Notre-Dame de Paris
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.”[19]
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