A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

One of the comic papers must, however, be exempted from these generalisations. Le Rire, Le Journal Amusant, La Vie Parisienne and the scores of cheaper imitations may depend for their living on the one joke; but L'Assiette au Beurre is more serious. L'Assiette au Beurre is first and foremost a satirist. It chastises continually, and its whip is often scorpions. Even its lighter numbers, chiefly given to ridicule, contain streaks of savagery.

At the end of the brief Rue de Lutèce is the great Hôtel Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris, having been founded in the seventh century; and to the left of it is one of the Paris flower markets, where much beautiful colour may be seen very formally and unintelligently arranged. Gardens are among those things that we order (or shall I say disorder?) better than the French do.

And now we will enter Notre Dame.

CHAPTER III
NOTRE DAME

Pagan Origins and Christian Predecessors—The Beginnings of Notre Dame—Victor Hugo—The Dangers of Renovation—Old Glass and New—A Wedding—The Cathedral's Great Moment—The Hundred Poor Girls and Louis XVI.—The Revolution—Mrs. Momoro, Goddess of Reason—The Legend of Our Lady of the Bird—Coronation of Napoleon—The Communards and the Students—The Treasures of the Sacristy—Three Hundred and Ninety-seven Steps—Quasimodo and Esmeralda—Paris at our Feet—The Eiffel Tower—The Devils of Notre Dame—The Precincts—Notre Dame from the Quai.

If the Ile de la Cité is the eye of Paris, then, to adapt one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' metaphors, Notre Dame is its pupil. It stands on ground that has been holy, or at least religious, for many centuries, for part of its site was once occupied by the original mother church of Paris, St. Etienne, built in the fourth century; and close by, in the Place du Parvis, have been discovered the foundations of another church, dating from the sixth century, dedicated to Sainte Marie; while beneath that are the remains of a Temple of Apollo or Jupiter, relics of which we shall see at the Cluny. The origin of Notre Dame, the fusion of these two churches, is wrapped in darkness; but Victor Hugo roundly states that the first stone of it was laid by Charlemagne (who reigned from 768 to 814, and whose noble equestrian statue stands just outside), and the last by Philip Augustus, who was a friend of our Richard Cœur de Lion. The more usual account of the older parts of the Notre Dame that one sees to-day is that the first stone of it was laid in 1163, in the reign of Louis VII., by Pope Alexander III., who chanced then to be in Paris engaged in the task of avoiding his enemies, the Ghibellines, and that in almost exactly a hundred years, in the reign of Saint Louis, it was completed. (I say completed, but as a matter of fact it is not completed even yet, for each of the square towers was designed to carry a spire, and I remember seeing at the Paris Exhibition of 1889 a number of drawings of the cathedral by young architects, with these spires added. It is, however, very unlikely that they will ever sprout, and I, for one, hope not.)

Victor Hugo is, of course, if not the first authority on Notre Dame, its most sympathetic poet, lover and eulogist; and it seems ridiculous for me to attempt description when every book shop in Paris has a copy of his rich and fantastic romance, Book III. of which is an interlude in the story wholly given to the glory of the cathedral. You may read there not only of what Notre Dame is, but of what it is not and should be: the shortcomings of architects and the vandalism of mobs are alike reported. Mobs! Paris is seared with cicatrices from the hands of her matricidal children, and Notre Dame especially so. Attempts to set her on fire were made not only by the revolutionaries but by the Communards too. These she resisted, but much of her statuary went during the Revolution, the assailants sparing the Last Judgment on the façade, but accounting very swiftly for a series of kings of Israel and Judah (who, however, have since been replaced) under the impression that they were monarchs of native growth and therefore not to be endured.

The statue of the Virgin in the centre of the façade, with Adam and Eve on each side, is not, I may say, the true Notre Dame of Paris: She is within the church—much older and simpler, on a column to the right of the altar as we face it. She is a sweeter and more winning figure than that between our first parents on the façade.

When I first knew Notre Dame it was, to the visitor from the open air, all scented darkness. And then as one grew accustomed to the gloom the cathedral opened slowly like a great flower—not so beautifully as Chartres, but with its own grandeur and fascination. That was twenty years ago. It is not the same since it has been scraped and lightened within. That old clinging darkness has gone. There are times of day now, when the sun spatters on the wall, when it might be almost any church; but towards evening in the gloom it is Notre Dame de Paris again, mysterious and a little sinister. A bright light not only chases the shade from its aisles and recesses but also shows up the garishness of its glass. For the glass of France, usually bad, is here often almost at its worst. That glorious wheel window in the north transept—whose upper wall has indeed more glass than stone in it—could not well be more beautiful, and the rose window over the organ is beautiful too. But for the rest, the glass is either too pretty, as in the case of the window over the altar, so lovely in shape, or utterly trumpery.