很明顯，在引言匯中雨果發現了古代文化與現代文化之間的相似之處。雨果稱來自古希臘的紀元與傳奇與中世紀的思想有很多共同點，好像古代作品是由中世紀書吏寫的一樣。雨果暗示兩個時代的思想之所以相似，是因為思想通過文學和文字作品傳承了下來。在古希臘，紀元與傳奇常常刻在石板上。由於這些文獻代代相傳，因此它們對中世紀的影響很大，在那個時代，歐洲古代的作品被珍藏、被看重。同樣，印刷文獻也存在於兩個時代。然而，中世紀的文獻不是刻在石板上，而是印在紙，或羊皮紙上。
在此，雨果描述了建築物的重要性，以及它是如何反映一個社會的價值觀與思想的。華麗而顯赫的建築物在巴黎成為了廢墟，表明社會對財富、藝術、美學的熱情不再。這種熱情在文藝復興時再度興起，古代的文藝與風尚再度流行。雨果將這種傳承的熱情歸結於上古社會。雨果稱雖然古代法國的原始建築破敗失修，但它的建築美學為中世紀哥德式風格提供了靈感。雨果稱：「哥特一詞，從它的一般應用上來講是完全不合適的，卻又被尊為至高。由此，我們接受了它，習慣了它，和其它世界一樣，塑造了中世界後半部分的建築物，而尖頂拱卻來自於前半部分，半圓形則是其父。」
小說第一卷的主題是文化演化。雨果想要向世人展示人們是如何通過文學或技術襲承先前思想的。雨果繼續在時代之間強化了這一主題。他辯稱文學是思想在不同文化和時代之間傳承的一種方式。在第一卷第一章中，雨果辯稱建築物是另一種傳承方式。背景與建築物在小說中得到了重點突出，雨果常常對中世紀巴黎的建築物和紀念碑作了細緻入微的描述。他在風格上追溯到了哥德式特色，後者來源於更加古老的年代。在第一卷的全篇中，雨果將重點放在了文學、建築物、藝術對思想的傳承作用上。雨果對中世紀法國的哥特建築抱有濃厚的情懷，因此他的語氣是懷舊的，並且這種情緒貫穿了整部小說。
在第三卷中第一章中，小說的主題變成了歲月滄桑。第三卷著重描寫鐘樓怪人，它的外觀因歲月流逝而被磨損。敘述人描寫聖母院曾經壯美輝煌，如今卻破敗不堪。彩色的玻璃窗被「冷白窗格」代替，很明顯，敘述人的感情是酸楚的。對聖母院的翻修在某種程度上降低了它的價值內涵。樓梯被熙熙攘攘的城市掩埋，雕塑被挪走。時間的流逝對教堂產生了重大的改變，而這常常是負面的。時代的劃痕無法修復。敘述者稱：「時尚比革命的傷害更大。」對聖母院的翻修是時代的不幸，這成為小說第三卷中的主題。
Notre Dame de Paris Harvard Classics
| Victor Marie Hugo (1802–1885). Notre Dame de Paris. |
| The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917. |
| Book III |
| I. Notre Dame |
| ASSUREDLY the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris is, to this day, a majestic and sublime edifice. But noble as it has remained while growing old, one cannot but regret, cannot but feel indignant at the innumerable degradations and mutilations inflicted on the venerable pile, both by the action of time and the hand of man, regardless alike of Charlemagne, who laid the first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid the last. | 1 |
| On the face of this ancient queen of our cathedrals, beside each wrinkle one invariably finds a scar. “Tempus edax, homo edacior,” which I would be inclined to translate: “Time is blind, but man is senseless.” | 2 |
| Had we, with the reader, the leisure to examine, one by one, the traces of the destruction wrought on this ancient church, we should have to impute the smallest share to Time, the largest to men, and more especially to those whom we must perforce call artists, since, during the last two centuries, there have been individuals among them who assumed the title of architect. | 3 |
| And first of all, to cite only a few prominent examples, there are surely few such wonderful pages in the book of Architecture as the façades of the Cathedral. Here unfold themselves to the eye, successively and at one glance, the three deep Gothic doorways; the richly traced and sculptured band of twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rose-window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like a priest by the deacon and subdeacon; the lofty and fragile gallery of trifoliated arches supporting a heavy platform on its slender columns; finally, the two dark and massive towers with their projecting slate roofs—harmonious parts of one magnificent whole, rising one above another in five gigantic storeys, massed yet unconfused, their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving boldly allied to the impassive grandeur of the whole. A vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal achievement of a man and a nation—one and yet complex—like the Iliades and the Romances to which it is sister—prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch, where on every stone is displayed in a hundred variations the fancy of the craftsman controlled by the genius of the artist; in a word, a sort of human Creation, mighty and prolific, like the divine Creation, of which it seems to have caught the double characteristics—variety and eternity. | 4 |
| And what we say here of the façade applies to the entire church; and what we say of the Cathedral of Paris may be said of all the ministers of Christendom in the Middle Ages. | 5 |
| Everything stands in its proper relation in that self-evolved art, is logical, well-proportioned. By measuring one toe you can estimate the height of the giant. | 6 |
| To return to the façade of Notre Dame, as we see it to-day, when we stand lost in pious admiration of the mighty and awe-inspiring Cathedral, which, according to the chroniclers, strikes the beholder with terror—quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus. | 7 |
| Three important things are now missing in that façade: the flight of eleven steps which raised it above the level of the ground; the lower row of statues occupying the niches of the three doorways; and the upper series of twenty-eight, which filled the gallery of the first story and represented the earliest Kings of France, from Childebert to Philip Augustus, each holding in his hand the “imperial orb.” | 8 |
| The disappearance of the steps is due to Time, which by slow and irresistible degrees has raised the level of the soil of the city. But Time, though permitting these eleven steps, which added to the stately elevation of the pile, to be swallowed by the rising tide of the Paris pavement, has given to the Cathedral more perhaps than he took away; for it was the hand of Time that steeped its façade in those rich and sombre tints by which the old age of monuments becomes their period of beauty. | 9 |
| But who has overthrown the two rows of statues? Who has left the niches empty? Who has scooped out, in the very middle of the central door, that new and bastard-pointed arch? Who has dared to hang in it, cheek by jowl with Biscornette’s arabesques, that tasteless and clumsy wooden door with Louis XV carvings? Man—the architects—the artists of our own day! | 10 |
| And, if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown the colossal St. Christopher, proverbial among statues as the Grande Salle of the Palais among Halls, as the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral among steeples? And the countless figures—kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, knights, of stone, marble, gold, silver, brass, even wax—which peopled all the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir—what brutal hand has swept them away? Not that of Time. | 11 |
| And who replaced the ancient Gothic altar, splendidly charged with shrines and reliquaries, by that ponderous marble sarcophagus with its stone clouds and cherubs’ heads, which looks like an odd piece out of the Val de Grâce or of the Invalides? | 12 |
| And who was so besotted as to fix this lumbering stone anachronism into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV, in fulfillment of the vow of Louis XIII? | 13 |
| And who put cold white glass in the place of those “richly coloured” panes which caused the dazzled eyes of our fore-fathers to wander undecided from the rose-window over the great doorway to the pointed ones of the chancel and back again? And what would a priest of the sixteenth century say to the fine yellow wash with which the vandal Arch-bishops have smeared the walls of their Cathedral? He would recollect that this was the colour the hangman painted over houses of evil-fame; he would recall the Hôtel de Petit-Bourbon plastered all over with yellow because of the treason of its owner, the Connétable—“a yellow of so permanent a dye,” says Sauval, “and so well laid on, that the passage of more than a century has not succeeded in dimming its colour.” He would think that the Holy Place had become infamous and would flee from it. | 14 |
| And if we ascend the Cathedral, passing over a thousand barbarisms of every description—what has become of the charming little belfry, fretted, slender, pointed, sonorous, which rose from the point of intersection of the transept, and every whit as delicate and as bold as its neighbour the spire (likewise destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, soared into the blue, farther even than the towers? An architect “of taste” (1787) had it amputated, and deemed it sufficient reparation to hide the wound under the great lead plaster which looks like the lid of a sauce-pen. | 15 |
| Thus has the marvellous art of the Middle Ages been treated in almost every country, but especially in France. In its ruin three distinct factors can be traced, causing wounds of varying depths. | 16 |
| First of all, Time, which has gradually made breaches here and there and gnawed its whole surface; next, religious and political revolutions, which, in the blind fury natural to them, wreaked their tempestuous passions upon it, rent its rich garment of sculpture and carving, burst in its rose-windows, broke its necklets of arabesques and figurines, tore down its statues, one time for their mitres, another time for their crowns; and finally, the various fashions, growing ever more grotesque and senseless, which, from the anarchical yet splendid deviations of the Renaissance onwards, have succeeded one another in the inevitable decadence of Architecture. Fashion has committed more crimes than revolution. It has cut to the quick, it has attacked the very bone and framework of the art; has mangled, pared, dislocated, destroyed the edifice—in its form as in its symbolism, in its coherence as in its beauty. This achieved, it set about renewing—a thing which Time and Revolution, at least, never had the presumption to do. With unblushing effrontery, “in the interests of good taste,” it has plastered over the wounds of Gothic architecture with its trumpery knick-knacks, its marble ribbons and knots, its metal rosettes—a perfect eruption of ovolos, scrolls, and scallops; of draperies, garlands, fringes; of marble flames and brazen clouds; of blowzy cupids and inflated cherubs, which began by devouring the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and ended by causing it to expire, tortured and grimacing, two centuries later, in the boudoir of Mme. Dubarry. | 17 |
| Thus, to sum up the points we have just discussed, the ravages that now disfigure Gothic architecture are of three distinct kinds: furrows and blotches wrought by the hand of Time; practical violence—brutalities, bruises, fractures—the outcome of revolution, from Luther down to Mirabeau; mutilations, amputations, dislocation of members, restorations, the result of the labours—Greek, Roman, and barbarian—of the professors following out the rules of Vitruvius and Vignola. That magnificent art which the Goths created has been murdered by the Academies. | 18 |
| To the devastations of Time and of Revolutions—carried out at least with impartiality and grandeur—have been added those of a swarm of school-trained architects, duly licensed and incorporated, degrading their art deliberately and, with all the discernment of bad taste, substituting the Louis XV fussiness for Gothic simplicity, and all to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass to the dying lion; it is the ancient oak, dead already above, gnawed at the roots by worms and vermin. | 19 |
| How remote is this from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre Dame at Paris with the far-famed Temple of Diana at Ephesus, “so much vaunted by the ancient pagans,” which immortalized Erostratus, considered the Gallican Cathedral “more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.” 1 | 20 |
| For the rest, Notre Dame cannot, from the architectural point of view, be called complete, definite, classified. It is not a Roman church, neither is it a Gothic church. It is not typical of any style of architecture. Notre Dame has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive squareness, the round, wide, vaulted roof, the frigid nudity, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have their origin in the Roman arch. Nor is it like the Cathedral of Bourges, the splendid, airy, multiform, foliated, pinnacled, efflorescent product of the Gothic arch. Impossible, either, to rank it among that antique family of churches—sombre, mysterious, low-pitched, cowering, as it were, under the weight of the round arch; half Egyptian, wholly hieroglyphical, wholly sacerdotal, wholly symbolical; as regards ornament, rather overloaded with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than animals, with animals than human figures; less the work of the architect than the Bishop, the first transformation of the art still deeply imbued with theocratic and military discipline, having its root in the Byzantine Empire, and stopping short at William the Conqueror. Nor, again, can the Cathedral be ranked with that other order of lofty, aerial churches, with their wealth of painted windows and sculptured work, with their sharp pinnacles and bold outlines; communal and citizen—regarded as political symbols; free, capricious, untrammelled—regarded as works of art. This is the second transformation of architecture—no longer cryptic, sacerdotal, inevitable, but artistic, progressive, popular—beginning with the return from the Crusades and ending with Louis XI. | 21 |
| Notre Dame is neither pure Roman, like the first, nor pure Gothic, like the second; it is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect had just finished erecting the first pillars of the nave when the pointed arch, brought back by the Crusaders, arrived and planted itself victorious on the broad Roman capitals which were intended only to support round arches. Master, henceforth, of the situation, the pointed arch determined the construction of the rest of the building. Inexperienced and timid at its commencement, it remains wide and low, restraining itself, as it were, not daring to soar up into the arrows and lancets of the marvellous cathedrals of the later period. It would almost seem that it was affected by the proximity of the heavy Roman pillars. | 22 |
| Not that these edifices showing the transition from Roman to Gothic are less worthy of study than the pure models. They express a gradation of the art which would else be lost. It is the grafting of the pointed arch on to the circular arch. | 23 |
| Notre Dame de Paris, in particular, is a curious specimen of this variety. Every surface, every stone of this venerable pile, is a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art. Thus—to mention here only a few of the chief details—whereas the small Porte Rouge almost touches the limits of fifteenth century Gothic delicacy, the pillars of the nave, by their massiveness and great girth, reach back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would imagine that six centuries lay between that door and those pillars. Not even the Hermetics fail to find in the symbols of the grand doorway 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 Church of the Mystics—Gothic art—Saxon art—the ponderous round pillar reminiscent of Gregory VII, the alchemistic symbolism by which Nicolas Flamel paved the way for Luther—papal unity—schism—Saint-Germain-des-Prés—Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie—all are blended, combined, amalgamated in Notre Dame. This generative Mother-Church is, among the other ancient churches of Paris, a sort of Chimera: she has the head of one, the limbs of another, the body of a third—something of all. | 24 |
| These hybrid edifices are, we repeat, by no means the least interesting to the artist, the antiquary, and the historian. They let us realize to how great a degree architecture is a primitive matter, in that they demonstrate, as do the Cyclopean remains, the Pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that the greatest productions of architecture are not so much the work of individuals as of a community; are rather the offspring of a nation’s labour than the out-come of individual genius; the deposit of a whole people; the heaped-up treasure of centuries; the residuum left by the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, a species of formations. Each wave of time leaves its coating of alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monuments, each individual contributes his stone to it. Thus do the beavers work, thus the bees, thus man. Babel, that great symbol of architecture, is a bee-hive. | 25 |
| Great edifices, like the great mountains, are the work of ages. Often art undergoes a transformation while they are waiting pending completion—pendent opera interrupta—they then proceed imperturbably in conformity with the new order of things. The new art takes possession of the monument at the point at which it finds it, absorbs itself into it, develops it after its own idea, and completes it if it can. The matter is accomplished without disturbance, without effort, without reaction, in obedience to an undeviating, peaceful law of nature—a shoot is grafted on, the sap circulates, a fresh vegetation is in progress. Truly, there is matter for mighty volumes; often, indeed, for a universal history of mankind, in these successive layers of different periods of art, on different levels of the same edifice. The man, the artist, the individual, are lost sight of in these massive piles that have no record of authorship; they are an epitome, a totalization of human intelligence. Time is the architect—a nation is the builder. | 26 |
| Reviewing here only Christo-European architecture, that younger sister of the great Masonic movements of the East, it presents the aspect of a huge formation divided into three sharply defined superincumbent zones: the Roman, 2 the Greek, and that of the Renaissance, which we would prefer to call the Greco-Romanesque. The Roman stratum, the oldest and the lowest of the three, is occupied by the circular arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper stratum of the Renaissance. Between the two comes the pointed arch. The edifices which belong exclusively to one or other of these three strata are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete in themselves. The Abbey of Jumièges is one, the Cathedral of Reims another, the Sainte-Croix of Orleans is a third. But the three zones mingle and overlap one another at the edges, like the colours of the solar spectrum; hence these complex buildings, these edifices of the gradational, transitional period. One of them will be Roman as to its feet, Greek as to its body, and Greco-Romanesque as to its head. That happens when it has taken six hundred years in the building. But that variety is rare: the castle-keep of Etampes is a specimen. Edifices of two styles are more frequent. Such is Notre Dame of Paris, a Gothic structure, rooted by its earliest pillars in that Roman zone in which the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are entirely sunk. Such again is the semi-Gothic Chapter Hall of Bocherville, in which the Roman layer reaches half-way up. Such is the Cathedral at Rouen, which would be wholly Gothic had not the point of its central spire reached up into the Renaissance. 3 | 27 |
| For the rest, all these gradations, these differences, do but affect the surface of the building. Art has changed its skin, but the actual conformation of the Christian Church has remained untouched. It has ever the same internal structure, the same logical disposition of the parts. Be the sculptured and decorated envelope of a cathedral as it will, underneath, at least, as germ or rudiment, we invariably find the Roman basilica. It develops itself unswervingly on this foundation and following the same rules. There are invariably two naves crossing each other at right angles, the upper end of which, rounded off in a half circle, forms the choir; there are always two lower-pitched side-aisles for the processions—the chapels—sort of lateral passages communicating with the nave by its intercolumnar spaces. These conditions once fulfilled, the number of chapels, doorways, steeples, spires, may be varied to infinity, according to the fancy of the age, the nation, or the art. The proper observances of worship once provided for and insured, architecture is free to do as she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose-windows, arabesques, flutings, capitals, bas-reliefs—all these flowers of fancy she distributes as best suits her particular scheme of the moment. Hence the prodigious variety in the exterior of these edifices, in the underlying structure of which there rules so much order and uniformity. The trunk of the tree is unchanging; its vegetation only is variable. | 28 |
| Note 1. Histoire Gallicane, Book ii, period ii, fol. 130, p. 4.—AUTHOR’SOTE. [back] |
| Note 2. vThis is also known, according to situation, race, or style, as Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine: four sister and parallel architectures, each having its own peculiar characteristics, but all deriving from the same principle—the circular arch. Facies non omnibus una, non diversa tamen, qualem, etc.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back] |
| Note 3. This part of the spire, which was of timber, was destroyed by lightning in 1823.—AUTHOR’S NOTE. [back] |
- Notre-Dame De Paris at Project Gutenberg, 1888 English translation by Isabel Florence Hapgood (plain text and HTML)
BOOK THIRD.
CHAPTER I. 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.
* 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: _quæ 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.
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