BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME.

ASSUREDLY the church of Our Lady at Paris is still, at this day, a majestic and sublime edifice. Yet, noble an aspect as it has preserved in growing old, it is difficult to suppress feelings of sorrow and indignation at the numberless degradations and mutilations which the hand of Time and that of man have inflicted upon the venerable monument, regardless alike of Charlemagne, who laid the first stone of it, and of Philip Augustus, who laid the last.

Upon the face of this old queen of the French cathedrals, beside each wrinkle we constantly find "Tempus edax, homo edacior;" which we would willingly render thus, "Time is blind, but man is stupid."

a scar.

If we had leisure to examine one by one, with the reader, the traces of destruction imprinted on this ancient church, the work of Time would be found to form the lesser portion; the worst destruction has been perpetrated by men, especially by men of art. We are under the necessity of using the expression,

men of art," seeing that there have been individuals

í

who have assumed the character of architects in the last two centuries.

And first of all, to cite only a few leading examples, there are assuredly few finer architectural pages than that front of that cathedral, in which, successively and at once, the three receding pointed gateways; the decorated and indented band of the twenty-eight royal niches; the vast central circular window flanked by the two lateral ones like the priest, by the deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and slender gallery of trifoliated arcades, supporting a heavy platform upon its light and delicate columns; and the two dark and massive towers, with their eaves of slate, harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic stories, unfold themselves to the eye, in combination unconfused, with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving, in powerful alliance with the grandeur of the whole, - a vast symphony in stone, if we may so express it, the colossal work of a man and of a nation, combining unity with complexity, like the Iliads and the Romanceros to which it is a sister production, - the prodigious result of a draught upon the whole resources of an era, in which upon every stone is seen displayed, in a hundred varieties, the fancy of the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist, - a sort of human Creation, in short, mighty and prolific as the Divine Creation, of which it seems to have caught the double character, variety and eternity.

And what is here said of the front must be said of the whole church; and what we say of the cathedral

church of Paris must be said of all the churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. Everything is in its place in that art, self-created, logical, and wellproportioned. By measuring the toe, we estimate the giant.

But let us return to the front of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, while we gaze in pious admiration upon the solemn and mighty cathedral, that inspires terror, - in the words of its chroniclers, "quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus."

Three things of importance are now wanting to this front: first, the flight of eleven steps by which it formerly rose above the level of the ground; then, the lower range of statues, which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly, the upper series of the twenty-eight more ancient kings of France, which filled the gallery on the first story, beginning with Childebert and ending with Philip Augustus, each holding in his hand the imperial ball.

As for the flight of steps, it is Time that has made it disappear, by raising, with slow but resistless progress, the level of the ground in the City. But while thus swallowing up, one after another, in this mounting tide of the pavement of Paris, the eleven steps which added to the majestic elevation of the structure, Time has given to the church, perhaps, yet more than he has taken from it; for it is he who has spread over its face that dark gray tint of centuries which makes of the old age of architectural monuments their season of beauty.

But who has thrown down the two ranges of statues? Who has left the niches empty? Who has cut, in the middle of the central portal, that new and bastard pointed arch? Who has dared to hang in it that heavy unmeaning wooden gate, carved à la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette ? The men, the architects, the artists, of our times.

And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overturned the colossal Saint Christopher, proverbial for his magnitude among statues, as the Grande Salle of the Palace was among halls, as the spire of Strasburg among steeples? And those myriads of statues which thronged all the intercolumniations of the nave and the choir, - kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, warriors, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in brass, and even in wax, - who has brutally swept them out? It is not Time that has done it.

And who has substituted for the old Gothic altar, splendidly loaded with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy sarcophagus of marble, with angels' heads and clouds, which looks like an unmatched specimen from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who has stupidly fixed that heavy anachronism of stone into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling the vow of Louis XIII. ?

And who has put cold white glass in place of those deep-tinctured panes which made the wandering eyes of our forefathers hesitate between the round window over the grand doorway and the pointed ones of the chancel? And what would a subchanter of the sixteenth century say, could he see that fine yellowwashing with which the Vandal archbishops have besmeared their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the hangman brushed over such buildings as were adjudged to be infamous; he would recollect the hôtel of the PetitBourbon, which had thus been washed all over yellow for the treason of the constable, - " yellow, after all, so well mixed," says Sauval, "and so well applied, that the lapse of a century and more has not yet taken its color." He would believe that the holy place had become infamous, and would flee away from it.

And then, if we ascend the cathedral, not to mention a thousand other barbarisms of every kind, what have they done with that charming small steeple which rose from the intersection of the cross, and which, no less bold and light than its neighbor, the spire (destroyed also) of the Sainte Chapelle, pierced into the sky yet farther than the towers, - perforated, sharp, sonorous, airy? An architect de bon goût amputated it in 1787, and thought it was sufficient to hide the wound with that great plaster of lead which resembles the lid of a porridge-pot.

Thus it is that the wondrous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in almost every country, and especially in France. In its ruin, three sorts of inroads are distinguishable, and have made breaches of different depths: first, Time, which has gradually made deficiencies here and there, and has gnawed over its whole surface; then, religious and political revolutions, which, blind and angry in their nature, have tumultuously wreaked their fury upon it, torn its rich garment of sculpture and carving, burst its rose-shaped windows, broken its bands of arabesques