Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  This book was written about that word.

  February 1831

  NOTE ADDED TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION (1832)

  THIS edition was mistakenly announced as due to be expanded by several new chapters. They should have been called unpublished. Indeed, if by new is understood newly written, the chapters added to this edition are not new. They were written at the same time as the rest of the work, they date from the same period and originated from the same thinking; they have always been part of the manuscript of Notre-Dame de Paris. Moreover, it would be beyond the author’s comprehension that new chapters should later be added to a work of this kind. That cannot be done at will. A novel, according to him, is born, necessarily as it were, with all its chapters; a drama is born with all its scenes. You must not suppose that there is anything arbitrary about the number of parts of which this whole is composed, the mysterious microcosm you call drama or novel. Grafts or welds do not take well on works of this nature, which must spring forth in a single burst and stay just as they are. Once the work is complete, there must be no second thoughts, no touching up. Once the sex of the work, virile or not, has been recognized and proclaimed, once the child has uttered its first cry, it is born, there it is, that is how it is made, neither father nor mother can do anything about it, it belongs to the air and sunlight, let it live or die as it is. Is your book a failure? Too bad. Do not add a chapter to a book that is a failure. Is it incomplete? It should have been made complete at its begetting. Is your tree gnarled? You will never straighten it. Is your novel consumptive? Is your novel not viable? You will never give it the breath it lacks. Was your drama born lame? Believe me, do not put a wooden leg on it.

  The author, then, considers it particularly important that the public should be aware that the chapters added here were not written specially for this reprinting. If they were not published in previous editions of this book, the reason is quite simple. At the moment when Notre-Dame de Paris was being printed for the first time, the file containing these three chapters went astray. They had either to be rewritten or dispensed with. The author considered that the only two of these chapters of significant length were chapters on art and history, which in no way affected the basic drama or novel, that the public would not notice their absence, and that he alone, as author, would be party to the secret of the omission. He decided to let it go. Also, if all is to be admitted, his laziness recoiled from the task of rewriting three missing chapters. He would have found it quicker to write a new novel.

  Today these chapters have turned up again, and he takes this first opportunity to put them back where they belong.

  So here now is his work in its entirety, as he imagined it, as he wrote it, good or bad, lasting or flimsy, but as he wants it to be.

  No doubt these rediscovered chapters will be deemed of little worth in the eyes of those people, otherwise most judicious, who looked in Notre-Dame de Paris only for the drama, for the novel. But there may be other readers who have not found it a waste of time to study the aesthetic and philosophical ideas hidden within the book, and who, while reading Notre-Dame de Pan’s, have taken willing pleasure in sorting out beneath the novel something other than the novel and following, if we may be allowed the somewhat ambitious expressions, the historian’s system and the artist’s aim through the poet’s creation, such as it is.

  It is especially for those readers that the chapters added to this edition will make Notre-Dame de Paris complete, always supposing that Notre-Dame de Paris is worth completing.

  The author expresses and develops in one of these chapters, on the present decadence of architecture and the death, according to him, today almost inevitable, of that sovereign art, an opinion, unfortunately, deeply rooted within him and the subject of much reflection. He feels a need, however, to say here that he dearly wishes that the future should one day prove him wrong. He knows that art, in all its forms, can have every hope in the new generation, whose still-budding genius can be heard springing up in our studios. The seed is in the furrow, the harvest will certainly be rich. His only fear is, and the reason will be seen in the second volume of this edition, that the sap may have withdrawn from this old soil of architecture which for so many centuries was that art’s richest ground.

  There is, though, in young artists today so much life, power, and, so to speak, predestination, that at the present time, particularly in our schools of architecture, the teachers, who are odious, are producing, not only without realizing it, but even quite despite themselves, pupils who are excellent: just the opposite of Horace’s potter, who dreamed of amphorae and produced cooking-pots. Currit rota, urceus exit [The wheel turns, out comes a pot].*

  But in any case, whatever the future of architecture may be, however our young architects may one day resolve the question of their art, while we wait for new monuments, let us preserve the old ones. Let us inspire the nation, if possible, with a love of our national architecture. Such, the author declares, is one of the main aims of this book; such is one of the main aims of his life.

  Notre-Dame de Paris may have opened up some true perspectives on the art of the Middle Ages, on that wonderful art unknown up till now to some or, what is still worse, misunderstood by others. But the author is far from regarding as accomplished the task which he has voluntarily imposed on himself. On more than one occasion he has already pleaded the cause of our old architecture, he has already spoken out loudly to denounce many a profanation, many a demolition, many an impiety. He will not tire in so doing. He has pledged himself to return frequently to this subject, and he will return to it. He will be as tireless in defending our historic buildings as the iconoclasts in our schools and academies are relentless in attacking them. For it is distressing to see into what hands the architecture of the Middle Ages has fallen, and the way in which the plaster-sloppers of the present day treat the ruin of that great art. It is even shameful for us, intelligent men, who can see what they are doing and are content just to boo. We are not speaking here simply of what goes on in the provinces, but of what is being done in Paris, on our own doorsteps, beneath our windows, in this great town, this cultured town, in the city of the press, the spoken word, ideas. In conclusion to this Note, we cannot resist the need to report a few of these acts of vandalism which every day are planned, debated, begun, continued, and quietly completed before our eyes, before the eyes of the artistic public in Paris, in the face of criticism disconcerted by such audacity. They have just demolished the archbishop’s palace,* a building in poor taste, no great harm done; but together with the archbishop’s palace they demolished that of the bishop, a rare fourteenth-century fragment which the demolition architect was unable to distinguish from the rest. He tore out the wheat with the tares; it is all the same to him. There is talk of razing the admirable chapel at Vincennes, so that the stones can be used to build some fortification or other, which Daumesnil* never needed for all that. While they repair and restore at vast expense the Palais Bourbon,* that wretched barn, they let the equinoctial gales smash in the magnificent stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle. For some days now there has been scaffolding on the tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie;* and one of these mornings the pickaxe will set to. They found some mason to build a little white house between the venerable towers of the Palais de Justice. They found another to castrate Saint-Germain-des-Prés,* the feudal abbey with its three steeples. They will find another, have no doubt about it, to pull down Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.* All these masons claim to be architects, they are paid by the prefecture or the privy purse, and wear green coats.* Any harm that false taste can do to true taste, they do. At the moment of writing—deplorable sight!—one of them is in charge of the Tuileries, one of them is slashing Philibert Delorme* right in the middle of his face, and it is assuredly not one of the lesser scandals of our time to see how shamelessly this gentleman’s lumpish architecture is sprawled right across one of the most delicate façades of the Renaissance!

  Paris, 20 October 1832

&
nbsp; BOOK ONE

  I

  THE GREAT HALL

  JUST three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today* Parisians woke to the sound of all the bells pealing out within the triple precinct of City, University, and Town.

  The sixth of January 1482 is not, however, a day commemorated by history. There was nothing very special about the event which thus launched the bells and the people of Paris into movement from early in the morning. It was not an attack by Picards or Burgundians,* not a procession of relics, not a student revolt in the Laas vineyard,* not ‘our aforesaid most dread sovereign Lord the King’ making his entry, not even the fine spectacle of men and women being hanged for robbery at the Palais de Justice in Paris. Nor was it the arrival of some embassy, a frequent occurrence in the fifteenth century, all bedizened and plumed. It was hardly two days since the last cavalcade of that kind, the Flemish embassy sent to conclude the marriage of the Dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had entered Paris, much to the annoyance of the Cardinal de Bourbon, who, to please the King, had had to put on a welcoming smile for this rustic bunch of Flemish burgomasters and treat them, in his Hôtel de Bourbon, to ‘a very fine morality, satire, and farce’, while torrential rain soaked the magnificent tapestries hung at his door.

  What, in the words of Jean de Troyes,* ‘excited all the people of Paris’ on 6 January was the twofold celebration, combined since time immemorial, of the Feast of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.*

  That day there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole set up at the chapel of Braque,* and a mystery play at the Palais de Justice. The news had been publicly proclaimed with trumpet calls at all the crossroads by the Provost’s men, in their handsome tunics of purple camlet,* with big white crosses on the front.

  From early morning the crowd of townsfolk, men and women, had begun to come in from all directions, leaving houses and shops closed up, making their way towards one of the three appointed places. Everyone had made a choice, some for the bonfire, some for the maypole, some for the mystery. It must be said, in praise of the age-old good sense of curious Parisians, that the majority of this crowd was making for the bonfire, which came very seasonably, or the mystery, to be performed in the sheltered and enclosed Great Hall of the Palais, and that, by common consent, the curious left the poor maypole, with its scanty garlands, to shiver all alone under the January sky in the cemetery of the chapel of Braque.

  The flood of people was particularly dense in the roads leading to the Palais de Justice, because it was known that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days earlier, intended to be present at the performance of the mystery play and the election of the Pope of Fools, which was also to take place in the Great Hall.

  It was no easy matter that day to gain admission to the Great Hall, though at the time it was reputed to be the largest enclosed and covered space in the world. (It is true that Sauval had not yet measured the great hall of the castle at Montargis.) To onlookers watching from their windows the Place du Palais, blocked with people, presented the appearance of a vast sea into which a dozen streets, like so many river mouths, continually disgorged fresh streams of heads. The waves of this human flood, constantly spreading, broke against the corners of houses projecting here and there like headlands into the irregular basin formed by the Place. In the centre of the tall, Gothic1 façade of the Palais was the grand staircase; up and down it flowed continuously a double stream, breaking on the central flight of steps, and then spreading out in broad waves over its two lateral flights. This grand staircase, as I say, poured ceaselessly into the Place like a cascade into a lake. The shouts of laughter, the tramping of these thousands of feet, set up a great noise and clamour. Now and then this noise and clamour grew louder, the current driving the whole crowd towards the grand staircase ebbed, broke into turbulence and eddies. It was an archer thumping somebody, or the horse of one of the provost-sergeants kicking out to restore order—an admirable tradition bequeathed by the Provost’s men to the constabulary, by the constabulary to the mounted police, and by the mounted police to our modern Paris gendarmerie.

  At doors, windows, skylights, on the roofs, swarmed thousands of citizens, with good, solid, honest faces, just looking at the Palais, looking at the throng, and perfectly satisfied to do so, for plenty of people in Paris are quite content with the spectacle of spectators, and curiosity is easily aroused by a wall behind which something is going on.

  If it could be given to us, men of 1830, to mingle in thought with these fifteenth-century Parisians and join them as they go, tugged, jostled, shoved into this immense hall in the Palais, so cramped on that 6 January 1482, the spectacle would not prove to be without interest or appeal, and everything around us would be so old as to strike us as a novelty.

  With the reader’s permission we shall try to recreate in imagination the impression he would have shared with us as he crossed the threshold of the Great Hall amid this throng of people dressed in surcoat, tunic, and kirtle.

  First of all we feel a buzzing in our ears, our eyes are dazzled. Above our heads a double ogive vault, panelled with wooden carvings, painted sky-blue, sprinkled with golden fleurs-de-lys, beneath our feet a marble pavement with alternate slabs of black and white. A few paces away stands an enormous pillar, then another and another; seven pillars in all down the length of the hall, supporting in the middle of its width the springing of the double vaults. Round the first four pillars stand traders’ stalls, sparkling with glass and tinsel; round the last three are set oaken benches, worn smooth and polished by the breeches of litigants and the robes of lawyers. All round the hall, along the lofty walls, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, is an endless range of statues of every king of France since Pharamond;* the do-nothing kings, arms slack and eyes downcast; the valorous warrior kings, head and hands raised boldly up to heaven. Then, in the tall pointed windows, stained glass of countless hues; at the spacious arches leading to the hall, finely carved and splendid doors; and the whole, vaults, pillars, walls, window frames, panelling, doors, statues, all covered from top to bottom with splendid gold and blue illumination, already slightly faded by the time we are looking at it, and almost completely hidden beneath dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549 when Du Breul* still admired it as tradition demanded.

  Now imagine this vast oblong hall, lit by the wan light of a January day, invaded by a motley, noisy crowd drifting round the walls and swirling round the pillars, and you will already have a vague idea of the whole scene which we shall try to depict in more precise and curious detail.

  It is certain that if Ravaillac* had not assassinated Henri IV there would have been no documents from Ravaillac’s trial to be deposited in the registry of the Palais de Justice; no accomplices with an interest in making the said documents disappear; hence no arsonists obliged, for want of any better method, to burn down the registry in order to burn the documents and to burn down the Palais de Justice in order to burn the registry; in short, therefore, no great fire in 1618. The old Palais would still be standing with its old Great Hall; I could say to the reader ‘Go and see it’, and we should both be spared the trouble, I of composing, he of reading, any detailed description of it. Which proves a new truth: great events have incalculable consequences.

  It is true that Ravaillac may quite possibly have had no accomplices, and then that his accomplices, if perchance he had any, had nothing to do with the fire of 1618. There are two other, quite plausible explanations for it. First, the great fiery star, a foot wide and a cubit high, which fell, as everyone knows, from the sky on to the Palais, after midnight on 7 March. Secondly Théophile’s* quatrain:

  Certes ce fut un triste jeu,

  Quand à Paris Dame Justice,

  Pour avoir mangé trop d’épice,

  Se mit tout le palais en feu.

  [It was indeed poor sport when Dame Justice in Paris took too much spicy food/in bribes and set all her palate/Palais ablaze.]

  W
hatever one may think of this triple explanation, political, physical, poetical, for the conflagration of the Palais de Justice in 1618, the one unfortunately certain fact is the conflagration. Very little remains today, thanks to that catastrophe, and above all thanks to the different and successive restorations, which finished off what had been spared of that first residence of the kings of France, of that palace older than the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philippe le Bel* that a search was made for traces of the magnificent buildings put up by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost everything has disappeared. What has become of the bedroom in the chancellery where St Louis ‘consummated his marriage’? The garden where he dispensed justice, ‘wearing a camlet tunic, a sleeveless linseywoolsey surcoat, with a black sendal cloak on top, reclining on carpets with Joinville’? Where is the Emperor Sigismond’s room? That of Charles IV? Of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI promulgated his Edict of Mercy? The slab on which Marcel, in the Dauphin’s presence, murdered Robert de Clermont and the maréchal de Champagne? The wicket where the bulls of the anti-pope Benedict* were torn up, and from whence those who had brought them set out again, mockingly decked in cope and mitre, to make amende honorable right through Paris? And the Great Hall, with its gilding, its azure colouring, pointed arches, statues, pillars, the immense vault fretted with carvings? And the Gilded Chamber? And the stone lion standing at the door, head down and tail between his legs, like the lions of Solomon’s throne, in the humbly submissive posture befitting strength before justice? And the fine doors? And stained-glass windows? And the chased ironwork which made Biscornette* lose heart? And the delicate joinery of Du Hancy?* What have the years, what have men done to these marvels? What have they given us in place of it all, all that Gaulish history, all that Gothic art? The heavy surbased arches of Monsieur de Brosse,* the clumsy architect of the Portail Saint-Gervais, so much for art; and as for history, we have the garrulous memories of the great pillar, still echoing with the Patrus’* gossip.