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, homo 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 bastard 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 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."

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 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