never happened.