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

by Hugo, Victor

  NO doubt the church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still today a sublime and majestic building. But for all the beauty it has preserved in ageing, it is hard to repress a sigh, to repress indignation over the countless degradations and mutilations which time and men have simultaneously inflicted on the venerable monument, showing no respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip-Augustus,* who laid the last.

  On the face of this old queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle you will find a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior [Time devours, man devours still more].* Which I should like to translate thus: ‘Time is blind, man is stupid.’

  If we had the leisure to examine with the reader one by one the various traces of destruction imprinted on the ancient church, time’s share would be the least, that of men the worst, especially men of the art. I have to say ‘men of the art’ since there have been individuals in the past two centuries who have assumed the title of architect.

  First of all, to give only a few major examples, there are assuredly few finer pages in architecture than that façade where successively and simultaneously the three recessed, pointed doorways, the embroidered and serrated band of the twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by the two side windows like the priest by deacon and sub-deacon, the lofty, slender gallery of trefoiled arches supporting a heavy platform on its delicate small columns; finally the two dark, massive towers with their slate eaves, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, rising one above the other in five gigantic storeys, all unfold before one’s eye, multitudinous and unconfused with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carvings, adding powerfully to the calm grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work of a man and a people, at the same time one and complex, like its sisters the Iliads and the Romanceros, the prodigious result of contributions made from all the resources of an age, where every stone displays in hundreds of ways the workman’s imagination disciplined by the artist’s genius; a kind of human creation, in a word, as mighty and fruitful as the divine creation whose dual character it seems to have abstracted: variety, eternity.

  And what we are saying here about the façade must be said of the entire church; and what we are saying about the cathedral church of Paris must be said of all the churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. Everything coheres in this art, self-generating, logical, and well proportioned. To measure a toe is to measure the giant.

  Let us come back to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears at the present day, when we go piously to admire the solemn and mighty cathedral which, according to its chroniclers, inspires terror: quae mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus [which by its mass strikes spectators with terror].*

  Three important things are today missing from that façade. First, the flight of eleven steps which once raised it above ground level; then the lower series of statues which occupied the niches in the three doorways; and lastly the upper series of the twenty-eight earliest kings of France, which filled the first-floor gallery, from Childebert* to Philip-Augustus, each holding in his hand ‘the imperial apple’.

  As to the steps, it is time which has caused them to disappear, by slowly and irresistibly raising the ground level of the City. But time, while causing the rising tide of Paris pavements to devour one by one the eleven steps which added to the majestic height of the building, has perhaps given the church more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the façade that sombre colouring of centuries which makes the old age of monuments the age of their beauty.

  But who cast down the two rows of statues? Who left the niches empty? Who cut that new and bastard ogive right in the middle of the central doorway? Who dared set within it that heavy, tasteless, wooden door carved in Louis XV style, next to Biscornette’s arabesques? The men, the architects, the artists of our own day.

  And, going inside the building, who overthrew that colossal Saint Christopher, proverbial among statues just as the great hall of the Palais was among halls, the spire of Strasbourg among steeples? And those myriads of statues which thronged every space between the columns of nave and choir, kneeling, standing, riding, men, women, children, kings, bishops, soldiers, in stone, marble, gold, silver, brass, even in wax, who swept them all brutally away? Not time.

  And who substituted for the old Gothic altar, with its splendid clutter of shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus with angels’ heads and clouds, looking like some spare sample from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who stupidly fixed that heavy stone anachronism into Hercandus’* Carolingian pavement? Was it not Louis XIV fulfilling the vow of Louis XIII?

  And who put in those cold, white windows in place of the ‘richly coloured’ stained glass which made our forebears’ eyes hesitate in wonder between the rose of the great doorway and the ogive windows of the apse? And what would a succentor of the sixteenth century say at the sight of the fine yellow distemper which our archiepiscopal vandals have daubed over their cathedral? He would remember that that was the colour which the public executioner smeared over infamous buildings; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, plastered with yellow too after the Constable de Bourbon’s treason,* ‘a yellow, besides, of such good quality,’ says Sauval, ‘and so highly recommended, that more than a century has passed without its colour fading.’ He would think that the holy place had become infamous, and run away.

  And if we go up on top of the cathedral, without paying attention to countless acts of barbarity of every kind, what have they done with that delightful little steeple which used to stand at the mid-point of the crossing and which, no less slender and no less bold than the neighbouring spire (also destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, pierced even more deeply into the sky than the towers, slim, pointed, sonorous, fretted? An architect of good taste (1787) amputated it and thought it enough to conceal the wound with that large leaden patch that looks like a saucepan lid.

  That is how the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in almost every country, especially in France. Three sorts of damage can be distinguished on the ruins, and they all affect it at different depths: first is time, which has chipped it away imperceptibly here and there and left rust all over its surface; then political and religious revolutions which, blind and angry by their very nature, have hurled themselves upon it in tumult, rent its rich array of sculptures and carvings, smashed its rose-windows, broken its necklaces of arabesques and figurines, torn down its statues, sometimes for wearing a mitre, sometimes a crown; finally fashions, increasingly silly and absurd, which after the splendidly anarchic deviations of the Renaissance, have succeeded one another in the inevitable decline of architecture. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions. They have cut into the living flesh, attacked the bone-structure of the art underneath, they have hewn, hacked, dislocated, killed the building, in its form as in its symbolism, in its logic as in its beauty. And then they remade it; a claim that at least neither time nor revolutions had advanced. Brazenly, in the name of ‘good taste’, they stuck over the wounds of Gothic architecture their wretched baubles of a day, their marble ribbons, their metal pompoms, a veritable leprosy of ovolos, scrolls, surrounds, draperies, garlands, fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, chubby cupids, bloated cherubs, which started eating away the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de’ Medici, and caused its death, two centuries later, in a tortured grimace, in the Dubarry’s boudoir.*

  Thus, to sum up the points just mentioned, Gothic architecture is today disfigured by three kinds of ravage. Wrinkles and warts on its skin are the work of time; marks of violence, brutality, contusions, fractures, the work of revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of its limbs, ‘restorations’, are the Greek, Roman, and barbaric work of professors quoting Vitruvius* and Vignolo*. The magnificent art produced by the Vandals was killed by the academies. To the centuries and revolutions, which at least devastated impartially and on the grand scale, has been added the swarm of ar
chitects from the schools, licensed, sworn, and accredited, degrading with all the discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting Louis XV chicory for Gothic lace to the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the ass kicking the dying lion. It is the old oak decaying, as a final blow being stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.

  How far it is from this to the age when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de Paris to that famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, ‘so celebrated by the pagans of antiquity’, which immortalized Erostratus,* found the Gallic cathedral ‘more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure’!1

  Notre-Dame de Paris is not, however, what can be called a complete, definite, classifiable monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church, nor yet a Gothic one. The building is not typical. Notre-Dame de Paris does not have, like the abbey of Tournus, the solemn, massive build, the broad, circular vaulting, the chilly bareness, the majestic simplicity of buildings whose generating principle is the round arch. It is not, like the cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent, light, multiform, involved, spiky, flowery product of the pointed arch. It cannot be ranked among that ancient family of dark, mysterious, low-roofed churches, crushed, as it were, by the round arch; almost Egyptian, but for their ceilings; all hieroglyphic, priestly, symbolic; decorated more profusely with lozenges and zigzags than flowers, with flowers more than animals, with animals more than with human beings; not so much the work of the architect as of the bishop; the first transformation of the art, stamped all over with theocratic, military discipline, rooted back in the Late Empire and ending with William the Conqueror. Nor can our cathedral be placed in that other family of lofty, airy churches, rich with stained glass and sculpture; of pointed forms and bold attitudes; communal and civic as political symbols, free, fanciful and unrestrained as works of art; a second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immutable, and priestly, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins with the return from the Crusades and ends with Louis XI. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Roman stock like the first, nor of pure Arab stock like the second.

  It is a transitional building. The Saxon architect was just completing the first pillars of the nave when the pointed arch arriving from the Crusades installed itself victoriously on those broad Romanesque capitals designed only for round arches. The pointed arch, dominant from then on, constructed the rest of the church. However, inexperienced and diffident to start with, it opened, broadened out, contained itself, and did not dare soar up into spires and lancets as it did later in so many marvellous cathedrals. It is as though it was conscious of the presence of the heavy Romanesque pillars nearby.

  In any case, these buildings which mark the transition from Romanesque to Gothic repay study no less than the pure types. They express a nuance of the art which would be lost without them, that is to say the grafting of the pointed on to the round arch.

  Notre-Dame de Paris in particular is a curious example of that variety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument is a page not only of the history of France, but also of the history of science and art. Thus, to indicate here only the main details, while the little Porte-Rouge goes almost to the limits of fifteenth-century Gothic delicacy, the nave pillars, by their volume and weightiness, go back to the Carolingian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Anyone would think that there were six centuries between that door and those pillars. Even the hermetics find in the symbolism of that great doorway a satisfying summary of their science, of which the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. So the Romanesque abbey, the philosophical church, Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy round pillar recalling Gregory VII,* the hermetic symbolism which made Nicolas Flamel the precursor of Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, everything is merged, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central, generative church is a kind of chimera among the old churches of Paris; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the rear of a third; something of all of them.

  We repeat, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, the antiquary, the historian. They make one feel how primitive a thing architecture is by demonstrating, as the Cyclopean remains, Egyptian pyramids, gigantic Hindu temples also demonstrate, that architecture’s greatest productions are not so much the works of individuals as of societies; the fruit of whole peoples in labour rather than the inspiration of men of genius; the deposit left by a nation; the accumulation of centuries; the residue from successive evaporations of human society; in a word, types of formation. Each wave of time lays its alluvium on top, each race lays down its stratum, each individual brings his stone. That is the way of beavers, that is the way of bees, that is the way of men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a beehive.

  Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending: pendent opera interrupta [interrupted works remain in suspense];* they are quietly continued in accordance with the art transformed. The new art takes the monument as it finds it, forms a crust upon it, assimilates it, develops it as it pleases, and completes it if it can. It all takes place without trouble, without strain, without reaction, according to a tranquil law of nature. A graft occurs, sap circulates, vegetation continues. To be sure, there is material for massive tomes, and often for the universal history of mankind, in these successive weldings of several arts at several levels on the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual are erased from these great masses with no author’s name; they are a summary of human intelligence and represent its sum total. Time is the architect, the whole people the builder.

  Considering here only European, Christian architecture, younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it strikes the eye as a huge formation divided into three clearly distinct zones superimposed one upon the other: the Romanesque zone,1 the Gothic, the Renaissance, which we should like to call Graeco-Roman. The Romanesque stratum, the oldest and deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which reappears carried on the Greek column in the higher, more recent stratum of the Renaissance. The pointed arch is between the two. Buildings belonging exclusively to one of these three strata are perfectly distinct, unified, and complete. Such are the abbey of Jumiéges, the cathedral of Reims, Sainte-Croix at Orléans. But the three zones merge and amalgamate at their edges, like the colours in the solar spectrum. Whence the complex monuments, buildings of nuance and transition. One such may have Romanesque feet, a Gothic middle, a Graeco-Roman head. That is because it took six hundred years to build it. That variety is rare. The keep at Etampes is an example. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. Such is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch building, but with its earliest pillars going down into that Romanesque zone where the doorway of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are deeply plunged. Such is the charming half-Gothic chapter house of Boscherville, where the Romanesque stratum goes half-way up the body. Such is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if the tip of its central spire did not dip into the Renaissance zone.2

  However, all these nuances, all these differences affect only the surface of the buildings. Art has changed its skin. The actual constitution of the Christian church has not been touched by it. It is still the same inner framework, the same logical disposition of the parts. Whatever may be the carved or decorated envelope of a cathedral, there will always be found under it, at least in germ or rudimentary form, the Roman basilica. It develops on the ground eternally according to the same law. There are invariably two naves crossing at right angles, the upper end of which is rounded into an apse and forms the choir; there are always side aisles for processions inside the church, for chapels, a kind of lateral ambulatory into which the main nave empties through the bays. That granted, the number of chapels, doorways, steeples, spires can be endlessly modified, according to the fancy of the age, the people, the art. Once the needs of worship have been met and ensured, architecture can do whatever it chooses. Stat
ues, stained glass, rose-windows, arabesques, indentations, capitals, bas-reliefs: all such objects of imagination can be combined according to whichever logarithm is appropriate. Whence the prodigious external variety of these buildings where so much order and unity are essentially lodged. The tree trunk never varies, the foliage is a matter of caprice.

  II

  A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS

  WE have just tried to repair for the reader the admirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly indicated most of the beauties it had in the fifteenth century and has no longer today, but we omitted the chief of them: the view of Paris revealed at that time from the top of its towers.

  Indeed, when after groping one’s way up the long, dark spiral staircase, pierced vertically through the thickness of the tower walls, one at last emerged on to one of the two lofty platforms, flooded with light and air, it was a fine picture that on every side at once unfolded before the eye; a sight sui generis, which can be readily visualized by those of our readers who have been lucky enough to see a Gothic town intact, complete, homogeneous, such as the few still remaining, Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain, or even smaller specimens, so long as they are well preserved, Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia.

  The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already an enormous city. We Parisians are generally mistaken in thinking how much ground we have acquired since then. Paris since Louis XI has not grown by much more than a third. It has, to be sure, lost more in beauty than it has gained in size.

  Paris was born, as we all know, on that old island of the City shaped like a cradle. Its first enclosure was the shoreline of that island, the Seine its first moat. For several hundred years Paris remained an island, with two bridges, one to the north, the other to the south, and two bridgeheads, at once gates and fortresses, the Grand Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit Châtelet on the left. Then, from the time of the first line of kings, Paris, too constricted on the island, no longer with room enough to turn round, crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand and beyond the Petit Châtelet a first ring of walls and towers began to encroach on the countryside on both banks of the Seine. Some traces of that ancient enclosure still existed into the last century; today all that remains is the memory, here and there a tradition, the Porte Baudets or Baudoyer, Porta Bagauda. Gradually the flood of houses, constantly driven outwards from the heart of the town, overflowed this enclosure, eroded it, wore it down, erased it. Philip-Augustus built a new containing dyke. He imprisoned Paris within a circular chain of massive, solid, high towers. For more than a century the houses pressed and piled up one upon another, their level rising like water in a reservoir. They began to grow deeper, put storey upon storey, climbed one upon another, spurted upwards like any sap under pressure, and each strove to lift its head higher than its neighbours for the sake of a little fresh air. The streets grew deeper and narrower; every open space was filled up and disappeared. At last the houses leaped over Philip-Augustus’s wall, and joyfully scattered over the plain in ragged disorder, as though escaping from captivity. There they settled, hacked gardens out of the fields, took their ease. From 1367 the town had spread so far into the suburbs that a new enclosure was needed, especially on the right bank. Charles V built it. But a town like Paris is in perpetual spate. Only such towns ever become capital cities. They are like funnels into which drain all the geographical, political, moral, intellectual slopes of a nation, all the natural inclinations of a people; wells of civilization, so to speak, but also sewers, where trade, industry, intelligence, population, all the sap, the life, all the soul of a nation is constantly filtered and collected, drop by drop, century by century. Charles V’s wall, then, had the same fate as that of Philip-Augustus. From the end of the fifteenth century it was encroached upon, superseded, and the suburbs ran still further out. In the sixteenth century the wall seemed to be visibly withdrawing, buried deeper and deeper in the old town, so dense already was the new one beyond it. Thus from the fifteenth century, to go no further, Paris had already worn out the three concentric ring-walls which at the time of Julian the Apostate* were, so to speak, in embryonic existence in the Grand and Petit Châtelets. The mighty city had burst successively four rings of walls like a growing child splitting its last year’s clothes. Under Louis XI one could in places see sticking out amid this sea of houses a few groups of ruined towers from the ancient enclosures like the tips of hills from a flood, like archipelagos of old Paris submerged beneath the new.