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_ 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*~; which I should be glad to translate thus:
time is blind, man is stupid.
* Time is a devourer; man, more so.
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: ~quoe 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."*
* _Histoire Gallicane_, liv. II. Periode III. fo. 130, p. 1.
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*, 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 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 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.**
* This is the same which is called, according to locality,
climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine. There are
four sister and parallel architectures, each having its special
character, but derived from the same origin, the round arch.
~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.
** This portion of the spire, which was of woodwork, is precisely
that which was consumed by lightning, in 1823.
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. _
Read next: VOLUME I: BOOK THIRD: Chapter 2 - A Bird's-eye View of Paris
Read previous: Volume 1: Book 2: Chapter 7. A Bridal Night
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