The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic andsublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old,it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberlessdegradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused thevenerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laidits first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.
On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of awrinkle, one always finds a scar. _Tempus edax, homo edacior*_; which Ishould 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 diversetraces of destruction imprinted upon the old church, time's share wouldbe the least, the share of men the most, especially the men of art,since there have been individuals who assumed the title of architectsduring the last two centuries.
And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples, therecertainly are few finer architectural pages than this facade, where,successively and at once, the three portals hollowed out in an arch; thebroidered and dentated cordon of the eight and twenty royal niches; theimmense central rose window, flanked by its two lateral windows, likea priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery oftrefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its fine, slendercolumns; and lastly, the two black and massive towers with their slatepenthouses, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed in fivegigantic stories;--develop themselves before the eye, in a mass andwithout 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 manand one people, all together one and complex, like the Iliads and theRomanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious product of the groupingtogether of all the forces of an epoch, where, upon each stone, one seesthe fancy of the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist startforth in a hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word,powerful and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems to havestolen 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 allthe churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. All things are in placein that art, self-created, logical, and well proportioned. To measurethe 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, whichinspires terror, so its chronicles assert: _quae mole sua terroremincutit spectantibus_.
Three important things are to-day lacking in that facade: in the firstplace, the staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above thesoil; next, the lower series of statues which occupied the niches ofthe three portals; and lastly the upper series, of the twenty-eight mostancient kings of France, which garnished the gallery of the first story,beginning with Childebert, and ending with Phillip Augustus, holding inhis hand "the imperial apple."
Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of thecity with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing theeleven steps which added to the majestic height of the edifice, tobe devoured, one by one, by the rising tide of the pavements ofParis,--time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it has takenaway, for it is time which has spread over the facade that sombre hue ofthe centuries which makes the old age of monuments the period of theirbeauty.
But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the nichesempty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that newand bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace andheavy door of carved wood, a la Louis XV., beside the arabesques ofBiscornette? The men, the architects, the artists of our day.
And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown thatcolossus of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues,as the grand hall of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spireof Strasbourg among spires? And those myriads of statues, which peopledall 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,--whohas brutally swept them away? It is not time.
And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumberedwith shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, withangels' heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged fromthe Val-de-Grace or the Invalides? Who stupidly sealed that heavyanachronism of stone in the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was itnot Louis XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?
And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows, "highin color," which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitatebetween the rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? Andwhat would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholdingthe beautiful yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals havedesmeared their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color withwhich the hangman smeared "accursed" edifices; he would recall theHotel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable'streason. "Yellow, after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and sowell recommended, that more than a century has not yet caused it to loseits color." He would think that the sacred place had become infamous,and would flee.
And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand barbarismsof 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 (alsodestroyed), the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, buried itself in the sky,farther forward than the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carvedin open work. An architect of good taste amputated it (1787), andconsidered it sufficient to mask the wound with that large, leadenplaster, which resembles a pot cover.
'Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated innearly every country, especially in France. One can distinguish onits ruins three sorts of lesions, all three of which cut into it atdifferent depths; first, time, which has insensibly notched its surfacehere and there, and gnawed it everywhere; next, political and religiousrevolution, which, blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselvestumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of carving and sculpture,burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tinyfigures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their mitres,sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more grotesqueand foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations ofthe Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary decadenceof architecture. Fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions. Theyhave cut to the quick; they have attacked the very bone and framework ofart; they have cut, slashed, disorganized, killed the edifice, in formas in the symbol, in its consistency as well as in its beauty. Andthen they have made it over; a presumption of which neither time norrevolutions 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 pomponsof 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 theoratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause it to expire, two centurieslater, tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of the Dubarry.
Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated, three sorts ofravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on theepidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities,contusions, fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from Lutherto Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints,"restorations"; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian work ofprofessors according to Vitruvius and Vignole. This magnificent artproduced by the Vandals has been slain by the acad
emies. The centuries,the revolutions, which at least devastate with impartiality andgrandeur, have been joined by a cloud of school architects, licensed,sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment and choice ofbad taste, substituting the _chicorees_ of Louis XV. for the Gothiclace, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the assat the dying lion. It is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heapthe measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.
How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Damede Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, *so much laudedby the ancient pagans*, which Erostatus *has* immortalized, foundthe Gallic temple "more excellent in length, breadth, height, andstructure."*
* _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 aGothic church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame de Paris has not,like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive frame, the largeand round vault, the glacial bareness, the majestic simplicity of theedifices 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. Impossibleto class it in that ancient family of sombre, mysterious churches, lowand crushed as it were by the round arch, almost Egyptian, with theexception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, allsymbolical, more loaded in their ornaments, with lozenges and zigzags,than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with animals thanwith men; the work of the architect less than of the bishop; firsttransformation of art, all impressed with theocratic and militarydiscipline, taking root in the Lower Empire, and stopping with the timeof William the Conqueror. Impossible to place our Cathedral in thatother family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows andsculpture; pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois aspolitical symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; secondtransformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable andsacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at thereturn from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris isnot of pure Romanesque, like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, likethe second.
It is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect completedthe erection of the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch,which dates from the Crusade, arrived and placed itself as a conquerorupon the large Romanesque capitals which should support only roundarches. The pointed arch, mistress since that time, constructed the restof the church. Nevertheless, timid and inexperienced at the start, itsweeps out, grows larger, restrains itself, and dares no longer dartupwards in spires and lancet windows, as it did later on, in so manymarvellous cathedrals. One would say that it were conscious of thevicinity of the heavy Romanesque pillars.
However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque to theGothic, are no less precious for study than the pure types. They expressa shade of the art which would be lost without them. It is the graft ofthe pointed upon the round arch.
Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of thisvariety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page notonly of the history of the country, but of the history of science andart as well. Thus, in order to indicate here only the principal details,while the little Red Door almost attains to the limits of the Gothicdelicacy of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by theirsize and weight, go back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain desPres. One would suppose that six centuries separated these pillars fromthat door. There is no one, not even the hermetics, who does not findin the symbols of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of theirscience, of which the Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was socomplete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Roman abbey, the philosophers' church,the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recallsGregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with which Nicolas Flamel playedthe prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain des Pres,Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,--all are mingled, combined, amalgamatedin Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the ancient churchesof Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs ofanother, the haunches of another, something of all.
We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interestingfor the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They makeone feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, bydemonstrating (what is also demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges,the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindoo pagodas) that the greatestproducts of architecture are less the works of individuals than ofsociety; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspiredflash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heapsaccumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations ofhuman society,--in a word, species of formations. Each wave of timecontributes 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. Artoften undergoes a transformation while they are pending, _pendent operainterrupta_; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformedart. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itselfthere, 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 tranquillaw. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetationwhich starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many largevolumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successiveengrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man,the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, whichlack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up andtotalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.
Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture ofEurope, that younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient,it appears to the eyes as an immense formation divided into threewell-defined zones, which are superposed, the one upon the other: theRomanesque zone*, the Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, whichwe would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone. The Roman layer, which isthe most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the round arch, whichreappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper layerof the Renaissance. The pointed arch is found between the two. Theedifices which belong exclusively to any one of these three layersare perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey ofJumieges, there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix ofOrleans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the edges, likethe colors in the solar spectrum. Hence, complex monuments, edificesof gradation and transition. One is Roman at the base, Gothic in themiddle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is because it was six hundred yearsin building. This variety is rare. The donjon keep of d'Etampes is aspecimen of it. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. Thereis Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded byits pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal ofSaint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Pres. There is thecharming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Romanlayer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen, which wouldbe entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its central spire inthe zone of the Renaissance.**
* This is the same which is called, according to locality,climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine. There are four sisterand parallel architectures, each having its special character, butderived 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 ofsisters ought to be.
** This portion of the spire, which was of woodwork, is preciselythat which was consumed by lightning, in 1823.
However
, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect thesurfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. Thevery constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. Thereis always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangementof parts. Whatever may be the carved and embroidered envelope of acathedral, one always finds beneath it--in the state of a germ, and ofa rudiment at the least--the Roman basilica. It is eternally developedupon the soil according to the same law. There are, invariably, twonaves, which intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded intoan apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for interiorprocessions, for chapels,--a sort of lateral walks or promenades wherethe principal nave discharges itself through the spaces between thepillars. That settled, the number of chapels, doors, bell towers,and pinnacles are modified to infinity, according to the fancy of thecentury, the people, and art. The service of religion once assuredand provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues,stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals,bas-reliefs,--she combines all these imaginings according to thearrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior varietyof these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity.The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.
CHAPTER II. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.