Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  Yet this was the town of which Voltaire said ‘before Louis XIV it possessed only four fine monuments’:* the dome of the Sorbonne, Val de Grâce, the modern Louvre, and a fourth that I forget, perhaps the Luxembourg. Fortunately, Voltaire none the less wrote Candide, and of all those who have followed one another in the long line of mankind he is the man with the most diabolical laugh. That also proves that one can be a real genius and still lack all understanding of an art which is not one’s own. Did not Molière think he was paying Raphael and Michelangelo a handsome tribute when he called them ‘the Mignards* of their age’?

  Let us return to Paris and the fifteenth century.

  It was not merely a fine town at that time; it was a homogeneous town, the architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city formed of two strata only, the Romanesque and the Gothic, for the Roman stratum had long since disappeared, except for Julian’s Baths, where it still broke through the thick medieval crust. As for the Celtic stratum, no more examples of it were being found then, even when wells were dug.

  Fifty years later, when the Renaissance arrived to add to that unity, so austere and yet so varied, the dazzling profusion of its fantasies and systems, its riot of rounded Roman arches, Greek columns and Gothic surbasements, its sculpture full of such idealized tenderness, its special taste for arabesques and acanthus, the paganism of its architecture, in an age when Luther too was alive, Paris was perhaps even more beautiful, though less harmonious to the eye and the mind. But that splendid moment did not last. The Renaissance was not impartial; it was not content with putting up, it wanted also to pull down. It is true that it needed room. So Gothic Paris was complete only for a minute. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was hardly finished before they began demolishing the old Louvre.

  Since then the great city has suffered more and more disfigurement, day by day. The Gothic Paris beneath which Romanesque Paris disappeared has disappeared in its turn. But can we say what sort of Paris has taken its place?

  There is the Paris of Catherine de’ Medici at the Tuileries,1 the Paris of Henri II at the Hôtel de Ville, two buildings still in excellent taste; the Paris of Henri IV in the Place Royale: brick façades with stone quoins and slate roofs, tricolour houses; the Paris of Louis XIII at Val-de-Grâce: a squat, compressed architecture, vaults like basket handles, something paunchy about the columns and humpbacked about the dome; the Paris of Louis XIV at the Invalides: grand, ornate, gilded and cold; the Paris of Louis XV at Saint-Sulpice: scrolls, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chicory, all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI, at the Panthéon: a poor copy of Saint Peter’s in Rome (the building has settled awkwardly, which has not improved its lines); the Paris of the Republic, at the École de Medecine: a poor Graeco-Roman style as much like the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the Constitution of the Year III is like that of Minos, in architecture it is known as the ‘Messidor style’;* the Paris of Napoleon at the Place Vendôme: that is quite sublime, a bronze column made from cannon; the Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze, the whole is square and cost 20 million.

  Associated with each of these typical monuments by similarity of style, manner, and attitude are a certain number of houses scattered through different districts, which the connoisseur’s eye can easily pick out and date. Anyone who knows how to look can recognize the spirit of an age and the physiognomy of a king even in a door-knocker.

  Present-day Paris has, then, no general physiognomy. It is a collection of examples from several centuries, and the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing only in houses, and what houses! At the rate Paris is going it will be renewed every fifty years. So the historical significance of its architecture is being erased every day. Its monuments are becoming increasingly rare, and they are, as it seems, being gradually swallowed up before our eyes, drowned in the sea of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of plaster.

  As for the modern monuments of our new Paris, we shall gladly refrain from comment. Not that we withhold from them the admiration which is their due. Monsieur Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève is certainly the finest sponge cake ever made out of stone. The Palais of the Légion d’Honneur is also a most distinguished piece of confectionery. The dome of the corn market is an English jockey cap on the grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets, a shape as shapes go; the crooked, grinning telegraph makes a pleasant contrast on their roofline. Saint-Roch has a doorway that can be compared in magnificence only with Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It has also a calvary sculpted in the round in a cellar and a sun made of gilded wood. These are all real marvels. The lantern in the maze at the Jardin des Plantes is also most ingenious. As for the palace of the Bourse, Greek in its colonnades, Roman in the rounded arches of its doors and windows, Renaissance in its great surbased ceiling, it is indisputably a monument in the purest and most correct style. To prove the point, it is crowned by an attic storey such as was never seen in Athens, a fine straight line, gracefully broken here and there by stove pipes. Let us add that it is the rule that a building’s architecture should be so adapted to its intended function that that function should be self-evident simply from the appearance of the building. No admiration could be too great for a monument which might equally well be a king’s palace, a house of commons, a town hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a warehouse, a lawcourt, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, a theatre. For the moment it is a stock exchange. A monument should furthermore be appropriate to the climate. This one has obviously been constructed expressly for our cold, rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat as in the East, with the result that in winter, when it snows, they sweep the roof, and roofs are assuredly made to be swept. As for the intended function just mentioned, it fulfils it wonderfully; it is a Bourse in France, as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architect found it quite hard to conceal the clock-face which would have destroyed the purity of the façade’s fine lines; but to make up for that there is the colonnade going right round the building, beneath which on high days of religious solemnity the procession of stockbrokers and jobbers can wend its majestic way.

  There can be no doubt that these are very splendid monuments. Add to them numerous fine streets as amusing and varied as the rue de Rivoli, and I am not without hope that Paris seen from a balloon may one day afford the sight of that amplitude of lines, that wealth of detail, that diversity of aspect, that indefinable element of grandiose simplicity and unexpected beauty which characterizes a draught-board.

  However admirable though the Paris of the present day may seem to you, recreate the Paris of the fifteenth century, reconstruct it in your mind, look at the daylight coming through that astonishing hedge of spires, towers, and steeples, spread out the Seine through the midst of the immense town, with a tear at the tip of the islands, a fold at the arches of the bridges, the Seine with its wide pools of green and yellow, more changeable than a snake’s skin; make the Gothic profile of old Paris stand out sharply against a blue horizon, make its contours float in the winter mist clinging to its countless chimneys; plunge it into deep night, and watch the strange play of darkness and points of light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; cast upon it a ray of moonlight to shape its vague outline and bring out from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take that black silhouette again, underline with shadow the innumerable acute angles of spire and gable, and make it stand out, more jagged than a shark’s jaws, against the copper sky at sunset—and then compare.

  And if you want to have an impression of the old city such as the modern one can no longer offer, go up, on the morning of some great festival, at sunrise on Easter Day or Whitsun, go up to some high point overlooking the whole capital and experience the waking of the bells. See, at a signal from the heavens, for it is the sun that gives it, these hundreds of churches start as one from their sleep. At first scattered tinklings go from one church to the
other, like musicians giving notice that they are about to start; then all of a sudden look, for at certain moments the ear too seems to see, look at how from every steeple at the same moment there rises a pillar of sound, a smoke-cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell rises straight, pure, and, so to speak, in isolation from the others into the splendid morning sky. Then gradually as the sound increases they merge, blend, coalesce, all combine in one magnificent concert. It is now a single mass of sound-waves ceaselessly pouring from the countless steeples, floating, rippling, leaping, swirling over the city and extending far beyond the horizon the deafening eddies of its oscillations. However, this sea of harmony is by no means chaotic. Vast and deep as it is, it has not lost its transparency. You can see the separate undulations of each group of notes escaping from the peals; you can follow the dialogue, alternately deep and shrill, of the lightest and the heaviest bell, the rattle and the bourdon: you can see the octaves leap from one belfry to the next; you can watch them spring winged, light, and whistling from the silver bell, fall broken and lame from the wooden one; among them you can admire the rich gamut falling and rising ceaselessly from the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you can see clear, rapid notes running across like three or four bright zigzags and vanishing like lightning flashes. Over there is the abbey of Saint-Martin, singing sharp and cracked; here the gruff, sinister voice of the Bastille; at the other end the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass-baritone. The royal carillon of the Palais casts in all directions respendent trills, on to which fall at regular intervals the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, striking sparks from them like the anvil under the hammer. Now and then you can see passing by sounds of every shape emanating from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then again from time to time this mass of sublime sounds leaves an opening through which comes the stretta* of the Ave-Maria,* bursting and sparkling like a plume of stars. Below, in the depths of the concert, you can vaguely make out the singing from inside the churches, seeping through the vibrating pores of their vaulted ceilings. It is, to be sure, an opera worth listening to. Usually the murmur that comes from Paris in the daytime is the city speaking; at night it is the city breathing; here it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this chorus from all the steeples, spread over the whole the murmur of half a million people, the everlasting plaint of the river, the infinite breathing of the wind, the deep and distant quartet of the four forests ranged over the hills on the horizon like immense organ cases, damp down as in a half-tone everything too raucous and shrill in the central peal, and then say whether you know anything in the world more rich, joyful, golden, dazzling than this tumult of bells and chimes; this furnace of music; these ten thousand brazen voices singing at once in stone flutes three hundred feet high; this city transformed into an orchestra; this symphony of tempestuous sound.

  BOOK FOUR

  I

  KIND SOULS

  IT was sixteen years before the beginning of this story when one fine Quasimodo (or Low) Sunday morning a living creature had been left after mass in the church of Notre-Dame, on the bedstead fixed into the parvis on the left-hand side, facing the ‘great image’ of Saint Christopher at which the carved stone effigy of Messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had been gazing on his knees ever since 1413, when it was decided to pull down both saint and devotee. It was on this bedstead that foundlings were customarily exposed to public charity. Whoever wished could take them. In front of the bedstead was a copper bowl for alms.

  The sort of living creature which lay on those boards that Quasimodo morning in the year of Our Lord 1467 seemed to be arousing intense curiosity among the very considerable group collected round the bed. This group was mainly composed of persons of the fair sex. They were nearly all old women.

  In the front row, bending most closely over the bed, could be seen four women who, from their grey cowls, a sort of cassock, presumably belonged to some religious sisterhood. I see no reason why history should not transmit to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable ladies. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four of them widows, all four bonnes-femmes or religious from the Chapel of Étienne Haudry,* who had left their house with their superior’s permission, and in accordance with Pierre d’Ailly’s statutes, to come and hear the sermon.

  However, if these haudriettes were for the moment observing Pierre d’Ailly’s statutes, they were certainly transgressing to their hearts’ content those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa which so harshly laid down silence for them.

  ‘Whatever is that, sister?’ said Agnès to Gauchère, looking at the little creature exposed there, which was squealing and wriggling about on the bed, frightened by so many onlookers.

  ‘What are we coming to,’ said Jehanne, ‘if that’s the way they are making children nowadays?’

  ‘I don’t know much about children,’ replied Agnès, ‘but looking at this one must be sinful.’

  ‘That’s not a child, Agnès.’

  ‘It’s a monkey gone wrong,’ observed Gauchère.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ put in Henriette la Gaultière.

  ‘In that case,’ Agnès noted,’ it is the third since Laetare Sunday.* For less than a week ago we had the miracle of divine punishment being visited by Our Lady of Aubervillers on the man who scoffed at pilgrims, and that was the second miracle this month.’

  ‘It’s a real monster of abomination, this so-called foundling,’ Jehanne went on.

  ‘He’s yelling loud enough to deafen a cantor,’ continued Gauchère. ‘Do be quiet, you little screamer!’

  ‘Just imagine his Grace of Reims sending this monstrosity to the Bishop of Paris!’ La Gaultière added, clasping her hands.

  ‘I imagine,’ said Agnès la Herme, ‘that it’s a beast, an animal, the offspring of a Jew and a sow; in fact, something that’s not Christian and ought to be thrown into the water or the flames.’

  ‘I certainly hope,’ la Gaultière went on, ‘that no one will apply for it.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ exclaimed Agnès, ‘those poor wet-nurses in the foundlings’ home, down at the bottom of the lane as you go downstream, right next to my Lord Bishop; just suppose someone brought them this little monster to suckle! I’d rather give suck to a vampire.’

  ‘How innocent she is, that poor la Herme!’ Jehanne went on. ‘Can’t you see, sister, that the little monster is at least 4 years old, and would find your teats much less appetizing than something off the spit.’

  In fact this ‘little monster’ (we should ourselves be hard put to it to describe him otherwise) was no newborn babe. It was a very angular, very restless small mass, imprisoned in a canvas bag marked with the cipher of Messire Guillaume Chartier, then Bishop of Paris, with a head sticking out. That head was very deformed. All you could see was a thicket of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and some teeth. The eye was weeping, the mouth crying, and the teeth seemed only to want something to bite. The whole mass was struggling about in the bag, to the great amazement of the crowd of bystanders, which grew all the time and attracted new people.

  Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich noblewoman, holding a pretty little girl of about 6 by the hand, and whose coif had a long veil trailing from its golden horn, stopped as she passed in front of the bed, and looked for a moment at the unfortunate creature, while her charming little girl, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, all dressed up in silk and velvet, spelled out with her pretty finger the label permanently attached to the bed: FOUNDLINGS.

  ‘Really,’ said the lady, turning away in disgust, ‘I thought they only exposed children here.’

  She turned her back, and threw into the bowl a silver florin which rang out among the liards and made the poor sisters of the Étienne Haudry chapel stare wide-eyed.

  A moment later the grave and learned Robert Mistricole, protonotary to the king, went by with an enormous missal under one arm and on the other his wife (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), th
us having on either side his two governors, spiritual and temporal.

  ‘Foundling!’ he said, after examining the object, ‘found apparently on the parapet of the river Phlegethon!’*

  ‘You can only see one of its eyes,’ observed Mademoiselle Guillemette, ‘there’s a wart over the other.’

  ‘That’s not a wart,’ replied Maître Robert Mistricole. ‘It’s an egg, with another devil, just like him, inside, with another little egg containing another devil and so on.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Guillemette La Mairesse.

  ‘I know it for a fact,’ replied the protonotary.

  ‘Monsieur the protonotary,’ asked Gauchère, ‘what do you predict for this alleged foundling?’

  ‘The greatest disasters,’ answered Mistricole.

  ‘Ah! my goodness!’ said an old woman in the audience, ‘on top of that bad outbreak of pestilence we had last year and talk of the English preparing to land in force at Harefleu [Harfleur].’

  ‘Perhaps that will stop the queen coming to Paris in September,’ put in another. ‘Business is bad enough as it is!’

  ‘It’s my opinion,’ exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, ‘that the people of Paris would be better off with that little wizard lying on a faggot instead of a plank.’

  ‘A nicely blazing faggot!’ added the old woman.

  ‘That would be wiser,’ said Mistricole.

  For some little time a young priest had been listening to the arguments of the haudriettes and the utterances of the protonotary. His face was austere, his forehead broad, his gaze piercing. He silently moved the crowd aside, examined the ‘little wizard’ and laid his hand on him. It was none too soon. For all the pious women were already licking their chops at the ‘nicely blazing faggot’.