part monastery, of which so admirable a nave still survives ;

the beautiful quadrilateral Monastery of the Mathurins;1 adjacent to it the Benedictine Monastery, within the wall of which they managed to knock up a theatre between the issue of the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Abbey of the Cordeliers, with its three enormous gables in a row; that of the Augustines, the tapering spire of which was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second pinnacle at this side of Paris, counting from the west. The colleges, the connecting link between the cloister and the world, held architecturally the mean between the great mansions and
1 An order formed in the twelfth century, specially vowed to the rescuing of Christians out of slavery.
126
VICTOR HUGO
the abbeys, mote severe in their elegance, more massive in their sculpture than the palaces, less serious in their style of architecture than the religious houses. Unfortunately, scarcely anything remains of these buildings, in which Gothic art held so admirable a balance between the sumptu¬ ous and the simple. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University quarter, illustrating every architectural era, from the Roman arches of Saint-Julien to the Gothic arches of Saint-Séverin) — the churches dom¬ inated the whole, and as one harmony more in that sea of harmonies they pierced in quick succession the waving, fretted outline of the gabled roofs with their boldly cut spires, their steeples, their tapering pinnacles, themselves but a magnificent exaggeration of the sharp angles of the roofs.
The ground of the University quarter was hilly, swelling in the southeast to the vast mound of the Montagne Sainte- Geneviève. It was curious to note, from the heights of Notre Dame, the multitude of narrow and tortuous streets (now the Quartier Latin), the clusters of houses, spreading helter-skelter in every direction down the steep sides of this hill to the water-edge, some apparently rushing down, others climbing up, and all clinging one to the other.
The inhabitants thronging the streets looked, from that height and at that distance, like a swarm of ants perpetually passing and repassing each other, and added greatly to the animation of the scene. •
)^And here and there, in the spaces between the roofs, the stfeeples, the innumerable projections which so fantastically bent and twisted and notched the outermost line of the quarter, you caught a glimpse of a moss-grown wall, a thick¬ set round tower, an embattled, fortress-like gateway — the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond this stretched the verdant meadows, ran the great high-roads with a few houses straggling along their sides, growing fewer the farther they were removed from the protecting barrier. Some of these suburbs were considerable. There was first — taking the Tournelle as the point of departure — the market-town of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge spanning the Bièvre; its Abbey, where the epitaph of King Louis the
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
127
Fat — epitaphium Ludovici Grossi — was to be seen; and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked by four belfry towers of the eleventh century (there is a similar one still to be seen at Etampes). Then there was Saint-Marceau, which already boasted three churches and a convent; then, leaving on the left the mill of the Gobelins with its white wall of enclosure, you came to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with its beautifully carved stone cross at the cross-roads; the Church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, then a charming Gothic structure; Saint-Magloire, with a beautiful nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hay¬ loft; and Notre Dame-des-Champs, which contained some Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving in the open fields the Chartreux Monastery, a sumptuous edifice contemporary to the Palais de Justice with its garden divided off into compartments, and the deserted ruins of Vauvert, the eye turned westward and fell upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the rear of which the market- town of Saint-Germain, already quite a large parish, formed fifteen or twenty streets, the sharp steeple of Saint-Sulpice marking one of the corners of the town boundary. Close by was the square enclosure of the Foire Saint-Germain, where the fairs were held — the present market-place. Then came the abbot’s pillory, a charming little round tower, capped by a cone of lead; farther on were the tile-fields and the Rue du Four, leading to the manorial bakehouse; then the mill on its raised mound; finally, the Lazarette, a small, isolated building scarcely discernible in the distance.
But what especially attracted the eye and held it long was the Abbey itself. Undoubtedly this monastery, in high repute both as a religious house and as a manor, this abbey- palace, wherein the Bishop of Paris esteemed it a privilege to pass one night ; with a refectory which the architect had endowed with the aspect, the beauty, and the splendid rose- window of a cathedral ; its elegant Lady Chapel ; its monu- tmental dormitories, its spacious gardens, its portcullis, its drawbridge, its belt of crenated wall, which seemed to stamp its crested outline on the meadow beyond, its court-yards where the glint of armour mingled with the shimmer of gold-embroidered vestments — the whole grouped and Tar-
138
VICTOR HUGO
shalled round the three high Roman towers firmly planted on a Gothic transept — all this, I say, produced a magnificent effect against the horizon.
When at length, after long contemplating the University, you turned towards the right bank — the Town — the scene changed its character abruptly. Much larger than the University quarter, the Town was much less of a united whole. The first glance showed it to be divided into several singularly distinct areas. First, on the east, in that part of the Town which still takes its name from the “marais” — the morass into which Camulogènes led Caesar — there was a great group of palaces extending to the water's edge. Four huge mansions, almost contiguous — the Hôtels Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, and the Logis de la Reine mirrored in the Seine their slated roofs and slender turrets. These four edifices filled the space between the Rue des Nonaindières to the Celestine Abbey, the spire of which formed a graceful relief to their line of gables and battlements. Some squalid, moss-grown hovels overhanging the water in front of these splendid buildings were not sufficient to conceal from view the beautifully ornamented corners of their façades, their great square stone casements, their Gothic porticoes sur¬ mounted by statues, the bold, clear-cut parapets of their walls, and all those charming architectural surprises which give Gothic art the appearance of forming her combina¬ tions afresh for each new structure. Behind these palaces ran in every direction, now cleft, palisaded, and embattled like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian monastery, the vast and multiform encircling wall of that marvellous Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the King of France had room to lodge superbly twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy with their retinues and their servants, not to mention the great barons, and the Emperor when he came to visit Paris, and the lions, who had a palace for themselves within the royal palace. And we must observe here that a prince’s lodging com¬ prised in those days not less than eleven apartments, from the state chamber to the oratory, besides all the galleries, the baths, the “sweating-rooms,” and other “superfluous places” with which each suite of apartments was provided — -
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
129
not to mention the gardens specially allotted to each guest of the King, nor the kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and general refectories of the household; the inner court-yards in which were situated twenty-two general offices, from the bakehouse to the royal cellarage; the grounds for every sort and description of game — mall, tennis, tilting at the ring, etc. ; aviaries, fish-ponds, menageries, stables, cattle- sheds, libraries, armouries, and foundries. Such was, at that day, a King’s palace — a Louvre, an Hôtel Saint-Pol — • a city within a city.
From the tower on which we have taken up our stand, one obtained of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, though half-hidden by the four great mansions we spoke of, a very considerable and wonderful view. You could clearly distinguish in it, though skilfully welded to the main building by windowed and pillared galleries, the three mansions which Charles V had absorbed into his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce with the fretted parapet that gracefully bordered its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbot of Saint-Maur, having all the appearance of a fortress, with its massive tower, its machicolations, loopholes, iron bulwarks, and over the great Saxon gate, between the two grooves for the drawbridge, the escutcheon of the Abbot; the Hôtel of the Comte d’Etampes, of which the keep, ruined at its summit, was arched and notched like a cock’s-comb ; here and there, three or four ancient oaks grouped together in one great bushy clump ; a glimpse of swans floating on clear pools, all flecked with light and shadow; picturesque corners of innumerable court wards; the Lion house, with its low Gothic arches on short Roman pillars, its iron bars and continuous roaring; cutting right through this picture the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria Chapel; on the left, the Mansion of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately perforated turrets; and, in the centre of it all, the Hôtel Saint-Pol itself, with its multiplicity of façades, its successive enrichments since the time of Charles V, the heterogeneous excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during two centuries, with all the roofs of its chapels, all its gables, its galleries, a thousand weather-cocks turning to the four winds of heaven, and its two lofty, contiguous towers with conical
130
VICTOR HUGO
roofs surrounded by battlements at the base, looking like peaked hats with the brim turned up.
Continuing to mount the steps of this amphitheatre of palaces, rising tier upon tier in the distance, having crossed the deep fissure in the roofs of the Town which marked the course of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye travelled on to the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure of several periods, parts of which were glaringly new and white, blending with the rest about as well as a crimson patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the peculiarly sharp and high-pitched roof of the modern palace — bristling with sculptured gargoyles, and covered with sheets of lead, over which ran sparkling in¬ crustations of gilded copper in a thousand fantastic arabesques — this curiously damascened roof rose gracefully out of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose massive old towers, bulging cask-like with age, sinking into them¬ selves with decrepitude, and rent from top to bottom, looked like great unbuttoned waistcoats. Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. No show-place in the world — not even Chambord or the Alhambra — could afford a more magical, more ethereal, more enchanting spectacle than this grove of spires, bell-towers, chimneys, weather-cocks, spiral stair-cases; of airy lantern towers that seemed to have been worked with a chisel ; of pavilions; of spindle-shaped turrets, all diverse in shape, height, and position. It might have been a gigantic chess-board in stone.
That sheaf of enormous black towers to the right of the inky Tournelles, pressing one against the other, and bound together, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon-keep, pierced far more numerously with shot-holes than with win¬ dows, its drawbridge always raised, its portcullis always lowered — that is the Bastile. Those objects like black beaks projecting from the embrasures of the battlements, and which, from a distance, you might take for rain-spouts, are cannon. Within their range, at the foot of the formidable pile, is the Porte Saint-Antoine, crouching between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, reaching to the wall of Charles V, stretched in rich diversity of lawns and flower-beds a
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
131
velvet carpet of gardens and royal parks, in the heart of which, conspicuous by its maze of trees and winding paths, one recognised the famous labyrinthine garden presented by Louis XI to Coictier. The great physician’s observatory rose out of the maze like a massive, isolated column with a tiny house for its capital. Many a terrible astrological crime was perpetrated in that laboratory. This is now the Place Royale.
As we have said, the Palace quarter, of which we have endeavoured to convey some idea to the reader, though merely pointing out the chief features, filled the angle formed by the Seine and the w7all of Charles V on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a congeries of dwelling- houses. For it was here that the three bridges of the City on the right bank discharged their streams of passengers; and bridges lead to the building of houses before palaces. This collection of middle-class dwellings, closely packed to¬ gether like the cells of a honeycomb, was, however, by no means devoid of beauty. The sea of roofs of a great city has much of the grandeur of the ocean about it. To begin with, the streets in their crossings and windings cut up the mass into a hundred charming figures, streaming out from the Halles like the rays of a star. The streets of Saint- Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, went up side by side like two great trees intertwining their branches ; while such streets as the Rue de la Plâterie, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue de la Tixeranderie, etc., wound in tortuous lines through the whole. Some handsome edifices, too, thrust up their heads through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. For instance, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which you could see the Seine foaming under the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, there was the Châtelet, no longer a Roman keep, as under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and built of stone so hard that three hours’ work with the pick did not remove more than the size of a man’s fist. Then there was the square steeple of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its richly sculptured corners, most worthy of admiration even then, though it was not completed in the fifteenth century; it lacked in particular the four monsters which, still pe ,hed
132
VICTOR HUGO
on the four corners of its roof, look like sphinxes offering to modern Paris the enigma of the old to unriddle. Rault, the sculptor, did not put them up till 1526, and received twenty- francs for his trouble. There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, facing the Place de Grève, of which we have already given the reader some idea ; there was Saint-Gervais, since spoilt by a doorway “in good taste”; Saint-Méry, of which the primitive pointed arches were scarcely more than circular; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; and twenty other edifices which disdained not to hide their won¬ ders in that chaos of deep, dark, narrow streets. Add to these the carved stone crosses, more numerous at the cross- ways than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, of whose enclosing wall you caught a glimpse in the distance; the pillory of the Halles, just visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the gibbet of the Croix du Trahoir at the corner of the ever-busy thoroughfare ; the round stalls of the Corn Market; fragments of the old wall of Philip Augustus, distinguishable here and there, buried among the houses ; mouldering, ivy-clad towers, ruined gate¬ ways, bits of crumbling walls ; the quay with its myriad booths and gory skinning yards ; the Seine, swarming with boats from the Port au Foin or hay wharf to the For- l’Evêque, and you will be able to form some adequate idea of what the great irregular quadrangle of the Town looked like in 1482.
Besides these two quarters — the one of palaces, the other of houses — the Town contributed a third element to the view : that of a long belt of abbeys which bordered almost its entire circumference from east to west; and, lying just inside the fortified wall which encircled Paris, furnished a second internal rampart of cloisters and chapels. Thus, im¬ mediately adjoining the park of the Tournelles, between the Rue Saint- Antoine and the old Rue du Temple, stood the old convent of Sainte-Catherine, with its immense grounds, bounded only by the city wall. Between the old and the new Rue du Temple was the Temple itself, a grim sheaf of lofty towers, standing haughty and alone, surrounded by a vast, embattled wall. Between the Rue Neuve du Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, in the midst of gardens, stood the
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
133
Abbey of Saint-Martin, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers and crown of steeples were second only to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in strength and splendour.
Between the two streets of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis stretched the convent enclosure of the Trinité, and between the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Montorgueil that of Filles- Dieu. Close by, one caught a glimpse of the mouldering roofs and broken wall of the Cour des Miracles, the only pro¬ fane link in that pious chain.
Lastly, the fourth area, standing out distinctly in the conglomeration of roofs on the right bank, and occupying the eastern angle formed by the city wall and the river wall, was a fresh knot of palaces and mansions clustered round the foot of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that stupendous pile whose enormous middle tower mustered round it twenty-three major towers, irrespective of the smaller ones, appeared from the distance as if encased within the Gothic roof-lines of the Hôtel d’Alençon and the Petit- Bourbon. This hydra of towers, this guardian monster of Paris, with its twenty-four heads ever erect, the tremendous ridge of its roof sheathed in lead or scales of slate and glis¬ tening in metallic lustre, furnished an unexpected close to the western configuration of the Town.
This then, was the town of Paris in the fifteenth century — an immense mass — what the Romans called insula — of burgher dwelling-houses, flanked on either side by two blocks of palaces, terminated the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long chain of abbeys and walled gardens all blended and mingling in one harmonious whole ; above these thousand buildings with their fantastic outline of tiled and slated roofs, the steeples — fretted, fluted honeycombed — of the forty-four churches on the right bank; myriads of streets cutting through it; as boundary: on one side a circuit of lofty walls with square towers (those of the University wall were round) ; on the other, the Seine, intersected by bridges and carrying number¬ less boats.
Beyond the walls a few suburbs hugged the protection of the gates, but they were less numerous and more scattered than on the side of the University. In the rear of the Br ille
134
VICTOR HUGO
about twenty squalid cottages huddled round the curious stonework of the Croix-Faubin, and the abutments of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then came Popincourt, buried in cornfields; then La Courtille, a blithe village of taverns; the market-town of Saint-Laurent with its church steeple appearing in the distance as if one of the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the suburb of Saint-Denis with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; outside the Porte- Montmartre, the Grange-Batelière encircled by white walls; behind that again, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which then had almost as many churches as wind-mills, but has only retained the wind-mills, for the world is now merely con¬ cerned for bread for the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre, among the meadows, stretched the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, already a considerable suburb, and the verdant pastures of Petite-Bretagne and the Marché-aux-Porceaux or pig- market, in the middle of which stood the horrible furnace where they seethed the false coiners.
On the top of a hill, rising out of the solitary plain between La Courtille and Saint-Laurent, you will have remarked a sort of building, presenting the appearance, in the distance, of a ruined colonnade with its foundation laid bare. But this was neither a Panthéon nor a Temple of Jupiter; it was Montfaucon.1
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, brief as we have done our best to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the image of old Paris as fast as we have built it up, we will recapitulate in a few words. In the centre, the island of the City like an immense tortoise, stretching out its tiled bridges like scaly paws from under its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the dense, bristling, square block of the University; on the right, the high semicircle of the Town, showing many more gardens and isolated edifices than the other two. The three areas. City, University, and Town, are veined with streets innumerable. Athwart the whole runs the Seine — “the fostering Seine,” as Peter du Breul calls it — encumbered with islands, bridges, and boats. All around, a vast plain checkered with a thousand forms of
1 The place of execution, furnished with immense gibbets, the site of an ancient Druidical temple.
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
135
cultivation and dotted with fair villages; to the left, Issy, Vanves, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round and its square tower, etc. ; to the right, a score of others from Conflans to Ville-rEvêque ; on the horizon, a border of hills ranged in a circle, the rim of the basin, as it were. Finally, far to the east, Vincennes with its seven square towers; southward, Bicêtre and its sharp-pointed turrets; northward, Saint-Denis with its spire; and in the west, Saint-Cloud and its castle-keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens of 1482 looked down upon from the heights of Notre Dame.
And yet this was the city of which Voltaire said that “be¬ fore the time of Louis XIV it only possessed four handsome examples of architecture” — the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I forget the fourth — the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was none the less the author of Candide; and none the less the man of all others in the long line of humanity who possessed in highest perfection the rire diabolique — the sardonic smile. It proves, besides, that one may be a brilliant genius, and yet know nothing of an art one has not studied. Did not Molière think to greatly honour Raphael and Michael Angelo by calling them “the Mignards1 of their age”?
But to return to Paris and the fifteenth century.
It was in those days not only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, a direct product — architectural and his¬ torical — of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city composed of two architectural strata only — the Roman¬ esque and the Gothic — for the primitive Roman layer had long since disappeared excepting in the Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick overlying crust of the ' Middle Ages. As for the Celtic stratum, no trace of it was discoverable even when sinking wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance came, and with that unity of style, so severe and yet so varied, associated its dazzling wealth of fantasy and design, its riot of Roman arches, Doric columns and Gothic vaults, its delicate and ideal sculpture, its own peculiar tastes in arabesques and cap-
1 Pierre Mignard (1610-1695), the well-known French painter, a con¬ temporary of Molière.
136
VICTOR HUGO
itals, its architectural paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps more beautiful still though less harmoni¬ ous to the eye and the strictly artistic sense. But that splendid period was of short duration. The Renaissance was not impartial; it was not content only to erect, it must also pull down; to be sure, it required space. Gothic Paris was complete but for a moment. Scarcely was Saint-Jacques- de-la-Boucherie finished when the demolition of the old Louvre began.
Since then the great city has gone on losing her beauty day by day. The Gothic Paris, which was effacing the Romanesque, has been effaced in its turn. But what name shall be given to the Paris which has replaced it?
We have the Paris of Catherine de Médicis in the Tuiler¬ ies; the Paris of Henri II in the Hôtel-de-Ville, both edi¬ fices in the grand style; the Place Royale shows us the Paris of Henri IV — brick fronts, stone copings, and slate roofs — tricolour houses; the Val-de-Grâce is the Paris of Louis XIII — low and broad in style, with basket-handle arches and something indefinably pot-bellied about its pillars and humpbacked about its domes. We see the Paris of Louis XIV in the Invalides — stately, rich, gilded, cold; the Paris of Louis XV at Saint-Sulpice — scrolls and love-knots and clouds, vermicelli and chicory leaves — all in stone ; the Paris of Louis XVI in the Panthéon, a bad copy of Saint Peter’s at Rome (the building has settled rather crookedly, which has not tended to improve its lines) ; the Paris of the Republic at the School of Medicine — a spurious hash of Greek and Roman, with about as much relation to the Col¬ iseum or the Pantheon as the constitution of the year III has to the laws of Minos — a style known in architecture as “the Messidor”;1 the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme — a sublime idea, a bronze column made of can¬ nons; the Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse — an abnor¬ mally white colonnade supporting an abnormally smooth frieze — it is perfectly square and cost twenty million francs.
To each of these characteristic buildings there belongs, in virtue of a similarity of style, of form, and of disposition,
1 From that period of the French Revolution when this bad imitation of the antique was much in vogue.
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
137
a certain number of houses scattered about the various dis¬ tricts easily recognised and assigned to their respective dates by the eye of the connoisseur. To the seeing eye, the spirit of a period and the features of a King are traceable even in the knocker of a door.
The Paris of to-day has, therefore, no typical character¬ istic physiognomy. It is a collection of samples of several periods, of which the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing in houses only, and what houses ! At this rate, there will be a new Paris every fifty years. The historic significance, too, of its architecture is lessened day by day. The great edifices are becoming fewer and fewer, are being swallowed up before our eyes by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of stucco.
As for the modern structures of this new Paris, we would much prefer not to dilate upon them. Not that we fail to give them their due. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest tea-cake that ever was made of stone. The palace of the Légion d;Honneur is also a most distin¬ guished piece of confectionery. The dome of the Corn Market is a jockey-cap set on the top of a high ladder. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two great clarinets — a shape which is as good as any other — and the grinning zigzag of the telegraph agreeably breaks the monotony of their roofs. Saint-Roch possesses a door that can only be matched in magnificence by that of Saint Thomas Aquinas; also it own' a Calvary in alto-relievo down in a cellar, and a monstrance of gilded wood — real marvels these, one must admit. The lantern tower in the maze at the Botanical Gardens is als. vastly ingenious. As regards the Bourse, which is Greek a? to its colonnade, Roman as to the round arches of its win¬ dows and doors, and Renaissance as to its broad, low, vaulted roof, it is indubitably in purest and most correct style; in proof of which we need only state that it is crowned by an attic storey such as was never seen in Athens — a beautiful straight line, gracefully intersected at intervals by chimney pots. And, admitting that it be a rule in architecture that a building should be so adapted to its purpose that that purpose should at once be discernible in the aspect of the edifice iO
6— L
138
VICTOR HUGO
praise is too high for a structure which might, from its ap¬ pearance, be indifferently a royal palace, a chamber of deputies, a town hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court of justice, a museum, a barracks, a mausoleum, a temple, or a theatre — and all the time it is an Exchange. Again, a building should be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously constructed for our cold and rainy skies. It has an almost flat roof, as they obtain in the East, so that in winter, when it snows, that roof has to be swept, and, of course, we all know that roofs are intended to be swept. And as regards the purpose of which we spoke just now, the building fulfils it to admiration; it is a Bourse in France as it would have been a Temple in Greece. It is true that the architect has been at great pains to conceal the face of the clock, which would have spoilt the pure lines of the façade; but in return, we have the colonnade running round the entire building, under which, on high-days and holidays, the imposing procession of stock-brokers and ex¬ change-agents can display itself in all its glorv.
These now are undoubtedly very superior buildings. Add to them a number of such handsome, interesting, and varied streets as the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris offering one day to the view, if seen from a balloon, that wealth of outline, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that indescribable air of grandeur in its simplicity, of the unexpected in its beauty, which characterizes — a draught-board.
Nevertheless, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, conjure up the Paris of the fifteenth century; rebuild it in imagination ; look through that amazing forest of spires, towers, and steeples ; pour through the middle of the immense city the Seine, with its broad green and yellow pools that make it iridescent as a serpent’s skin; divide it at the island points, send it swirling round the piers of the bridges ; project sharply against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of old Paris; let its outline float in a wintry mist clinging round its numerous chimneys ; plunge it in deepest night, and watch the fantastic play of light and shadow in that sombre laby¬ rinth of edifices; cast into it a ray of moonlight, showing it vague and uncertain, with its towers rearing their massive
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
139
heads above the mists; or go back to the night scene, touch up the thousand points of the spires and gables with shadow, let it stand out more ridged and jagged than a shark’s jaw against a coppery sunset sky — and then compare.
And if you would receive from the old city an impression the modern one is incapable of giving, go at dawn on some great festival — Easter or Whitsuntide — and mount to some elevated point, whence the eye commands the entire capi¬ tal, and be present at the awakening of the bells. Watch, at a signal from heaven — for it is the sun that gives it- — those thousand churches starting from their sleep. First come scattered notes passing from church to church, as when musicians signal to one another that the concert is to begin. Then, suddenly behold — for there are moments when the ear, too, seems to have sight — behold, how, at the same moment, from every steeple there rises a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell mounts up straight, pure, isolated from the rest, into the resplendent sky of morn; then, by degrees, as the waves spread out, they mingle, blend, unite one with the other, and melt into one magnificent concert. Now it is one unbroken stream of sonorous sound poured incessantly from the innumerable steeples — floating, undulating, leaping, eddying over the city, the deafening circle of its vibration extending far beyond the horizon. Yet this scene of harmony is no chaos. Wide and deep though it be, it never loses its limpid clearness; you can follow the windings of each separate group of notes that detaches itself from the peal ; you can catch the dialogue, deep and shrill by turns, between the bourdon and the cre- celle; you hear the octaves leap from steeple to steeple, dart¬ ing winged, airy, strident from the bell of silver, dropping halt and broken from the bell of wood. You listen delightedly to the rich gamut, incessantly ascending and descending, of the seven bells of Saint-Eustache ; clear and rapid notes flash across the whole in luminous zigzags, and then vanish like lightning. That shrill, cracked voice over there comes from the Abbey of Saint-Martin; here the hoarse and sinister growl of the Bastile ; at the other end the boom of the great tower of the Louvre. The royal carillon of the Palais scat¬ ters its glittering trills on every side, and on them, at re Jar
140
VICTOR HUGO
intervals, falls the heavy clang of the great bell of Notre Dame, striking flashes from them as the hammer from the anvil. At intervals, sounds of every shape pass by, coming from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, ever and anon, the mass of sublime sound opens and gives passage to the stretto of the Ave-Maria chapel, flashing through like a shower of meteors. Down below, in the very depths of the chorus, you can just catch the chanting inside the churches, exhaled faintly through the pores of their vibrating domes. Here, in truth, is an opera worth listening to. In general, the murmur that rises up from Paris during the daytime is the city talking; at night it is the city breathing; but this is the city singing. Lend your ear, then, to this tutti of the bells; diffuse over the ensemble the murmur of half a million of human beings, the eternal plaint of the river, the ceaseless rushing of the wind, the solemn and distant quartet of the four forests set upon the hills, round the horizon, like so many enormous organ-cases; muffle in this, as in a sort of twilight, all of the great central peal that might otherwise be too hoarse or too shrill, and then say whether you know of anything in the world more rich, more blithe, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes — this furnace of music, these ten thousand brazen voices singing at once in flutes of stone, three hundred feet high — this city which is now but one vast orchestra — this symphony with the mighty uproar of a tempest.